Behind the desk

Public can quiz Trinity Area School Board candidates Wednesday

2011-04-11T15:18:00.000-04:00

Members of the public will have the opportunity to question Trinity Area School Board candidates Wednesday evening.
The session will take place at 7 p.m. in the Trinity East Elementary School gym.
Each candidate will have three to five minutes to speak about themselves and why they are running for the board.
Then, the public will have the chance to ask questions to the candidates.

Educational excellence campaign to launch in Washington

2011-04-05T17:13:00.001-04:00

Four community organizations are starting a campaign for educational excellence in Washington with the hope that others will step up and help toward their goals.
“We’re trying to place education and personal growth as our community’s highest priority,” said Bob Griffin, president of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
The NAACP of Washington County, Abernathy Black Community Development Education Fund, LeMoyne Center and Mel Blount Youth Home are sponsoring the Washington Community Campaign for Educational Excellence.
Griffin said the purpose is to engage the community, including parents, professionals and religious leaders, to help kids understand the importance of education. The campaign’s goals are for every child to graduate from high school and to attend college, technical school or other post-secondary training.
There’s a clear problem that’s been identified in regard to education – kids are not achieving as they could or should, he said. Griffin said plans for the campaign were well under way before the state released data in March showing that 47.54 percent of Washington students graduate from high school in four years. He said those numbers are more evidence that the community needs to emphasize the importance of education.
Griffin said he does not blame Washington School District for those problems because it is implementing a variety of programs to help students succeed.
He said it will take a community effort to help improve education. That effort will not replace the school district or be run by the district, Griffin said.
“This is not a duplication of the classroom setting,” he said. “We want to enhance what the school does.”
Instead, concerned citizens will do things like take kids to college campuses and trade schools, allow job shadowing, mentor children, take them on field trips and introduce them to the arts, history and outdoors.
He said community members can contribute their time, talent or energy to help kids.
“In these times, the community must respond but not let teachers or parents off the hook,” he said.
Griffin said it’s a growing trend around the country. In a variety of communities, like Cincinnati, Ohio, citizens are stepping up to help make education a priority, he said.
In Washington, the efforts will continue indefinitely.
“It’s not a six-month capital campaign,” he said. “This is a campaign that will have no end.”
He said the campaign will call on community organizations to renew their efforts or continue to do what they can to help children.
“We will send kids to organizations that can help them,” he said.
Griffin said the timing for this type of initiative is right.
“It is all of our responsibility to do this,” he said. “I believe that if we do it, we are going to see improvement.”
Griffin said a formal announcement and more details should be forthcoming in early May.

Western Pa. school board calls police in contract spat

2011-03-29T11:49:00.000-04:00

WEST MIDDLESEX, Pa. (AP) — Teachers in one western Pennsylvania school district have a new six-year contract, although the school board president called police when a dissenting board member and some citizens objected.
West Middlesex School Board president Dale Shrawder called township police from his cell phone as fellow board member Thomas Hubert objected to the deal. Hubert was one of two school board members to oppose the contract which passed 5-2 on Monday night, with two other board members absent.
Township police arrived as Hubert persisted in questioning claims by the other board members that the contract with the district’s 88 teachers would save the district money. The deal includes a first-year wage freeze followed by raises averaging about 2.6 percent annually.
Hubert wasn’t arrested and went home after conferring with police, telling The (Sharon) Herald the contract will “bankrupt” the district.
© 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Hard work pays off for Wash High student

2011-03-23T13:49:00.000-04:00

Hong Jie Chen moved to Washington from China when he was in eighth grade, knowing little English.
Now a senior at Washington High School, Jie is excelling and even taking Advanced Placement courses. But it took a lot of hard work.
For his hard work, Jie was honored last year with the Pencil for Excellence Award by his AP European History teacher, Jeff Bunner. Jie excelled in the class, even though it was given in English.
Jie said that moving here was a shock. His family moved to this area to help his uncle, who owns a Chinese restaurant in Washington.
He said schools are different in China.
“Everything was strange, like a fantasy,” he said of schools here.
Chinese schools don’t have computers in every class, only a computer lab, he said. Students ride bikes to school instead of taking buses. They go home for lunch and then come back for classes in the afternoon, he said.
Jie had 50 to 60 students in his class there. Here, his largest classes have between 25 and 35 students.
That allows him to get much more help from teachers at Wash High.
“American teachers are so nice, like a friend to you,” the 18-year-old said. “Anytime you need help, they help.”
In China, there were so many students in each class that they could not get that kind of help, he said. He also described Chinese teachers as more strict and said they taught directly out of textbooks instead of using additional materials.
He said sports are not emphasized as much in Chinese schools, where they have only basketball and ping pong teams. Here, he is on the bowling and tennis teams.
While he lived in China, Jie took English for about 11⁄2 years. He said he learned basic phrases but hadn’t yet learned complete sentences when he moved to the United States.
That made taking classes here tough, especially when he started high school.
“At first, I did not understand the books,” he said. “It took a lot of time to do assignments.”
Jie was classified as an English as a Second Language student, which meant he was eligible for services to help him in a classroom. He had an ESL teacher help him until this year.
“He devotes a lot of personal time to doing the right thing to excel,” said Jeff Bunner, who teaches some of the Advanced Placement classes that Jie is taking.
Jie’s been taking high-level classes during his high school career and plans to attend Penn State University with a major in engineering or architecture. He will be the first in his family to go to college.
That’s one of the reasons he is taking Advanced Placement classes.
When he started AP European history last year, his answers were short and general, Bunner said.
“Now his essay answers are some of the best I’ve ever seen,” said Bunner, who teaches the AP U.S. history class that Jie is taking this year. “He’s becoming one of the best students we’ve had in this school.”
Jie took the AP test for European history last year and was convinced he failed because he couldn’t get through all of the questions. He was not permitted extra time or a translator even though he was an ESL student.
However, Jie was wrong.
He passed the difficult test, given only in English, which means he will get college credit for the class.
“He was able to pass the test because of his hard work,” Bunner said, adding that Jie earned the most improved student award in his class last year.
Bunner said that led Jie to take even more AP classes this year. In addition to U.S. history, Jie is taking AP calculus and AP chemistry.
“He doesn’t shy away from hard courses,” Bunner said. “He takes the toughest courses.”
Jie described the AP European history class as “cool.” He said it took much more time for him to do well in that class.
“If you give me a higher level, I will try harder to reach higher,” he said, adding that it will lead him to a higher goal.
Jie said his teachers have helped him a lot, as have his friends. He said students have not treated him differently because he is Chinese.
“They just look at me like an American,” Jie said.

Trinity considers redistricting

2011-03-10T13:16:00.001-05:00

Trinity Area School District Superintendent Paul Kasunich plans to recommend that the school board redistrict 82 students from Trinity West Elementary to Trinity North Elementary to balance enrollments.
Kasunich said at Wednesday’s education committee meeting that the move would resolve Trinity West’s overcrowding while still giving the board time to determine what the best grade configurations are for the entire district. The recommendation would essentially undo redistricting from Trinity North to Trinity West five years ago.
He said he’s not comfortable making a recommendation about grade configurations without doing more research and getting the community involved.
“We need to spend more time looking at the alternatives,” he said.
The alternatives include leaving the grade configurations as they are; keeping the current grade configurations with class size reduction; moving fifth grade to the middle school and eighth grade to the high school; housing two grades in each elementary school; and moving kindergarten to the high school.
Kasunich said he would like to bring up his redistricting recommendation at the March 17 regular board meeting and then send a letter with the parents of students who would be redistricted. He said he wants to meet with those parents to talk about why the move is important and how it would work.
He said the redistricted students would not be on the bus for an inordinate amount of time and that the change would not make Trinity North overcrowded.
Dennis McWreath, school board member and education committee chairman, said he disagrees with the recommendation.
He said Trinity has spent 10 years talking about grade configurations and he thinks a decision that includes addressing Trinity West’s overcrowding needs to be made for the next school year.
Simply moving kids from Trinity West to Trinity North does nothing to enhance the educational programs, he said.
“We’re simply kicking the can down the road,” he said. “I think this is a Band-Aid.”
The rest of the committee said something needs to be done about Trinity West overcrowding for the fall, but a decision about grade configurations will take more time.
“I think the suggestion by the superintendent is something that has to be done,” said school board member Jack Keisling.
School board member Tamara Salvatori said she was adamant that fifth-graders from Trinity West not be redistricted this year because they were the students moved from Trinity North. She didn’t think it was fair for them to be moved twice. Younger students at Trinity West did not attend Trinity North before the redistricting.
However, she said, something needs to be done about the overcrowding at Trinity West for the fall, which is so bad that students barely have time to get through the lunch line and eat.
“The whole day is a mess because they are overcrowded,” she said.
Salvatori said making a decision about grade configurations for the fall is too soon. Every February, the discussion comes up, but that time of year is too late, she said. Instead, it needs to be a year-round discussion, Salvatori said.
“My issue is it’s going to take a long time to put it together,” she said.

Wylandville celebrates winning Blue Ribbon

2010-12-20T15:55:00.000-05:00

By Dawn Goodman Staff writer
dgoodman@observer-reporter.com
EIGHTY FOUR – With music, video and speeches Friday, Wylandville Elementary School celebrated winning the national Blue Ribbon Award.
The school is the second in Canon-McMillan to win the prestigious award in the past few years. Wylandville is one of 254 schools across the country that won the academic achievement award for 2010. The award honors schools whose students achieve at high levels or have made significant progress and helped close gaps in achievement, especially among disadvantaged and minority students.
The U.S. Department of Education announced the winners in September and held the awards ceremony in November.
“Wylandville is truly a special place,” said Superintendent Helen McCracken, who was once principal at the elementary school. “There’s no higher honor than a blue ribbon. It’s like winning the gold medal at the Olympics. You can’t get any better than that.”
She was one of several dignitaries who spoke during the celebration, where all the students and staff were wearing blue T-shirts shouting their Blue Ribbon success. They also watched a video created by teachers called “Wylandville through the Years,” that looked back at the history of the school.
“You guys have basically won the Super Bowl of education,” state Sen.-elect Tim Solobay said as he gave a special state citation to the school.
Wylandville holds a special place in the heart of school board President Debbie Link because three of her daughters attended the school.
“We knew it was a special place then and are not surprised it has risen to be honored as a special place in our nation,” Link said.
Dave Coder, who works in U.S. Rep. Mark Critz’s office, brought the school a copy of the Congressional Record from when Critz spoke on the floor about Wylandville earning the Blue Ribbon Award.
Coder said his daughter was a student teacher at Wylandville last year.
“She told me what a wonderful school it was,” he said.
State Rep.-elect Brandon Newman, a former student at Wylandville, said it was great to come back to the school.
“This is a fantastic award, a fantastic opportunity,” he said, adding that teachers and parents have done a great job at Wylandville. “It’s a collaborative effort to make this a Blue Ribbon School.”
Grace Lani, the district’s director of curriculum and instruction who was the principal when Wylandville won the award, presented the plaque from the U.S. Department of Education that will hang on the school wall.
“We should be very proud,” she said. “You should be Wylandville proud.”

Join the Observer-Reporter's conversation about education at our blog at http://orbehindthedesk.blogspot.com.

Greene County Career and Technology Center joint committee addresses financial irregularities

2010-12-16T16:12:00.002-05:00

WAYNESBURG - A forensic audit initiated last month after financial irregularities were uncovered at the Greene County Career and Technology Center is not expected to be completed until late next month.

The auditors, Cypher and Cypher, are proceeding at a good pace, John Stets, solicitor for the center's joint operating committee, said at a committee meeting Wednesday.

"Our bills are up to date at this point, and we do have cash on hand," Stets said. The center knows of no bills that have not been paid and that includes to vendors, insurance providers, retirement accounts and the federal government, he said.

The committee, however, may later have to address any shortfall that could face the center at the end of the fiscal year, he said.

The committee has indicated money might be missing. Asked if the committee knew how much, Stets said members were given some "preliminary numbers." He declined to say how much money might be gone, though he later said it is a "significant amount."

All programs at the center will continue to operate and instruction will continue as planned, said Thelma Szarell, superintendent at West Greene and superintendent of record at the center.

The committee began the forensic audit last month after its bank noticed irregularities in the center's payroll account and contacted the center.

The center's business coordinator for the last two years, Jo Phyllis Popielarcheck, was suspended Nov. 4. Her resignation was accepted by the committee at its last meeting Nov. 17.

At that meeting, committee members referred to the investigation as a "criminal investigation" and said state police and the district attorney's office had been notified.

The five school districts that form the center also agreed to accelerate payments to the center to cover any cash shortfalls.

Committee chairman Tom Howard explained last month how problems could develop at the center when only one person is in charge of finances and given a great deal of autonomy.

The committee took several steps last month to tighten controls by requiring additional "live" signatures on checks and designating a person to log in and distribute mail.

Other administrative procedures would be implemented to ensure similar problems never occur again, Howard said.

In other business, the committee reorganized, re-electing Howard, who represents Southeastern Greene, chairman and Roberta Boyd, who represents Central Greene, vice chairman. Other committee members are Pete Shlosky, Carmichaels Area; Jim Handley, West Greene; and Lisa Mattish, Jefferson-Morgan. Copyright Observer Publishing Co.

Trinity board member resigns

2010-12-15T16:33:00.001-05:00

Trinity Area School Board member Tom Bodnovich is resigning from the board because he says he doesn't agree with how the arrest of Superintendent Paul Kasunich has been handled.

Kasunich was arrested in November for allegedly assaulting his girlfriend Darlene Tartaglione. He waived a preliminary hearing, and the charge will proceed to Allegheny County Court.

The board placed Kasunich on paid leave for a few weeks. Last week, he resumed his duties.

Bodnovich, who was the board president until the annual election last week when Sandy Clutter was voted into the position, said Monday that he has been dismayed with the events of the last several weeks and that Kasunich should have taken a voluntary unpaid leave.

"In my opinion, the employee who is charged with simple assault should not be in his current position until, and if there is, a satisfactory resolution to the case," Bodnovich wrote in a news release.

He said Kasunich's continued employment is not in the best interest of the community, students or staff.

"In good conscience, I would find it very difficult to work on the board while the daily operation is under questionable leadership," Bodnovich said. "I hope that the residents of Canton Township understand and appreciate my position."

He said he is resigning because he has to do what he feels is right.

"Anywhere else in the world, people would resign instead of putting their company through this," Bodnovich said.

Kasunich's attorney, Robert Del Greco Jr., could not be reached for comment Monday evening.

Bodnovich said there is little to no accountability in public education. He said he respects his fellow board members and hopes that accountability will return to public education.

"Given the inconsistent leadership created by turnover in the administration, it has been difficult to improve the educational process," he said. "However, we have made some progress in the educational program for our students."

Bodnovich said his resignation is effective Jan. 31 to give the board time to find a replacement. He submitted his letter of resignation Monday. Copyright Observer Publishing Co.

Kasunich placed on paid leave

2010-11-29T16:20:00.000-05:00

The Trinity Area School Board has placed Superintendent Paul Kasunich on paid administrative leave because of allegations that he assaulted his girlfriend.
The board met with its solicitor Thomas Breth in executive session Friday to discuss the matter and Breth talked to Kasunich over the weekend.
Breth said Monday that the leave will be in place until further notice. He said the board will continue to monitor the situation and make decisions as more information becomes available. Assistant Superintendent Yvonne Weaver has been asked to fulfill Kasunich’s duties as long as he is out of the district, Breth said.
Find out more in Tuesday's Observer-Reporter.

Wash High to host Veteran's Day event

2010-11-10T16:31:00.000-05:00

Washington High School will host a student-organized event Thursday to honor veterans.

Wash High student Benjamin Marasco said he organized the program to honor the sacrifice, courage and service of the nation's veterans and because it is important for this generation to understand the service of our veterans.

"Their debt is one that we can never repay," he said "We want as many people there as possible, so that we may show them our gratitude and gratefulness."

Chief Master Sgt. Terrence Malley will be the keynote speaker for the event in the auditorium that will start at 1:30 p.m.

Malley served in the Marines on a one-year tour of duty in Vietnam. As a squad leader, he and his squad conducted jungle operations, where they engaged enemy units on the North Vietnamese Army as well as Viet Cong forces.

After being discharged from the Marines, he pursued a career in plumbing. He was the foreman for the tropical rain forest complex at the Pittsburgh Zoo and Pittsburgh's River Safety Center.

He re-entered the military in 1981 with the 171st Air Refueling Wing and was selected as a first sergeant in 2000 and served 10 years in that capacity.

He was deployed with the Pennsylvania Air Guard and served tours in five European countries, as well as Japan, Turkey and Kyrgyzstan.

Malley has been awarded 25 federal and state military decorations. He retired from the Pennsylvania Air Guard and the plumbers union in March.

Marasco said veterans, their families and members of the community are invited. Copyright Observer Publishing Co.

Fort Cherry, Burgettstown get grants for college-ready centers

2010-10-28T14:26:00.001-04:00

Fort Cherry and Burgettstown Area school districts were each awarded a $93,250 grant to create college-ready centers at their high schools.
The two-year grant worth a total of $186,500 is a collaboration among the schools, the Benedum Foundation and the Community College of Allegheny County. School officials met Tuesday to discuss how the grant will be implemented. Both districts hope to have the centers up and running in the spring.
The money will be used for computers, software licenses, salaries and benefits for tutors, supplies and travel expenses for the coordinator.
The purpose of the centers is to decrease the number of students who require remediation when entering college, said Fort Cherry director of curriculum Trish Craig. Burgettstown also will use the grant to help students perform better in math, reading and writing, said Assistant Superintendent Amy Rush.
Both districts will use the PLATO Learning Systems software. The program exempts students from lessons about information they already know and reinforces areas where they need help, Rush said. PLATO Learning constructs an educational program that is unique to each student. Each student completes a pre-test that assesses the student’s current knowledge. The system then creates a learning program based on those results.
Burgettstown plans to set up one center at the high school and have a number of classes using it, Rush said. Who uses the software will be decided based on individual student data, Rush said.
Fort Cherry is creating a mobile center so it can be used by more students, given the limitations of space within the high school building, Craig said.
For the 2010-11 school year, the tutoring will be incorporated into the current tutoring program at the high school, Craig said. The program will be evaluated in the spring for implementation during the 2011-12 school year.

U.S. Department of Education issues guidance about prevention of bullying

2010-10-27T16:45:00.001-04:00

The U.S. Department of Education issued guidance to schools, colleges and universities Tuesday about how to make sure they prevent bullying.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said there are no new laws or regulations, and that the guidance is to emphasize the importance of bullying prevention. The guidelines make it clear what the obligations of educational institutions are: Stop bullying from happening, fix why it happened and prevent it from happening again, said Russlynn Ali, assistant secretary for civil rights.
“We think in this country that bullying should not exist,” Duncan said in a conference call Tuesday.
He said the goal is to raise awareness about the steps schools must take to end this “silent epidemic.”
The guidelines include information about bullying and harassment based on race, national origin, sexual and gender-based harassment and disability harassment.
In extreme cases and as a last resort, schools can lose federal funding if they don’t comply, Ali said.
Bullying in schools is widespread and causes a range of problems, from low self- esteem and having trouble in school to acts of violence and suicide, Melody Barnes, White House Domestic Policy Council Director, said in the same teleconference.
She said early next year the White House will host a conference to educate about tools to prevent bullying and to hopefully spark a dialogue about the ways the community can prevent bullying.
“We’re all facing the same challenges,” Duncan said. “We’re going to highlight those who do it well and challenge those with their head in the sand.”
Canonsburg Middle School is one of the schools trying to take a proactive approach, said Principal Greg Taranto.
The school had a kickoff for its Olweus Bullying Prevention Program Friday and will begin classroom sessions next week, he said. Teachers wrote a song and performed it during the kickoff and several students had their own performances as well.
“Teachers did a really nice job with it,” Taranto said. “Kids love it.”
Part of the idea behind the program is to empower bystanders, to let them know that they hold the power to help stop bullying, he said.
Taranto said there was not one incident that led to the implementation of the Olweus program. However, research shows that bullying peaks at the middle school level in grades five through nine, he said. Research also shows Olweus to be an effective way to reduce bullying.
He said the school will use the program to target bullying that happens on school property as well as cyberbullying.
Cyberbullying is more viscous than ever and hard to control, Taranto said. The school is also teaching students how to use social networking tools appropriately to help prevent cyberbullying.
The school is not alone in its efforts.
Trinity recently had a stakeholder survey in which teachers and parents named their top concern as bullying.
As a result, Superintendent Paul Kasunich recommended that the district implement the Olweus program in addition to its other bullying prevention efforts.
Trinity School Board heard a presentation about the program and how it would work in the district last week and may vote on whether to use Olweus next month.
Federal resources about bullying prevention are consolidated at www.Bullyinfo.org.

Bentworth hires scholarship coordinator

2010-10-25T16:03:00.000-04:00

Bentworth School District students now will have someone to help them find scholarships for college.
The board voted last week to hire Kristy Smydo as the district’s scholarship coordinator.
The district received a $25,000 state grant to pay for the position and ancillary expenses, said Superintendent Charles Baker. Smydo will be paid $20,000.
Smydo was hired because Bentworth was familiar with similar work she performed in other districts, Baker said. While guidance counselors are aware of generalities, there are specifics about scholarship searches that the district knew Smydo was well-versed in, he said.
She will do more than search for scholarships. She will help students fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, which is required to be completed before students can get aid. She will contact specific students about scholarships that might meet their needs, Baker said. She also will meet with parents.
Smydo will have a flexible schedule and will work some evenings if that works best for parents, he said.
She will help students who want to continue any post-secondary education, he said.
She will begin the job immediately and the position will last for one year. If she is successful, Bentworth will seek other funding sources for her position or determine if the district can pay for it out of its own budget, Baker said.
The board also hired E. Emily Bryan-Reeder as a middle school librarian with a salary of $35,974.

Canon-Mac discusses options for swap agreements

2010-10-15T15:55:00.000-04:00

CANONSBURG – A financial adviser told Canon-McMillan School Board Monday night to put out a request for proposals to determine the cost of different options for the district’s swap agreements.
The district still has two fixed payor swaps, which are financial agreements used to hedge interest rate risk by synthetically fixing a variable rate. One of them has an exercise date of Dec. 1, 2010, and the other’s is Dec. 1, 2012. The amount of the transaction for the 2010 swap is $23,195,000. The other is $11,755,000.
Scott E. Shearer, managing director of the PFM Group, told the board it has a few options. It can terminate the swap, it can enter into the swap or it can find some kind of middle ground.
Board members said they wanted to know the financial impact of each option before making a decision. Shearer said the RFP would give them the information they are seeking.
There would be a termination fee if the board ended the swap agreement and then sold bonds at a low fixed interest rate. If the board continues with the swap, the rate would become variable, depending on market conditions, he said. He said the current rate is 5.673 percent, but it would probably jump to at least 7 percent.
Canon-McMillan already terminated two of its constant maturity swap agreements, allowing the district to make about $400,000 by getting out of the agreements.

Classroom helps create atmosphere for French students

2010-10-13T15:16:00.002-04:00

CLAYSVILLE - Christine Shymchyk's class is more than four walls and a floor inside a brick-and-mortar building.

When you walk into the McGuffey High School French teacher's room, you smell creamy pumpkin and are surrounded by soft lighting.

Her whole room is decorated in a French theme.

She takes pictures of all of her students and puts them on the wall in one corner "to help them get a sense of ownership in the room."

Another area is dedicated to the French Club. There's a section on French food and another that displays flags of each country whose language is French.

Behind her desk is a black-and-white program from the ballet, "Swan Lake," she saw while she lived in Paris.

Shymchyk, who has taught at McGuffey for three years, said she takes to heart one of the most basic lessons she learned about teaching.

"You need to create a warm, welcoming environment for your students to be a successful teacher," she said. "When it's a soothing, happy place, they perform better. They like being here."

She said her favorite part is the pictures of her students.

"I love watching them grow, especially those I have for a few years," she said.

Right now, she has a fall theme of decorations, but she will change them for the holidays and again for spring.

Students will help make decorations to celebrate Mardi Gras, and those, too, will hang around the room.

When she first came to McGuffey, she said adults and students alike would suck in their breath when they saw her room.

Now, she said, everyone is used to it.

"I like to make it cozy for them and me," she said, adding that when students are feeling comfortable, she can get the curriculum through to them better.

Ninth-grader Cassandra Westfall, whose French name is Sophie, said Shymchyk's class feels warmer and smells better than others.

"When I first walked in, I was like 'Wow! This is amazing!'" the French II student recalled.

Most rooms are four just white walls, said freshman Brady Reitmeyer.

But not this one.

"It makes it very comfortable," said the student, whose French name is Jean-Pierre. "It spiffs it up."

The classroom feels more like a home environment, said Philip Maccarato, whose French name is Maurice.

"It helps you relax and makes you want to learn at the same time," the ninth-grader said.

Shymchyk said it's especially true when they are working with technology.

She said she likes to create authentic learning environments by allowing students to apply the lessons to themselves.

For example, her French II class just finished a digital story in which they brought in pictures of their family, added that to music and had to talk about it in French.

"They enjoy it," she said. "They get to express themselves."

She said she uses new technology, but not to the exclusivity of other styles, such as flash cards and the overhead projector.

"I think the technology is a good essential because we're only going to use it more in the future," said ninth-grader Bobbi Santek, whose French name is Solange.

All of the technology fits in with Shymchyk's decorations.

"It's all even. It's all equal," Bobbi said of the decorations. "We love every part of the room."

Join the Observer-Reporter's conversation about education at our blog at http://www.observer-reporter.com/or/behinddesk/.

Pennsylvania Houses passes new rules for concussions

2010-09-29T14:09:00.002-04:00

The Pennsylvania House on Tuesday passed the Safety In Youth Sports Act, which calls for Pennsylvania high school or junior high school athletes who suffer a concussion or brain injury to be cleared by a medical professional trained in concussion management before returning to the sport, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The bill passed by a 169-29 vote.

If passed by the Senate and signed into law, the legislation sponsored by Rep. Tim Briggs (D., Montgomery) also would require athletes and their parents or guardians to sign a concussion and head-injury information sheet before participating in a sport. It also would require coaches to complete a concussion certification course.

"The Safety In Youth Sports Act is the most comprehensive, advanced and reasonable bill in the nation when it comes to concussion management in youth sports," Micky Collins, assistant director of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's sports-medicine concussion program, said in a statement

Obama presses for longer school year

2010-09-28T14:43:00.000-04:00

WASHINGTON – Barely into the new school year, President Barack Obama issued a tough-love message to students and teachers on Monday: Their year in the classroom should be longer, and poorly performing teachers should get out.
American students are falling behind their foreign counterparts, especially in math and science, and that’s got to change, Obama said. Seeking to revive a sense of urgency that education reform may have lost amid the recession’s focus on the economy, Obama declared that the future of the country is at stake.
“Whether jobs are created here, high-end jobs that support families and support the future of the American people, is going to depend on whether or not we can do something about these schools,” the president said in an interview on NBC’s “Today” show.
U.S. schools through high school offer an average of 180 instruction days per year, according to the Education Commission of the States, compared to an average of 197 days for lower grades and 196 days for upper grades in countries with the best student achievement levels, including Japan, South Korea, Germany and New Zealand.
“That month makes a difference,” the president said. “It means that kids are losing a lot of what they learn during the school year during the summer. It’s especially severe for poorer kids who may not see as many books in the house during the summers, aren’t getting as many educational opportunities.”
Obama said teachers and their profession should be more highly honored – as in China and some other countries, he said – and he said he wanted to work with the teachers’ unions. But he also said that unions should not defend a status quo in which one-third of children are dropping out. He challenged them not to be resistant to change.
And the president endorsed the firing of teachers who, once given the chance and the help to improve, are still falling short.
“We have got to identify teachers who are doing well. Teachers who are not doing well, we have got to give them the support and the training to do well. And if some teachers aren’t doing a good job, they’ve got to go,” Obama said.
They’re goals the president has articulated in the past, but his ability to see them realized is limited. States set the minimum length of school years, and although there’s experimentation in some places, there’s not been wholesale change since Obama issued the same challenge for more classroom time at the start of the past school year.
One issue is money, and although the president said that lengthening school years would be “money well spent,” that doesn’t mean cash-strapped states and districts can afford it.
“It comes down to the old bugaboo, resources. It costs money to keep kids in school,” said Mayor Scott Smith of Mesa, Ariz. “Everyone believes we can achieve greater things if we have a longer school year. The question is how do you pay for it.”
One model is Massachusetts, where the state issues grants to districts that set out clear plans on how they would use the money to constructively lengthen instructional class time, said Kathy Christie, chief of staff at the Education Commission of the States. Obama’s Education Department already is using competitions among states for curriculum grant money through its “Race to the Top” initiative.
“The federal carrots of additional money would help more states do it or schools do it in states where they don’t have a state grant process,” Christie said.
But the federal budget is hard-up, too. And while many educators believe students would benefit from more quality learning time, the idea is not universally popular.
In Kansas, sporadic efforts by local districts to extend the school year at even a few schools have been met by parental resistance, said state education commissioner Diane DeBacker.
“It’s been tried,” she said, describing one instance of a Topeka-area elementary school that scrapped year-round schooling after just one year. “The community was just not ready for kids to be in school all summer long. Kids wanted to go swimming. Their families wanted to go on vacation.”
Teachers’ unions say they’re open to the discussion of longer classroom time, but they also say that pay needs to be part of the conversation. As for Obama’s call for ousting underperforming teachers, National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel said unions weren’t the main stumbling block there, as many education reformers assert.
“No one wants an incompetent teacher in the classroom,” Van Roekel said. “It’s in the hiring, and in those first three to five years no teacher has the right to due process.”
© 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Washington Post: Local universities build programs targeting federal government's growing role in business

2010-09-27T13:09:00.000-04:00

The economic downturn may have begun in New York with the collapse of major financial institutions such as Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, but for the past couple of years, eyes have been fixed on Washington for a solution.

It's a shift that reflects the city's growing influence over corporate America. From billion-dollar bailouts and financial regulation to federal spending and debate over tax cuts, the government's role in industry and importance as a consumer has expanded.

To capitalize on the trend, local business schools have hired faculty, commissioned research centers and designed entire degree programs that specialize in the intersection of Washington and business, the Washington Post reports. Academic leaders said this serves as a natural means of differentiation for the region's universities, which must compete for top students and tuition dollars in a market that's grown crowded with options.

Georgetown University, for example, has filled faculty positions with former Treasury department officials such as Steven Shafran and Phillip Swagel, who played roles in the government response to the financial crisis. They're among a handful of "professors of the practice," who use industry or government experience to teach modern business dynamics rather than academic theory.

"We have to innovate and determine, quite simply, what are those things we think we can do better than anybody else," said George Daly, dean at Georgetown's McDonough School of Business.

The pressure to differentiate from competitors is being felt broadly by business programs, said Dan LeClair, vice president and chief knowledge officer at the American Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, which accredits business programs around the globe.

Schools face competition from foreign universities, online degree programs and the greater number of schools that now offer business as an academic discipline, LeClair said. His organization alone accredits nine business schools within an hour of the District. If you venture another hour outside the city, the number jumps to 14.

"The basis for differentiation can vary. In this case, location matters," he said of Washington. "In other cases, it might be based on a partnership with another unit on campus. It's not just the trend of the day. My sense is this is a longer-term shift, not just a short-term response to the particular administration that has moved into Washington."

Georgetown's business school recently formed a graduate program coupled with the School of Foreign Service. The university snagged Edward Montgomery, Obama's point person on the automobile industry, earlier this summer to head its Public Policy Institute, and Daly said the school is also considering a partnership built around financial regulation policy and business.

"I really feel that that is sort of emblematic of what the future is like," he said. "In other words, how responsive can schools be to what is going on right now, because it's not simply a matter of getting it right or wrong, but it's a question of how quickly you do so."

Across town at American University, a research center on tax policy is slated to open early next year. Richard Durand, dean of the Kogod School of Business, said the center will also house the school's existing Master of Science in Taxation program.

"Every time you get a new president, there are vast changes in tax interpretation, so what we're really finding is the industry is looking for true experts in very specific areas," Durand said. That's now a driving force in program development, he added. "Let's start with the marketplace and figure out how we build these programs that go beyond just business."

George Mason University in Fairfax added an executive MBA program with courses tailored to the national defense sector. The program hopes to pull adult students from the cluster of government contractors that are also located in Northern Virginia. A cybersecurity management program, developed with the schools of public policy and information technology and engineering, could be approved by next summer.

Roy Hinton, a Chicago transplant and associate dean of executive programs, said he did not fully appreciate the business dynamics unique to Washington when he arrived at George Mason five years ago. They've grown more pronounced since then.

"It just seemed that the best practices in business should be easily translated into the federal sector, and in fact those best practices can be valuable there, but there's more," he said. "There is a whole additional set of processes and ways of doing business that are important."

And ultimately, graduates who land in the public sector -- particularly as hiring in many private industries has stagnated -- could find those skills set them apart from other students. Howard University, for example, has seen a renewed interest in a co-op program with federal agencies and government employers are among the most active recruiters.

"The government agencies historically have kind of sat back and hoped that folks would come to them," said Barron Harvey, the business school's dean. "They're starting to be very aggressive now because they know that they have opportunities and they're seeing a significant increase in the number of applicants."

Study: Merit pay not linked to student performance

2010-09-24T15:13:00.001-04:00

Offering teachers incentives of up to $15,000 to improve student test scores produced no discernible difference in academic performance, according to a study released Tuesday, a result likely to reshape the debate about merit pay programs sprouting in D.C. schools and many others nationwide, the Washington Post reported this week.

The study, which the authors and other experts described as the first scientifically rigorous review of merit pay in the United States, measured the effect of financial incentives on teachers in Nashville public schools and found that better pay alone was not enough to inspire gains.

Advocates of performance pay did not immediately challenge the methodology of the study. But they said its conclusions were narrow and failed to evaluate the full package of professional development and other measures that President Obama and philanthropists such as Bill Gates say are crucial to improving America's public schools.

"Pay reform is often thought to be a magic bullet," said Matthew Springer, a Vanderbilt University education professor who led the study. "That doesn't appear to be the case here. We need to develop more thoughtful and comprehensive ways of thinking about compensation. But at the same time, we're not even sure whether incentive pay is an effective strategy for improving the system itself."

With backing from federal and state governments and private foundations, a growing number of public schools in recent years have embraced the idea of paying teachers, at least in part, on how much they improve student achievement.

Obama has encouraged the movement, through $4.35 billion in federal Race to the Top grants and other federal programs, despite the skepticism of some teachers unions and lawmakers within his party. D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee became a hero in reform circles in part because of her insistence on a teachers' contract that allows performance bonuses. Some Prince George's County teachers also are earning bonuses.

Central to such changes is the idea that teachers should be rewarded when their students achieve outsize gains on standardized tests. That is a major shift from the tradition of determining pay by seniority and credentials such as master's or doctoral degrees.

The study was conducted by the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt. The center, which takes no advocacy position on the issue, was created at the university's highly regarded Peabody College of Education and Human Development in 2006 with a $10 million federal research grant.

In a three-year experiment funded by the federal grant and aided by the Rand Corp., researchers tracked what happened in Nashville schools when math teachers in grades 5 through 8 were offered bonuses of $5,000, $10,000 and $15,000 for hitting annual test-score targets. About 300 teachers volunteered. Researchers randomly assigned half of the participants to a control group ineligible for the bonuses and the other half to an experimental group that could receive bonuses if their students reached certain benchmarks.

Researchers designed the bonuses to be large enough to function as a legitimate incentive for teachers whose average salary, according to a union official, is between $40,000 and $50,000. There were no additional variables in the experiment: no professional development, mentoring or other elements meant to affect test scores. The bonuses, totaling nearly $1.3 million, were funded by businessman Orrin Ingram, according to news reports. A university spokeswoman said Tuesday evening that she could not confirm those reports, and Ingram could not be reached for comment.

On the whole, researchers found no significant difference between the test results from classes led by teachers eligible for bonuses and those led by teachers who were ineligible. Bonuses appeared to have some positive effect in the fifth grade, researchers said, but they discounted that finding in part because the difference faded out when students moved to the sixth grade.

Obama administration officials and a wide range of experts were quick to note that the study did not examine the effect of performance pay in combination with other measures intended to improve teaching.

"While this is a good study, it only looked at the narrow question of whether more pay motivates teachers to try harder," said Peter Cunningham, assistant U.S. education secretary for communications and outreach. "What we are trying to do is change the culture of teaching by giving all educators the feedback they need to get better while rewarding and incentivizing the best to teach in high-need schools, hard to staff subjects. This study doesn't address that objective."

Administration officials say a federal program that backs performance pay in dozens of school systems has grown to $400 million a year, from about $100 million when Obama took office in 2009. Federal officials say a number of such efforts have shown promising initial results; they also are planning a comprehensive review of the program.

Eric A. Hanushek, an expert on the economics of education at Stanford University's conservative-leaning Hoover Institution, said the Vanderbilt study did not address a key question.

"The biggest role of incentives has to do with selection of who enters and who stays in teaching - i.e., how incentives change the teaching corps through entrance and exits," Hanushek said. "I have always thought that the effort effects were small relative to the potential for getting different teachers. Their study has nothing to say about this more important issue."

Erick Huth, president of the Metropolitan Nashville Education Association, a teachers union, said the study raised significant questions about "the extent to which we spend a lot of time trying to develop complex schemes to measure teacher performance and then reward [teachers] based on that performance." He said the study indicates that such efforts "may be a waste of time."

In the D.C. school system, teachers deemed "highly effective" based on test scores and other measures began receiving bonuses this year of up to $10,000, as well as other potential compensation benefits. The performance pay plan, a cornerstone of Rhee's effort to overhaul the city schools, is backed by a new contract with the Washington Teachers' Union and funding from private foundations.

Prince George's is entering the third year of a performance pay program that offers some teachers up to $10,000 based on good evaluations, improved student test scores and other factors. Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. said that there is some evidence that teacher retention has improved but that it is too early to say anything about student academic performance.

Staff writers Bill Turque and Michael Birnbaum contributed to this report.

Trinity survey shows top concerns are bullying, drugs

2010-09-20T16:29:00.000-04:00

A Trinity Area School District survey shows that teachers and parents are most concerned about bullying while students are most concerned about drugs.

Superintendent Paul Kasunich explained the 2009-10 survey results during Thursday night's school board meeting.

He said the purpose of the survey was to get a sense of what parents, teachers and students thought about the district.

Kasunich said the results will be posted online at www.trinitypride.org. However, he said, individual responses will not be posted.

He said that there was nothing different in this survey than what he has seen in other district's surveys.

But now the question becomes what to do with the information, Kasunich said.

He plans to institute the nationally-known Olweus Bullying Prevention Program. It's a comprehensive, school-wide program for use in all grades. It's been used in a dozen countries and thousands of American schools, according to the Olweus website.

Kasunich said he also plans to meet with administrators at all levels to determine what else the district can do about drugs and alcohol.

He said the survey will be given every year.

"By addressing these needs and not hiding them, that's how we will get better," Kasunich said.

Construction and conversion

2010-09-16T18:01:00.001-04:00

Ringgold School Board decided Wednesday night to build a new high school and convert the existing high school into a middle school.
The board vote authorized the district administration and architect to go to the state Department of Education with its proposal. The decision was made by a 7-1 vote. Board member Charles Smith voted against it and board member William Stein was not present.
Board member Donald Bartoe, who is on the facilities, planning and transportation committee, said the focus has been on finding a site and building a middle school, but during discussions the board felt that a new high school might help more people move into the area.
The new high school will be at the existing high school property. The process to build a new high school will take roughly three years, Bartoe said. He said the board has been given cost estimates for the new high school in the high $30 million to low $40 million range, depending on how the board plans to build.
The board will need additional property at the site, but which land will depend on the specific plan approved by the board, he said.
Bartoe said the existing high school will not need a lot of renovation to be converted to a middle school. He said estimated costs are between $500,000 and $1 million for items such as an HVAC upgrade and new boilers. The middle school will hold fifth- through eighth-graders.
The administration offices will be moved into the new high school, which means the existing administration building could be sold, Bartoe said.
When this facilities plan is done, Ringgold will have four buildings, down from eight. The four buildings will be a new high school, a renovated middle school, a renovated elementary school and Gastonville elementary, which is in good condition, Bartoe said.
“Long term, it’s the way to be as cost-effective as possible for taxpayers,” Bartoe said, adding that he hopes it will be the solution for the next 50 years.
Board President Denise Kuhn said the board has been discussing the middle school for the past four to six years. Bartoe and Kuhn both said a new high school would be a selling point to get more people to move into the district.
“It was a decision that made sense,” she said. “Moneywise, it’s more from $38 (million) to $45 (million), but in the long-term, I think it will benefit our residents and our students far greater.”

Chartiers-Houston awards bids for renovation project, gym

2010-09-15T17:15:00.002-04:00

The Chartiers-Houston School Board on Monday approved bids for the $18.83 million project to renovate the junior/senior high and build a gym.
Business Manager Don Bennett said the bids came in a little higher than anticipated, but that the district still has borrowed enough to cover the costs.
Bennett said the board discussed rebidding the project, but the district architect said the prices would just increase.
The bids were approved on a 7-1 vote. Board member Fred Rockage voted no and board member Richard Caumo was absent.
Bennett said he was not sure when the two-year project would start because the architect is expected to have an updated timeline for next Monday’s meeting. However, he said as much work inside the building as possible would be completed during the summer months to lessen the disruption during the school year.
The approved bids are:
n General construction, Walter Mucci Construction, Inc., $9,909,705;
n HVAC construction, Hranec Sheet Metal, $3,930,500;
n Plumbing construction, Vrabel Plumbing Co. LLC, $1,288,950;
n Electrical construction, A-1 Electric, $1,943,300;
n Food service construction, Commercial Appliance Contract, Inc., $495,251; and
n Asbestos abatement was previously awarded on July 19 to Canfield Development for $145,000.
The board also appointed PSI as the geotechnical inspection and testing services agency for the project for $26,420.
Join the Observer-Reporter’s conversation about education at our blog at http://www.observer-reporter.com/or/behinddesk/

Love of language, learning

2010-09-14T16:50:00.000-04:00

By Dawn Goodman Staff writer
dgoodman@observer-reporter.com
HOUSTON – Carla Hayes danced on her tip-toes as she urged the boys in her class to sing the alphabet in Spanish.
She sang “A, be, ce,” in a low voice as they sang along.
Then, she called out to the girls, singing in a high-pitched voice for them.
Finally, they all sang in Spanish together.
You could hear the passion, the joy in her voice as she helped her Central Christian Academy fourth-graders learn Spanish.
And you could see how much they enjoyed learning from her.
Perhaps it was because they sensed how much she loved teaching or perhaps it was the way she made learning fun, by singing songs, playing Jeopardy or having the Spanish Super Bowl.
She also said she tries to incorporate culture into her foreign language classes.
“I think that is so important for the kids,” Hayes said.
Just to walk in her classroom and watch her teach, you would never know that 51-year-old Hayes can’t see.
However, she was born blind.
At age 3, she was sent to Western Pennsylvania School for the Blind. She attended the boarding school until the end of her ninth-grade year. As a child, she wanted to grow up and buy the school so she could have all of the Braille books there.
Mainstreaming, which requires special education students to be educated in a general education classroom, kicked in during her 10th-grade year.
Hayes was then the only blind student at Peters Township High School. She described the change as culture shock because Peters Township was much less rigid. She didn’t have to line up for each class. And something else was missing, too.
“There were no Braille books there,” she said.
Still, she found a way to make it work and a high school Spanish teacher helped her love the language.
After graduation, she attended Westminster College as a music major.
She played the saxophone in the band at both schools before college. She even started her own band, BOM, or Band of McMurray. At any given time, she had up to 17 members, who played everything from flutes to drums.
“We practiced and played in churches,” she recalled.
She said students at the school for the blind did not believe she had a band.
“So I said, ‘I’m going to bring them down here,’” she said, laughing. “And I did.”
As much as she loved music, Hayes did not graduate with a music degree. She said the competition at the collegiate level made her start to hate it.
“Music ceased being fun and started being clinical,” she said. “It broke my heart.”
She dropped the music major to keep her love of music. After a short stint as a speech and broadcasting major, she changed to French and Spanish double majors. She also earned an education degree and went on to earn a degree in German from Washington & Jefferson College.
Hayes learned Latin on her own and is now studying Italian.
“The language bug had bitten me, and I couldn’t get away from it,” Hayes said.
She taught French in Peters Township and several languages at the now-defunct Washington Christian School. She taught German at Trinity until she was furloughed. She taught part-time at Fort Cherry.
Hayes also started her own business called Lengua-Learn Communication in 1989. Prior to that, she was tutoring and teaching classes at the library during her periods of unemployment between teaching stints.
She thought she could turn that into a successful business – and she has. She works for companies, training their employees in another language. She teaches homeschoolers and also teaches English as a second language.
She’s the president of the local chapter of the Washington County Council for the Blind and the vice president for Independent Visually Impaired Entrepreneurs.
The same year she started her business, the Central Christian principal approached her about teaching two days a week at the school.
“I’ve been doing both ever since,” she said of running her business and teaching at the school.
Dot Moore, the aide who works with Hayes in class, said she doesn’t just teach students, she talks to students who have issues, she prays with them, she encourages them. She tells them they can call her about homework or problems.
“She reaches out to them as people,” Moore said. “You don’t get that everywhere.”
Central Christian administrator Kate Giacalone said Hayes does not let her disability stand in the way of carrying out her teaching duties.
“It’s a blessing to watch her in action,” Giacalone said. “A true joy.”
Hayes has traveled but said she never wants to move away from the area. She still lives in the home in McMurray that her parents moved into when she was 6 months old. Her mother drives her to and from school.
“I have the connections here,” she said. “I live for the moment in Giant Eagle when one of my students comes up to me.”
Hayes said she loves teaching.
“There’s nothing like the kids to bring a smile to your face,” she said. “These are my kiddos. I’m going to do it as long as the good Lord allows.”

Join the Observer-Reporter’s conversation about education at our blog at http://www.observer-reporter.com/or/behinddesk/.

Districts have range of requirements for participation

2010-09-10T16:29:00.003-04:00

Trinity Area School District would have some of the highest academic requirements for participation in sports and clubs in the area if the school board approves proposed changes to its eligibility policy.
The PIAA has minimum academic requirements that all districts must use for athletic eligibility, but schools may have higher requirements. PIAA regulations say that athletes must pass at least four full-credit subjects, or the equivalent, as of each Friday during a grading period. If not, students are ineligible from the following Sunday through Saturday.
The school board is planning a vote Thursday on whether to increase the requirements to a 2.0 grade point average in core subject areas. The existing policy says students will be ineligible for extracurricular activities if they receive two or more Fs in any subject at the end of a marking period, which was based on the PIAA bylaws.
During a Trinity policy committee meeting this summer, committee Chairwoman Colleen Interval said if students know they need a 2.0 GPA, it may be the added pressure they need to keep their grades up.
A survey of area school districts shows a range of academic requirements for participation in sports and clubs.
Find out more in Saturday's Observer-Reporter

Wylandville Elementary wins National Blue Ribbon award

2010-09-09T16:04:00.000-04:00

Wylandville Elementary School was named a National Blue Ribbon School because of its high performance.
The Canon-McMillan school was one of 304 schools across the country recognized Thursday by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. The award honors schools whose students achieve at very high levels or have made significant progress and helped close gaps in achievement especially among disadvantaged and minority students.
“Schools honored with the Blue Ribbon Schools award are committed to achievement and to ensuring that students learn and succeed,” Duncan said in a news release. “Their work reflects the conviction that every child has promise and must receive a quality education.”
Find out more in Friday's Observer-Reporter.

NYT: research upends traditional study habits

2010-09-08T15:48:00.001-04:00

Every September, millions of parents try a kind of psychological witchcraft, to transform their summer-glazed campers into fall students, their video-bugs into bookworms. Advice is cheap and all too familiar: Clear a quiet work space. Stick to a homework schedule. Set goals. Set boundaries. Do not bribe (except in emergencies).

And check out the classroom. Does Junior’s learning style match the new teacher’s approach? Or the school’s philosophy? Maybe the child isn’t “a good fit” for the school.

Such theories have developed in part because of sketchy education research that doesn’t offer clear guidance, reports the New York Times. Student traits and teaching styles surely interact; so do personalities and at-home rules. The trouble is, no one can predict how.

Yet there are effective approaches to learning, at least for those who are motivated. In recent years, cognitive scientists have shown that a few simple techniques can reliably improve what matters most: how much a student learns from studying.

The findings can help anyone, from a fourth grader doing long division to a retiree taking on a new language. But they directly contradict much of the common wisdom about good study habits, and they have not caught on.

For instance, instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. So does studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing.

“We have known these principles for some time, and it’s intriguing that schools don’t pick them up, or that people don’t learn them by trial and error,” said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Instead, we walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken.”

Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are “visual learners” and others are auditory; some are “left-brain” students, others “right-brain.” In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” the researchers concluded.

Ditto for teaching styles, researchers say. Some excellent instructors caper in front of the blackboard like summer-theater Falstaffs; others are reserved to the point of shyness. “We have yet to identify the common threads between teachers who create a constructive learning atmosphere,” said Daniel T. Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia and author of the book “Why Don’t Students Like School?”

But individual learning is another matter, and psychologists have discovered that some of the most hallowed advice on study habits is flat wrong. For instance, many study skills courses insist that students find a specific place, a study room or a quiet corner of the library, to take their work. The research finds just the opposite. In one classic 1978 experiment, psychologists found that college students who studied a list of 40 vocabulary words in two different rooms — one windowless and cluttered, the other modern, with a view on a courtyard — did far better on a test than students who studied the words twice, in the same room. Later studies have confirmed the finding, for a variety of topics.

The brain makes subtle associations between what it is studying and the background sensations it has at the time, the authors say, regardless of whether those perceptions are conscious. It colors the terms of the Versailles Treaty with the wasted fluorescent glow of the dorm study room, say; or the elements of the Marshall Plan with the jade-curtain shade of the willow tree in the backyard. Forcing the brain to make multiple associations with the same material may, in effect, give that information more neural scaffolding.

“What we think is happening here is that, when the outside context is varied, the information is enriched, and this slows down forgetting,” said Dr. Bjork, the senior author of the two-room experiment.

Varying the type of material studied in a single sitting — alternating, for example, among vocabulary, reading and speaking in a new language — seems to leave a deeper impression on the brain than does concentrating on just one skill at a time. Musicians have known this for years, and their practice sessions often include a mix of scales, musical pieces and rhythmic work. Many athletes, too, routinely mix their workouts with strength, speed and skill drills.

The advantages of this approach to studying can be striking, in some topic areas. In a study recently posted online by the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology, Doug Rohrer and Kelli Taylor of the University of South Florida taught a group of fourth graders four equations, each to calculate a different dimension of a prism. Half of the children learned by studying repeated examples of one equation, say, calculating the number of prism faces when given the number of sides at the base, then moving on to the next type of calculation, studying repeated examples of that. The other half studied mixed problem sets, which included examples all four types of calculations grouped together. Both groups solved sample problems along the way, as they studied.

A day later, the researchers gave all of the students a test on the material, presenting new problems of the same type. The children who had studied mixed sets did twice as well as the others, outscoring them 77 percent to 38 percent. The researchers have found the same in experiments involving adults and younger children.

“When students see a list of problems, all of the same kind, they know the strategy to use before they even read the problem,” said Dr. Rohrer. “That’s like riding a bike with training wheels.” With mixed practice, he added, “each problem is different from the last one, which means kids must learn how to choose the appropriate procedure — just like they had to do on the test.”

These findings extend well beyond math, even to aesthetic intuitive learning. In an experiment published last month in the journal Psychology and Aging, researchers found that college students and adults of retirement age were better able to distinguish the painting styles of 12 unfamiliar artists after viewing mixed collections (assortments, including works from all 12) than after viewing a dozen works from one artist, all together, then moving on to the next painter.

The finding undermines the common assumption that intensive immersion is the best way to really master a particular genre, or type of creative work, said Nate Kornell, a psychologist at Williams College and the lead author of the study. “What seems to be happening in this case is that the brain is picking up deeper patterns when seeing assortments of paintings; it’s picking up what’s similar and what’s different about them,” often subconsciously.

Cognitive scientists do not deny that honest-to-goodness cramming can lead to a better grade on a given exam. But hurriedly jam-packing a brain is akin to speed-packing a cheap suitcase, as most students quickly learn — it holds its new load for a while, then most everything falls out.

“With many students, it’s not like they can’t remember the material” when they move to a more advanced class, said Henry L. Roediger III, a psychologist at Washington University in St. Louis. “It’s like they’ve never seen it before.”

When the neural suitcase is packed carefully and gradually, it holds its contents for far, far longer. An hour of study tonight, an hour on the weekend, another session a week from now: such so-called spacing improves later recall, without requiring students to put in more overall study effort or pay more attention, dozens of studies have found.

No one knows for sure why. It may be that the brain, when it revisits material at a later time, has to relearn some of what it has absorbed before adding new stuff — and that that process is itself self-reinforcing.

“The idea is that forgetting is the friend of learning,” said Dr. Kornell. “When you forget something, it allows you to relearn, and do so effectively, the next time you see it.”

That’s one reason cognitive scientists see testing itself — or practice tests and quizzes — as a powerful tool of learning, rather than merely assessment. The process of retrieving an idea is not like pulling a book from a shelf; it seems to fundamentally alter the way the information is subsequently stored, making it far more accessible in the future.

Dr. Roediger uses the analogy of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in physics, which holds that the act of measuring a property of a particle (position, for example) reduces the accuracy with which you can know another property (momentum, for example): “Testing not only measures knowledge but changes it,” he says — and, happily, in the direction of more certainty, not less.

In one of his own experiments, Dr. Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke, also of Washington University, had college students study science passages from a reading comprehension test, in short study periods. When students studied the same material twice, in back-to-back sessions, they did very well on a test given immediately afterward, then began to forget the material.

But if they studied the passage just once and did a practice test in the second session, they did very well on one test two days later, and another given a week later.

“Testing has such bad connotation; people think of standardized testing or teaching to the test,” Dr. Roediger said. “Maybe we need to call it something else, but this is one of the most powerful learning tools we have.”

Of course, one reason the thought of testing tightens people’s stomachs is that tests are so often hard. Paradoxically, it is just this difficulty that makes them such effective study tools, research suggests. The harder it is to remember something, the harder it is to later forget. This effect, which researchers call “desirable difficulty,” is evident in daily life. The name of the actor who played Linc in “The Mod Squad”? Francie’s brother in “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”? The name of the co-discoverer, with Newton, of calculus?

The more mental sweat it takes to dig it out, the more securely it will be subsequently anchored.

None of which is to suggest that these techniques — alternating study environments, mixing content, spacing study sessions, self-testing or all the above — will turn a grade-A slacker into a grade-A student. Motivation matters. So do impressing friends, making the hockey team and finding the nerve to text the cute student in social studies.

“In lab experiments, you’re able to control for all factors except the one you’re studying,” said Dr. Willingham. “Not true in the classroom, in real life. All of these things are interacting at the same time.”

But at the very least, the cognitive techniques give parents and students, young and old, something many did not have before: a study plan based on evidence, not schoolyard folk wisdom, or empty theorizing.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 8, 2010

An article on Tuesday about the effectiveness of various study habits described incorrectly the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in physics. The principle holds that the act of measuring one property of a particle (position, for example) reduces the accuracy with which you can know another property (momentum, for example) — not that the act of measuring a property of the particle alters that property.

Expert: School focusing on college prep

2010-09-07T17:02:00.001-04:00

The nation’s highest-performing school districts are using college prep classes as the default curriculum for high schools, according to an education expert.
It’s a change that Trinity Area School District Superintendent Paul Kasunich wants to make. However, some Trinity parents question whether eliminating the general track is best for students.
“It’s in line with what leading districts across the country are doing,” said Daria Hall, director of K-12 policy with the Education Trust, a Washington D.C.-based organization that works to close the gaps in opportunity and achievement for students.
Studying the ending of the general track is part of Trinity’s 2010-11 operational plan, though Kasunich says that it may take more than one year.
He said that doesn’t mean that all students will go to college. But it does mean that all students can be challenged more, he said. He said the change will help students be better prepared for their work or education choices after high school.
Hall said last week that there is clear evidence that high schools are not doing a good enough job preparing graduates for college or careers. Employers and college professors say students aren’t ready, she said. Students say if they had known what it was going to be like, they would have worked harder in high school, she said.
She said the work world has changed. There was a time when students could graduate from high school and find a job to support a family, but those jobs don’t exist any more, Hall said.
She said employers say that their workers need more skills. For example, someone installing HVAC systems needs a firm grasp of communication and reading because the manuals are so complex, while workers who install phone lines need geometry, she said.
Whether students are planning for a career right out of school or a college education, they need the same skills in reading, math and science, she said.
She said making college prep the default curriculum means those are the courses students will be scheduled for unless parents, teachers and the student collectively choose otherwise.
Some Trinity parents questioned at a recent public meeting whether students who want to go to college will be held back or whether students who don’t want to go will be frustrated if they are in the same class.
Hall said it’s a tough job for teachers to have students at different levels. She said they will have to “differentiate instruction,” which means teaching the same skill in different ways based on the needs of the child.
“That doesn’t mean dumbing it down,” she said. “It means making sure that all kids get pushed ahead.”
Some kids will need a lot of support to make that progress. For example, if a student is struggling in algebra, that child may need algebra support class for extra time on task, Hall said.
She said it’s essential for students to get the supports they need if college prep is the default curriculum; otherwise, some students will be set up for frustration.
Kasunich said Trinity will take the next year to assess the viability of making college prep the default curriculum and determine the supports necessary for teachers and students.
Hall said San Jose Unified School District in California was a pioneer in college prep default curriculum. She said California had a set of courses students must take to be considered for state universities. A shockingly low number of students were taking those courses, she said.
The district made college prep the default curriculum and saw increases in college readiness, higher Advanced Placement scores and the graduation rate stayed the same, she said.
Karen Fuqua, public information officer for San Jose Unified School District, said last week that the district made the change in 2002 because parents and the community said the district’s expectations were not high enough. There was some concern about whether the dropout rate would increase because of more rigor, but that has not been the case, she said.
“With higher rigor, there hasn’t been a profound impact on the dropout rate,” she said.
Kasunich said he’s not surprised by the results of San Jose’s students. He expects the same at Trinity.
“If you challenge them, they will be more engaged,” he said.
San Jose teachers questioned whether this was the best path until they saw the results, Fuqua said.
“They became believers, too,” she said.

Fringe church plans protest at Trinity

2010-09-02T16:47:00.001-04:00

Members of the Kansas-based church who believe the deaths of U.S. troops are God’s punishment for the nation’s tolerance of homosexuality have planned a protest at Trinity High School in October.
Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka is planning an Interstate 70 GodSmack tour from the church to Washington, D.C., with numerous stops along the way.
It details its itinerary for protests on its website and does not give any specific reason for choosing Trinity, except to say it’s the next stop on the I-70 tour. The protest will occur during the high school’s dismissal on Oct. 4. The church did not respond to an e-mail Wednesday asking why Trinity was chosen for the protest.
However, on its itinerary, the church accuses parents and teachers “across this doomed nation” of raising their children for the devil and said “so-called adults teach the students to be vain, selfish, sinful, violent, lusty, God-hating brats who turn the grace of our God into lasciviousness.”
“I won’t comment on ignorance,” Trinity Superintendent Paul Kasunich said Wednesday when asked about the reasons for the church’s planned protest.
However, he said, the church sent a letter to North Franklin Township police about its constitutionally protected plan to protest at the school.
Kasunich said he doesn’t know why the church picked Trinity. He suspects its because the group is traveling through the region and Trinity is a big district with name recognition along the path being taken.
He said he will meet with North Franklin police to discuss security during the protest. There will be additional security, he said.
The church members have the legal right to protest, but Kasunich said he will not allow protesters to jeopardize the health and safety of students and staff.
The church is known for its members going to the funerals of fallen service members and holding up signs that say “God Hates Fags.”

Hitting the books again

2010-08-31T15:44:00.000-04:00

Summer came to an end for about 5,500 Greene County children and young adults as classes got under way Monday in all five county school districts.

In each district, the first day of school was reported to have gone well, school officials said. The high temperatures also didn't seem to be much of a problem for the first day of the new year.

"It's been excellent," said Dr. Jerome Bartley, superintendent at Central Greene. "I visited the buildings this morning, and everything is business as usual; we're in great shape," he said.

During his visits, Bartley said, he checked in on several classrooms and students "were engaged." He also checked in on some of the district's new teachers and they seemed to be doing well, he said. "Everything is going as planned," Bartley said.

The district will be monitoring classrooms this week because of the expected high temperatures. "We'll have water on hand and if it becomes too extreme, we'll lead students to other areas (of the school) where it's cooler," he said.

This year, the district hopes to develop its own cyberschool, working with VLN Partners, Bartley said. The district also updated its student information system using Pro-Soft software, automated the libraries and implemented an "accelerated reader" program for all schools.

The district, in addition, will be updating its "Study Island" software for reading and math. The district serves about 2,100 students.

Southeastern Greene also reported a good start to the new school year.

"So far, so good," said Bill Henderson, the district's new superintendent. "The kids are where they need to be, and everything is taking its proper course," he said.

Monday's high temperatures didn't seem to be a problem, Henderson said early Monday afternoon. The staff had left some of the windows cracked open in the evenings, he said "The buildings take a while to heat up, and the cool nights are helping," he said.

The district, which has about 650 students, started its own cyberschool this year, the Southeastern Greene Digital Academy.

It also began using "Study Island" software in the elementary school and departmentalized the sixth grade, which involves having the students taught specific subjects by different teachers rather than having one teacher teach all subjects.

The district also continues to build on its inclusion program, under which students with special needs are taught in the regular classrooms, Henderson said.

In the Carmichaels Area School District, the first day of classes went smoothly, Superintendent Craig Baily said.

"It's been a very quiet day. We're right back into the groove of learning," he said. The district had a few minor transportation problems in the morning but had worked them out for the afternoon runs. Besides that, the first day has been "excellent," Baily said.

Baily said it also appeared that many students were ready to return to school after the long summer.

He said he had talked to a number of them during the past weekend at the Coal Show and they indicated they were ready. "I think many of them may have been getting a little bored," he said.

The district also saw somewhat of a build up for the start of school with many activities, such as band and football practice beginning in August. "The first of August many (students) were already in the swing of things," he said.

The district should not have any problems related to the heat having completed the air conditioning of the junior high school this summer and having air conditioners in rooms in the high school that normally would get hot, he said.

The district, which has 1,100 students, has provided staff this year with intensive training on an anti-bullying program in the junior-senior high school. A similar program had been started earlier in the elementary school.

The district also will continue a program held each morning in the junior-senior high school that prepares students for the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment exams. The program, begun last year, proved to be successful, he said.

Donna Furnier, superintendent at Jefferson-Morgan, said the first day went well.

"It was a great day, excellent," Furnier said. Teachers had been busy earlier preparing for the start of the school. "They were all ready to go for the first day," she said. The students also seemed happy to be back. "I think they were ready."

Though parts of the buildings seem to be a little warm, Furnier said she had heard no complaints.

The district, which has about 855 students, hired a new high school principal, David Bates, as well as a new first-grade teacher, second-grade teacher and elementary librarian.

Because of enrollment, the district started an additional kindergarten classroom and second-grade classroom. It also updated computer software and is in the process of developing a new Advanced Placement English course.

"We're looking forward to having an excellent year," Furnier said.

In the West Greene School District, the first day went "exceptionally well," district Superintendent Thelma Szarell said.

"We've had no problems, no glitches," she said. Szarell visited each of the schools and said elementary students in particular seemed "eager" to get back to school.

Several of the younger students told her they couldn't wait to return. They also were happy to talk about their new shoes and their new haircuts or what they did over the summer, she said. "It's nice to see them and greet them on the first day," she said.

Szarell said that though parts of some of the district buildings were getting warm during the afternoon, teachers were doing a good job of using fans to keep the air moving.

The district has about 800 students. This year, it will introduce eight new Advance Placement classes. It also has introduced the Study Island software at Graysville Elementary and FastForward software for reading.

The district made adequate yearly progress on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment and this year hopes to continue with that success, Szarell said.

Burgettstown still facing water woes

2010-08-30T12:25:00.000-04:00

Burgettstown Area School District still is trying to determine why it’s middle/high school has rusty water.
Superintendent Deborah Jackson said this week that there’s a conflict between Pennsylvania American Water Co. and the district’s architect, Eckles Architecture and Engineering, about what and who is responsible for the problem.
The architects think it’s the responsibility of the water company because it increased water pressure to the building, while the water company feels there are problems with the new plumbing system that is part of the building’s recent renovation, she said Tuesday.
Students have been subjected to orange-colored water for two years, Jackson wrote in a recent letter to the water company. They shower in orange-colored water; the kitchen staff has to run the faucets for 15 to 20 minutes each time they use water for cooking to get clean water; washing machines leave clothing discolored; and science labs cannot use the water for experiments, she said.
Administrators and school board members recently met with representatives from both companies and the district decided to do more testing of the hot water system. The district is waiting for test results on valves in the hot water system, she said. Those results should be back in about a week. If the results are fine, Jackson said she will talk to the water company about what steps to take next.
She said the district is considering whether to put a filtering system on the input pipe coming into the school to determine if that solves the problem. The water company will not pay for that, she said.
The state Department of Environmental Protection has tested the water and said it does not represent a health problem, Jackson said. That statement was confirmed by a DEP spokeswoman.
Spokeswoman Katy Gresh said DEP sampling showed the middle/high school cafeteria water has 900 micrograms of iron per liter and the maintenance room has 2,400 micrograms of iron per liter. The standard is 300 micrograms per liter.
Gresh said there is not a health risk with the iron in the water. It’s simply an aesthetic issue, she said.
“Parents need not be concerned,” she said.
Water also was tested at the water main connection and had 53 micrograms per liter, she said. That means the problem is not with the water, Gresh said. She said the DEP suggested the district have the plumbing checked because the problem could be with the hot water recirculation.
Jackson said the water in the elementary school is fine. Gresh said the DEP also tested water in the elementary school and bus garage and the amount of iron was less than the standard.
Jackson sent a letter this summer to the water company detailing all the steps the district has taken to resolve the problem and again asking for the company’s help to resolve the issue.
The water company suggested flushing the water system occasionally to rid it of rusty water, but said it would not credit the district for water used in the flushing.
Jackson said the district tried that, but the water remained clear for just a few days.
In February, the district hired CEC Forensic Engineers to review the plumbing design, especially the hot water system. The company suggested redesigning the hot water tanks to drain off the rust to prevent it from flowing through the water system. That was completed in May. However, that did not resolve the problem, Jackson said.

State giving less to districts than originally budgeted

2010-08-27T16:12:00.002-04:00

McGuffey School District is curtailing its tutoring program because it expects to get less than money than anticipated from the state.
Though the state budget was approved a few months ago, the federal government decided to give Pennsylvania less money than anticipated. The original state budget had a $250 million increase for basic education funding. Gov. Ed Rendell wants to cut $50 million of the increase to help balance the state budget, meaning all districts will get a smaller increase.
McGuffey business manager Scott Burchill said the new amount calls for McGuffey to get $74,159 less. That’s the equivalent of one mill for the district, he said.
“That’s a big number for our school district,” Burchill said.
Find out about other districts in Monday's Observer-Reporter.

Trinity teachers get technology training

2010-08-26T15:41:00.001-04:00

Shar Hope urged Trinity Area School District teachers Thursday to use tools that students love to teach them content.
Hope, a teaching and learning consultant for Promethean, was the keynote speaker for a daylong training session about the district’s new technology. Every classroom will be outfitted with a Promethean or Smart Board. The interactive boards allow teachers to bring more information into the classroom. Trinity has leased 207 Promethean Boards and 12 Smart Boards.
“I have found the best way to get your children to do work is to find out what tools they like and then assign them work using those tools,” said Hope, who is a former teacher, guidance counselor and administrator.
Just using the tool, however, isn’t enough, she said. Students need authentic learning experiences, Hope said.
“Connect them with people, places and events,” she said.
After her speech, teachers broke into small groups to learn how to use the technology. Some were beginning lessons while others were more advanced. Trinity East teachers Mollie Deegan and Kelly Shaw taught one of the sessions about getting started with the boards. They used the boards last year.
“You’re going to be amazed at what you’re going to be able to do,” Shaw said. “Our students love it.”
When her students were studying the Erie Canal, Shaw said she pulled in pictures on the interactive board to show how the canal works. It was more detailed than what they could read in a textbook, she said.
“It created a lot of excitement,” she said
They explained how to create flip charts on the computerized screen and how the “pen” that comes with the system works. Regular pens and markers cannot be used because they will ruin the board.
The system also has surround sound, which works well for students with hearing problems, Shaw said.
The screens are connected to teacher laptops. They can create text boxes anywhere on the interactive screen and then type just like it’s a computer, Deegan said.
The teachers also gave a website to use for tutorials and existing flip charts for different subject areas. Shaw said teachers can use those or come up with their own.
“Really, the possibilities are endless,” Shaw said. “My experience with Promethean has been nothing but fantastic.”

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Fort Cherry Superitendent sends out letter about gas drilling

2010-08-25T19:48:00.000-04:00

Fort Cherry School Board plans to enter into a non-surface lease with Texas-based Range Resources, according to a letter Superintendent Robert Dinnen sent to parents and residents this week.
The board tabled a vote on the lease Monday. Financial and other terms of the lease are not yet finalized, according to Dinnen’s letter.
The board has maintained three principles about gas wells: no surface drilling on school property, addressing environmental and safety concerns from drilling on adjacent property and exploring non-surface drilling for financial benefit, according to the letter.
A non-surface lease would allow horizontal drilling under district property and would take place from a surface well on an adjacent property, about one-half mile from the school.
Dinnen said in the letter that school officials have been working with governmental agencies and company officials to make the school as safe as possible.
He said four areas of safety are being addressed. Crisis drills and training with first responders and educational sessions with industry experts in the event of an accident are being planned. Annually, students and staff will participate in crisis drills.
Drilling companies have been asked to mitigate noise and traffic problems, especially during school hours, Dinnen said, adding that they have been cooperative.
The district has contacted the state Department of Environmental Protection for water testing. DEP officials indicate the school water is safe in regards to drilling, the letter states.
There are also plans to have air quality tested and monitored, Dinnen said. Air quality monitoring in the area is already taking place and the DEP has indicated results should be available in about a month, he said.
He said more water and air quality testing will take place and that Range has indicated that drilling will not take place at the property adjacent to the school for at least a few months.

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Pennsylvania again not chosen for Race to the Top federal grant

2010-08-24T16:21:00.002-04:00

ATLANTA (AP) — Pennsylvania will not be part of the second round of federal "Race to the Top" grants.
More than 13 million students and 1 million educators will share $3.4 billion from the second round of the federal “Race to the Top” grant competition, the U.S. Education Department said Tuesday.
The department chose nine states — Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Ohio and Rhode Island — and the District of Columbia for the grants. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said 25,000 schools will get money to raise student learning and close the achievement gap.
The “Race to the Top” program, part of President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan, rewards states for taking up ambitious changes to improve struggling schools. The competition instigated a wave of reforms across the country, as states passed new teacher accountability policies and lifted caps on charter schools to boost their chances of winning.
“These states show what is possible when adults come together to do the right thing for children,” Duncan said in a conference call with reporters. “Every state that applied showed a tremendous amount of leadership and a bold commitment to education reform. The creativity and innovation in each of these applications is breathtaking.”
In the first round of the contest in the spring, just two states were winners — Tennessee and Delaware — and they scored more than 440 out of a possible 500 points. In this round, Duncan said all 10 winners scored more than 440 points, showing improvement in the applications.
The department wanted to choose more winners but “simply ran out of money,” Duncan said. He said he hopes to reward more applicants next year with another $1.3 billion for a third round.
For the winners, the grants mean a cash infusion at a time when education funding is dwindling, forcing teacher layoffs and program reductions. The awards range from $75 million for Rhode Island and D.C. to $700 million for New York.
“While this has seemed more like a marathon at times, now the real race begins,” said Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, whose state is getting $400 million. “This is truly a unique opportunity to implement a Georgia-created plan that will accelerate our work in improving student achievement.”
Georgia came in third in the first round of the $4.35 billion competition in March, losing out to Tennessee and Delaware, which are sharing $600 million. Thirty-five states and the District of Columbia applied for the second round of the competition, and the Education Department named 19 finalists in July.
The applicants named winners Tuesday will share $3.4 billion. Another $350 million is coming in a separate competition for states creating new academic assessments.
In their applications, winners promised to support charter schools, create tracking systems that follow students through their academic careers, and improve teacher training programs at state colleges.
One notable absence on the list of winners was Colorado, which passed a controversial law this year that ties teacher pay to student performance and allows the state to strip tenure from low-performing instructors. Colorado officials said they will forge ahead with reforms, though progress will be slowed without the federal cash.
“They clearly in Washington have a tin ear about how we do things in the West,” said Lt. Gov. Barbara O’Brien, who helped make the state’s pitch to the competition’s judges.
Like Colorado, at least 17 states vying for the money reformed teacher evaluation systems to include student achievement, and more than a dozen changed laws to foster the growth of charter schools. Dozens also adopted Common Core State Standards, the uniform math and reading benchmarks developed by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association.
“The change unleashed by conditioning federal funding on bold and forward-looking state education policies is indisputable,” the Democrats for Education Reform said in a statement. “Under the president’s leadership, local civil rights, child advocacy, business and education reform groups, in collaboration with those state and local teacher unions ready for change, sprung into action to achieve things that they had been waiting and wanting to do for years.”
In a speech announcing the finalists last month, Duncan called the change a “quiet revolution.”
“This is not about funding a few states on a pilot basis. This is about a national movement,” he said Tuesday.
But some education groups said “Race to the Top” rewarded states that have weak reform efforts while leaving out those like Colorado and Louisiana that have made strides to overhaul their schools.
“It becomes clear that the vagaries of peer reviewers and the prowess of grant writers are what drive results in such competitions, not true policy change, political courage, leadership or public commitment to reform,” said Mike Petrilli, a former Education Department official who is now vice president at the Fordham Institute.
Between both rounds of the competition, 46 states and the District of Columbia applied.
The competition for many states was an uphill battle, with teacher unions hesitant to sign on to reforms directly tying teacher evaluations to student performance on standardized tests, and education leaders concerned winning meant giving up too much local control.
Florida was among the states that got resistance from many teachers unions in the first round of the competition but won their support after taking a more collaborative approach in round two.
“I think it shows that when the governor brought all the stakeholders together, we came up with an application that was strong and doable,” said Andy Ford, president of the Florida Education Association, the statewide teachers’ union.
Other states, like Indiana, dropped out of the competition because of the lack of union support for the state’s application.
© 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Cash course

2010-08-23T16:29:00.000-04:00

As Washington and Greene county students head back to school this fall, many will learn about personal finance, even though it is not a state requirement.
Twenty-six states, including Pennsylvania, have no mandate about personal finance education, though it may be taught as an elective, according to the Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy.
However, four states require at least a one-semester course devoted to personal finance and 20 require personal finance instruction be incorporated into other subject matter, according to the coalition website.
Laura Levine, executive director for the coalition, said most requirements are set at the state level; however, in Pennsylvania, it’s determined at the local level.
Levine said personal finance needs to be taught in schools because so many people are struggling financially and children may not get guidance at home.
“Parents ought to be the first teachers of personal finance and money management,” she said. “Schools need to help with this.”
Levine said she’s not sure there’s a conventional wisdom of the best approach to teaching about finances. Most experts say introduce it early in an age-appropriate fashion when kids are learning behaviors and habits. Just as you teach kids about brushing their teeth and eating healthy, teach them about savings, she said.
“When they get to middle and high school, they will have something to build on,” she said.
More than half of kids in this country don’t get financial education at school, she said.
There’s been a recent increase of states with personal finance education requirements, but she doesn’t attribute that to the latest financial meltdown.
Those requirements were in the pipeline ahead of the recession.
“I think we will see an even greater amount as we come out of the recession,” she said.
Washington Superintendent Roberta DiLorenzo said that some personal finance information is available in elective business courses. The district also offers Career Planning 1 and 2, which offers some personal finance information.
However, the staff has been discussing revisions to the family consumer science curriculum to add personal survival skills, which will include caretaking and finances, DiLorenzo said. Should that revision happen, it wouldn’t be until the 2011-12 school year.
“I think there’s a greater need to educate our students about that before they leave,” she said. “Managing your money is a priority.”
DiLorenzo said the district is also working with the Washington Area Teachers Federal Credit Union to potentially bring an age-appropriate finance program into the school.
Credit Union CEO Joe Marzullo said the credit union doesn’t have a prepared program and is waiting for the go-ahead from the school board.
However, he said officials are talking about creating a program that teaches little ones about savings and “growing it up” as they get older.
Financial institutions do have an interest in educating students, Marzullo said.
“An educated consumer is a better consumer,” he said, adding that it’s important for people to know how to get along financially.
Marzullo wouldn’t say classes about personal finance should be required.
“I won’t go there. I wouldn’t be so presumptuous to say it should be mandatory,” he said, adding he would leave that to educators. “But do I think it’s important? Yeah. I think it’s a good idea.”
Charleroi Superintendent Brad Ferko said the district has personal finance lessons in family consumer science classes, but they are electives. Charleroi also has a Life 101 class that goes over the transition into adulthood.
It’s about “things they need to know to be successful,” such as renting an apartment, buying a car and buying furniture instead of renting it, Ferko said.
Ferko said he wishes he had the staff to run family consumer science for every senior.
“It’s such an important message,” he said.
Charleroi probably won’t hire more staff to teach that, but the district needs to fit it into other classes, Ferko said.
West Greene Middle-Senior High School Principal Anthony Paull said the district doesn’t have standalone courses about personal finance, but it is included in family consumer science classes. West Greene also has an elective called home management, which includes lessons about everything from food preparation to financial resource management, he said.
Family consumer science is mandatory in seventh grade at West Greene. The district offers career education in seventh and 11th grades, which includes personal finance information, Paull said.
The school also offers a political science/economics course, where students can spend several weeks learning about economics.
Paul said schools should teach this kind of information.
“It’s a lifelong skill,” he said “It’s a skill that needs to be used every day.”

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Pulling an all-nighter for the college application

2010-08-12T13:13:00.002-04:00

Cree Bautista’s application for next year’s freshman class at New York University isn’t due until Jan. 1, but Cree, an incoming high school senior from Pflugerville, Tex., was not taking any chances, reports the New York Times.

Just after 12:01 a.m. on Aug. 1 — when this year’s version of the Common Application, the passport to N.Y.U. and more than 400 other institutions, was first posted on the Web — Cree sat down at the computer in his parents’ bedroom and began filling out the form. The room was dark, because they were sleeping.

After listing his extracurricular activities (including cross country and show choir), tallying his Advanced Placement courses (seven) and putting a final polish on his essay, he pushed the “send” button. It was about 3:30 a.m. Never mind that he had never visited New York, let alone New York University. This, he said, was his “dream school,” and he was determined “to be the first to apply.”

As it turned out, Cree, 17, was the first applicant for the class of 2015, not just at N.Y.U. but to any institution that accepts the Common App, including those of the Ivy League. By Tuesday he had plenty of company: Nearly 1,000 applications had been filed by students to colleges — Harvard, Miami of Ohio and Vanderbilt, among many others — a nearly fourfold increase over the comparable period last year.

But as more students each year seek to get the earliest possible jump on the nerve-racking process of applying to college, as if they were securing tickets to a soon-to-be-sold-out rock concert, the deans of admission at N.Y.U. and elsewhere are sounding a cautionary note. They say that there is no reason to apply five months in advance, let alone two, and that they are far more inclined to put a premium on thoughtfulness and contemplation than speed.

Asked when a member of his staff might first see Cree’s application, Shawn Abbott, assistant vice president for undergraduate admissions at N.Y.U., said it would probably not be until mid-October at the earliest.

“We won’t even download it until months from now,” Mr. Abbott said. “It’s not a horse race.”

While Cree is applying to N.Y.U. in the regular-decision round, several deans said Mr. Abbott’s plea for deliberation and patience was also good advice for those applying to selective colleges through their early application programs.

For example, the deadline for students to file early-action applications to the University of Michigan — which is accepting the Common Application for the first time this year — is Nov. 1. Asked if filing well in advance of that deadline would give an applicant a leg up, Ted Spencer, the longtime executive director of undergraduate admissions at Michigan, said no.

“As long as you pay attention to the deadline, you’re going to be in good shape,” Mr. Spencer said.

Rob Killion, executive director of the Common Application, said he was particularly unnerved by the flood of early submissions through the organization’s Web site because he feared that students were rushing their essays. (This year’s Common Application was actually posted several weeks later than last year’s — not as a prod to get applicants to file later, but instead to allow high schools extra time to send final documents before the new year begins.)

Cree said he felt he was as ready as he would ever be. He said the essay that he submitted in answer to the application’s array of broad questions — including “Discuss some issue of personal, local, national or international concern and its importance to you” — was actually drawn from a paper he worked on last semester in his junior-year English class.

Titled “It’s Not a Phase,” his essay begins: “I grew up in the same neighborhood, in the same house, in the same bedroom, for 10 years. Throughout that decade, I grew into the person I am today, changing who I thought I was just about every five seconds. As I came to terms with what was on the inside, my parents came to realize that no matter what, I was still their son.”

Cree, who hopes to study music at N.Y.U., will not have his application considered until his teachers have submitted their recommendations, his school has sent along his grades and the College Board has sent an official record of his SAT scores. But Mr. Abbott of N.Y.U. — who spoke only in general about early filers, and not Cree in particular — said he hoped that other students would wait to file their applications until they have actually begun their senior years, and can let the colleges know how things are going so far, whether in class or out.

Cree, whose parents are both teachers and who hopes to also apply to three Texas colleges that have not yet posted their applications, said he was just glad to have this one done and out of the way.

After essentially pulling an all-nighter, he was calm and fell immediately asleep.

“I was exhausted,” he said. “I just kind of collapsed.”

Former substitute teacher sues Peters Township

2010-08-11T16:13:00.000-04:00

A former Peters Township School District long-term substitute teacher has sued the district for age discrimination.
Susan Rzepecki, of Bridgeville, filed the lawsuit Tuesday in federal court in Pittsburgh.
She says worked as a long-term substitute teacher for the district in the 2007-08 school year. She received two letters of praise from parents, had satisfactory classroom observations and no concerns were raised with her performance, according to the lawsuit.
She applied for a similar long-term substitute position for the 2008-09 school year, but was not offered a position, the lawsuit states. None of the long-term substitutes hired was over 30, according to the lawsuit.
Rzepecki also alleges the district didn’t hire or schedule her as a day-to-day substitute teacher because she complained about and opposed the district’s decision to deny her employment because of her age.
She wants compensatory damages and other relief the court deems proper, such as reinstatement to the positions.
The school district had no comment.

Washington approves LERTA

2010-08-10T15:11:00.001-04:00

Washington School District homeowners will receive tax breaks for improving their property or building new homes.
The school board on Monday approved a five-year Local Economic Revitalization Tax Assistance resoluation by an 8-0 vote. Board member David Stotka was absent.
The LERTA will give residential property owners a 100 percent break on any increase in school taxes that would stem from up to $56,669 in improvements, including roofing, siding and windows, said district solicitor Ken Baker.
The LERTA also can be used for any new structure built on an existing lot in the school district, though the tax forgiveness will be for the entire amount of building a new home, he said.
Baker said he and Washington solicitor Lane Turturice looked at state law to determine if the dollar figure could be higher for improvements. However, that amount has to be determined by a state formula, he said.
Those who apply will get the LERTA for three years, Baker said.
He said he is sending a letter to the city, notifying representatives of the school board’s approval of the LERTA. The city and school board have worked together to draft the LERTA and Baker said a city vote may come soon.
He said it’s also possible that the county may sign on to the LERTA.
The school district’s LERTA is effective immediately.

Senate approves $26 billion in aid to states and schools

2010-08-06T16:53:00.001-04:00

By CARL HULSE
New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Senate on Thursday approved $26 billion in aid to states and school districts to prevent the layoffs of tens of thousands of teachers and government workers while allocating $600 million to strengthen border security as senators headed toward an August recess, the New York Times reported.

Both measures require approval by the House, which is being rushed back into session next Tuesday from its own extended August break to consider the state and local aid that had been caught up in a partisan impasse.

Democrats hailed the passage of the $26 billion package, which was approved by a vote of 61 to 39, saying it could prevent disruptions in the start of the school year. Two Republicans, Susan Collins and Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, joined 57 Democrats and 2 independents in backing the measure; 39 Republicans opposed it.

“As our children prepare to go back to school, I am thankful that we were able to keep teachers in the classroom, school bus drivers on their routes and school nurses and counselors in place to ensure our children’s safety,” said Senator Benjamin L. Cardin, Democrat of Maryland.

The legislation provides $10 billion to retain teachers who might otherwise lose jobs to cutbacks, and an additional $16 billion to help states struggling to close budget deficits because of rising health care costs. Backers of the measure said the state aid would prevent the loss of emergency and law enforcement workers who could be let go.

The bill does not add to the deficit since the money is generated by closing a business tax loophole and making spending cuts.

In a rare agreement, Senate Democrats and Republicans also cut a deal on the immigration money, providing a 10 percent increase in current year spending that would be generated by increasing visa application fees on a handful of companies that import foreign workers. Among other things, the money would pay for 1,000 new border patrol agents for a strike force to be deployed in vulnerable areas. The legislation would also provide money for the Department of Justice to handle the increased caseload.

“This bipartisan effort shows we are serious about making the border more secure than ever,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York and one of the authors of the plan. “Now our attention must turn to comprehensive reform, which is the only way to fully address the problem of illegal immigration.”

Bentworth High School getting upgrades

2010-08-05T15:50:00.000-04:00

Bentworth High School is getting a face lift.
The facility, constructed in 1973, is undergoing a renovation, said Superintendent Charles Baker.
He said the work includes a complete renovation of the hot water boiler system, bleachers in the gymnasium, carpeting and paint in the library, carpeting and seating in the auditorium, lockers in the hallways and dressing rooms, and upgrades to the telephone and Internet communication system. Much of the work will be completed by the district’s maintenance staff, he said.
The project is expected to cost $500,000 and will be taken from the $1.5 million left over from the construction fund for the middle school that opened in January 2009, he said. That money was set aside in the capital budget, which means it can only be used for construction or renovation.
Baker said other projects are under way. Fencing has been installed at the middle school multipurpose field, allowing for more athletic areas for the school and community, he said.
Bids are currently being received for site preparation for a facilities/maintenance building. A facilities building will provide increased space for the storage of equipment and general supplies.
Everything except the bleachers in the high school gymnasium will be completed by the beginning of school, Baker said. The facilities building will not be started until all bids have been reviewed and approved by the school board, he said.

Join the Observer-Reporter’s conversation about education at our blog at http://www.observer-reporter.com/or/behinddesk/

Canon-Mac discusses financing of construction projects

2010-08-03T16:18:00.001-04:00

CANONSBURG – If the Canon-McMillan School Board borrowed $72 million for construction, it would cost the equivalent of 10.82 mills in taxes over six years to pay for the debt service, according to the board’s financial advisor.
John P. McShane, managing director of Boenning & Scattergood, gave the a board a presentation about the district’s financial situation Monday night. He will be back each month until at least December with updates.
The board is considering whether to build new elementary schools, among other construction projects. However, no decisions have been made.
McShane said the dollar figures could change, depending on interest rates. He also said the increased debt service costs don’t automatically mean taxes will be raised by 10.82 mills. Some money will be saved in operational costs of new buildings, he said.
McShane said all of the money cannot be borrowed at once because the board could not raise property taxes enough in one year to pay for the debt service on the loan. School boards can raise taxes only to a certain index level without voter approval.
“It would be great to borrow it all now because rates are so low but you can’t afford it,” he said.
He said there is an exception that would allow the board to raise taxes to cover roughly 50 percent of the project cost in addition to what is permitted to be increased under the index.
There is also a program that runs until Dec. 31 where the federal government pays 35 percent of interest on bonds, McShane said. It’s not clear whether that program will be extended.
Business Manager Joni Mansmann said she asked McShane to present the financial analysis to the board so members could determine whether the district can afford it.
She said she asked McShane to use $72 million because it reflects Option C from the architects, which iss the plan that calls for two new elementary schools at the Wylandville and Muse sites and renovations of South Central and Hills-Henderson with an option of increasing enrollment capacity at Hills-Henderson.
McShane also briefly gave the board an update about one of its swap agreements. The board must decide whether to end the agreement by Dec. 1.

Join the Observer-Reporter’s conversation about education at our blog at http://www.observer-reporter.com/or/behinddesk/

Princeton Review names top party schools

2010-08-02T16:55:00.001-04:00

ATLANTA (AP) — The University of Georgia won a national title this year — top party school.
The Princeton Review announced Monday that Georgia is the No. 1 party school on its now infamous annual ranking. The school of about 30,000 students has been on the list 10 times since the ranking was created in 1992, but this is the first time the university has taken the top spot.
For the campus — surrounded by nearly 100 bars in tiny downtown Athens — parties are just part of life from August to May each year. Many students gear up for the weekend on Thursdays and sometimes don’t rest until Monday morning.
“That’s what people look forward to starting Thursday — Thursday night is the new Friday night,” said junior Andrew Chappell, 20. “The party atmosphere is such a big part of Georgia.”
University of Georgia spokesman Tom Jackson said the list is not one the school wants to lead. He said he’d rather emphasize that the school made Princeton Review’s top 50 “Best Values” list or the “Green Honor Roll” of the most environmentally conscious campuses.
Georgia beat out Pennsylvania State University, West Virginia University and University of Florida — which were the top party schools over the last three years. Those three made the top 10 this year, while Ohio University ranked second.
The ranking comes after several years of work by University of Georgia administrators to curb drinking on campus and tone down the party atmosphere.
Since 2006 — when a student died of an overdose of alcohol, cocaine and heroin in his dorm room — university police have been hauling underage drinkers to jail rather than simply giving them a ticket. School administrators call parents on the first offense and suspend a student for two semesters after the second alcohol violation.
“The University of Georgia takes student alcohol education programs very seriously and will continue to do so,” Jackson said.
Those efforts weren’t helped when athletic director Damon Evans stepped down last month after being charged with drunken driving. Evans had appeared in a video message played before home football games urging Georgia fans not to drink and drive.
The ranking is based on e-mail surveys of 122,000 students at more than 370 colleges across the country. It combines responses on alcohol and drug use on campus, hours spent studying outside class and the popularity of fraternities and sororities.
The surveys are filled out voluntarily by students, and on average about 325 students from each campus respond, said Rob Franek, author of the 800-page book put out by Princeton Review each year with nearly 60 categories of rankings.
Other rankings include best campus food, least accessible professors and most religious students.
“I want to make sure we’re giving any college-bound student a very clear example of what life could be for them at any of the 373 schools in the book,” he said.
Colleges dismiss the rankings as unscientific and complain that they glorify dangerous behavior.
In advance of Monday’s announcement, University of Colorado President Bruce Benson sent a letter to the Boulder, Colo., Daily Camera newspaper criticizing Princeton Review and the rankings.
“What I get really upset about is this is headline-grabbing, and it’s extremely unscientific,” Benson told the newspaper. His school ranked 16th on the party list this year and No. 1 in 2003.
This year, Brigham Young University topped the list of “Stone-Cold Sober Schools” for the 12th straight year.
The Princeton Review is a Massachusetts-based company known for its test preparation courses, educational services and books. It’s not affiliated with Princeton University.
© 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Trinity plans flexible grouping for students

2010-07-30T14:40:00.002-04:00

By the end of the first semester this year, Trinity Area School District third graders may be grouped in math based on their mastery of skills.
The concept is called “flexible grouping” and it’s something that Superintendent Paul Kasunich would like to see in kindergarten through eighth grade classes.
The idea is that students who are ahead shouldn’t be held back and those who are struggling shouldn’t be pushed ahead until they learn those skills.
Trinity will build into it slowly because it will change how education is delivered, he said. Within the groupings, the district will continue a concept called differentiated instruction, where teachers tailor instruction to each child’s needs.
He said recently that third grade teachers are looking at how to implement flexible grouping in Trinity Schools.
“Teachers are taking ownership over creating this model,” Kasunich said.
They will be visiting other schools that effectively use it, including Pine Richland School District. There, they will talk to other teachers about flexible grouping to find out the issues they had with implementing the program. Kasunich wants to make sure they think of all the things that could possible happen, he said.
Some Trinity board members, administrators and teachers have already visited Eden Hall Upper Elementary School in Pine Richland to see how the school uses flexible grouping, said Eden Hall Principal Robert Cooper.
Find out more in the Observer-Reporter next week.

Southeastern Greene explores cyber school

2010-07-28T11:59:00.001-04:00

MAPLETOWN - Southeastern Greene School District is exploring the possibility of establishing its own cyber school.

Superintendent Bill Henderson told the board Tuesday he hopes to have a representative from a company that helps districts establish the Internet-based education programs attend a special board meeting scheduled for Aug. 12.

A cyber school or "digital academy," Henderson said, could help the district supplement its own programs as well as bring students back to the district.

Last school year, Henderson said, about 29 students in the district attended cyber schools. Being new to the district, Henderson said, he wasn't sure why parents had chosen that option.

A cyber program could be developed using the district's curriculum, he said. It also could be arranged so that students in the cyber program on occasion could come into the schools.

The cyber classes would not be taught by district teachers but by instructors who would be state accredited, he said.

Other school districts also are now looking into starting such programs. Frazier School District currently operates a digital academy, Henderson said.

Pennsylvania named Race to the Top Finalist

2010-07-27T13:29:00.004-04:00

Pennsylvania is one of 19 states named a finalist Wednesday in the second round of the federal Race to the Top funding program.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said $3 billion was available in this round. Pennsylvania could get $400 million.
Thirty-five states and Washington D.C. submitted blueprints for the reform program. Before the first round of the program, districts had to sign off on participation, with signatures from the district teacher's union president, school board president and superintendent. Central Greene was the only district to sign on in Washington and Greene counties.
In addition to Pennsylvnia, the other finalists are Arizona, California, Colorado, Washington D.C., Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island and South Carolina.
The finalists will travel to Washington D.C. during the week of Aug. 9 to present their plans to peer reviewers. The department of education will announce the winners in September
In the first round, Delaware and Tennessee won grants based on their school reform plans.

Trinity superitendent details operational plan

2010-07-23T15:12:00.002-04:00

Trinity School District’s new operational plan for the 2010-11 school year includes significant amounts of teacher training to help them use student data, incorporate technology into the classroom, include special education students in the regular classroom, and increase academic rigor.
The plan was created after the school board hired James Manley as a consultant to review the district. Manley issued a report earlier this year examining what Trinity does well and how it can improve.
Paul Kasunich, Trinity’s superintendent who was hired in April, worked with Manley, administrators and teachers to create the operational plan. He will go over the details of the plan publicly at the Aug. 19 school board meeting.
“The operational plan is a starting point,” Kasunich said Friday, adding that it will be assessed throughout the year. “It gives the district a focused direction.”
Find out more about the plan in Saturday's Observer-Reporter

Fort Cherry residents divided over drilling

2010-07-20T16:17:00.000-04:00

McDONALD - Fort Cherry residents who spoke Monday night were divided about whether the school board should allow gas drilling on district property.

The board held a public hearing about a potential nonsurface gas lease. The hearing came three months after the board invited Range Resources representatives to a public meeting to grill them about drilling.

A letter approved by the district's Parents and Teachers Association executive board was read to the board and residents by JoAnne Wagner, a Mt. Pleasant Township resident.

"The PTA requests the board include, as a condition of any natural gas lease, the installation of equipment for monitoring air toxics, with the costs to be covered by the industry," the letter said.

The health and safety of the children is of utmost importance, according to the letter. The board's guiding principles for a lease are a good start, but they must be made quantifiable to ensure a safe environment. Air monitoring will do that, the PTA letter said.

"It will provide real-time data to enable informed decision-making, every day while kids are in school and in emergency situations," the letter said.

Several years ago, the state had grants available for those constructing wind turbines, yet Fort Cherry never looked into those, said Bulger resident Cathy Lodge. Now drilling has come to the area, she said. She said a public hearing should be scheduled between the district and those soliciting a lease.

"Both sides of this controversial topic should be aired," she said. "It is time for full disclosure and to cease back-room deals excluding the public."

Lodge asked the board to refrain from participating in an industry with questionable health impacts on communities.

"We should strive to keep the school grounds not only a safe place but a healthy one, too," Lodge said.

However, other residents said they thought a nonsurface gas lease was a good idea.

"You're going to have the gas lease wells here anyway," said Mt. Pleasant Township resident Brian Temple. Gas wells are planned adjoining district property.

Joey Ogburn, of Hickory, agreed with Temple for the same reason.

"It seems like a no-brainer," he said.

Mt. Pleasant resident Regis Mucha said he supports the drilling but thinks others in the community should be more involved in the negotiations.

"This is a win situation for taxpayers," he said, adding that the money should be earmarked for education or necessary capital improvements and not administrative salaries.

Board President Brant Miller would not let Sue Seppi, a representative for Group Against Smog and Pollution, speak because she is not a district resident. That angered some in the audience because the board invited Range to the previous meeting.

Board member Mike Duran questioned whether the board can let the public know what's in any lease before it is voted on.

Board President Brant Miller said they would have to discuss that with the district solicitor.

Board member Chris Lauff said the board saw an addendum to the lease Monday night and questioned whether members would see an entire lease.

Miller said yes. He said after the meeting that there is no lease for the board to act on yet.

Is this generation more spoiled?

2010-07-19T16:07:00.002-04:00

If the subject is kids and how they're raised, it seems our culture has exactly one story to tell, according to Alfie Kohn in Sunday's Washington Post.
Anyone who reads newspapers, magazines or blogs knows how it goes: Parents today either can't or won't set limits for their children. Instead of disciplining them, they hover and coddle and bend over backward to protect their self-esteem. The result is that we're raising a generation of undisciplined narcissists who expect everything to go their way, and it won't be pretty when their sense of entitlement crashes into the unforgiving real world.
Read 10 articles or books on this topic and you'll find yourself wondering whether one person wrote all of them, so uniform is the rhetoric. The central premise is that the problem's dimensions are unprecedented: What's happening now contrasts sharply with the days when parents weren't afraid to hold kids to high standards or allow them to experience failure.
That's why this generation is so self-centered . Take it from journalist Peter Wyden, the cover of whose book depicts a child lounging on a divan eating grapes while Mom fans him and Dad shades him from the sun: It has become "tougher and tougher to say 'no' [to children] and make it stick," he insists.
Or listen to the lament of a parent who blames child development experts for the fact that her kids now seem to believe that "they have priority over everything and everybody." Or consider a pointed polemic in the Atlantic. Sure, the author concedes, kids have always been pleasure-seekers, but longtime teachers report that what we're now witnessing "is different from anything we have ever seen in the young before." Forget about traditional values: Things come so easily to today's entitled children that they fail to develop any self-discipline.
Powerful stuff. Except that those three indictments were published in 1962, 1944 and 1911, respectively.
The revelation that people were saying almost exactly the same things a century ago ought to make us stop talking and sit down -- hard. So let's consider three questions: Are parents unduly yielding or overprotective? Are kids today unusually narcissistic? And does the former cause the latter?
Everyone has an anecdote about a parent who hovered too close or tolerated too much. But is it representative of American parents in general? Does research tell us how pervasive permissiveness really is? My efforts to track down national data -- by combing both scholarly and popular databases as well as asking leading experts in the field -- have yielded absolutely nothing. Scholars have no idea how many parents these days are permissive, or punitive, or responsive to their children's needs without being permissive or punitive.
Thus, no one has a clue whether parenting has changed over the years -- and, if so, in what direction. Researchers have shown that various practices are more likely to produce certain outcomes, but they shrug when asked how prevalent those practices are. Similarly, "you will find next to no scientific data on helicopter parenting," says Keene State College psychologist Neil Montgomery, using the popular term for parental overinvolvement.
What we do know about discipline is that corporal punishment remains extremely popular in this country. In a 1995 Gallup poll, 94 percent of parents of preschoolers admitted to having struck their children within the previous year, a fact that's not easy to square with claims that parents have become softer or more humane.
There's also endless demand from parents for advice on getting kids to do what they're told. Some of the recommended methods have shifted over the years, but the goal is still compliance. A verbal reward such as "Good job!" is just the mirror image of punishment -- a tool for eliciting obedience. The same is true of much "overparenting": It's an exercise in control. Yet both are often portrayed as signs of indulgence.
When the conversation turns to what the kids themselves are like, we find separate complaints sloppily lumped together: They're rude, lacking in moral standards, materialistic, defiant, self-centered, excessively pleased with themselves and more.
What are interchangeable, in style and substance, are the polemics themselves -- books with titles such as "Overindulged Children," "Spoiling Childhood," "The Myth of Self-Esteem," "Pampered Child Syndrome," "The Omnipotent Child," "Generation Me," "The Narcissism Epidemic," and countless articles in the popular media. Trust me: If you've read one of these, you've read them all.
But other researchers doubt these findings, raising multiple concerns about Twenge's methodology. Kali Trzesniewski at the University of Western Ontario and Brent Roberts at the University of Illinois (together with their colleagues) went on to conduct their own analyses -- Roberts drew on additional data -- and discovered no meaningful differences across generations.
Why, then, are we so willing to believe that kids today are excessively self-confident or self-centered? Social psychologists say we selectively notice and remember examples that confirm our assumptions -- which is why anecdotal evidence is so unreliable: Look, there's a parent who's wimpy. And my cousin knows a 20-year-old who refuses to work hard. I knew it was true! But why would we gravitate to these beliefs in the first place? In a recent scholarly article, Roberts and others explained that complaints about a "Generation Me" -- Twenge's snide label -- reflect people's age, not the age they live in.
When older people are told that younger people are getting increasingly narcissistic, they may be prone to agree because they confuse the claim for generational change with the fact that younger people are simply more narcissistic than they are," Roberts and his colleagues write. "The confusion leads to an increased likelihood that older individuals will agree with the Generation Me argument despite its lack of empirical support."
In short, they argue, "every generation is Generation Me" -- until it grows up.
There's no evidence, then, that today's parents are more permissive than parents of yesteryear, or that today's young people are more narcissistic. But even if there were, no one has come close to showing that one causes the other.
In fact, a pair of recent studies cast serious doubt on that proposition. The first, published in Pediatrics last May, discovered that there is indeed a parental practice associated with children who later become demanding and easily frustrated. But it's not indulgent parenting. It's spanking.
And in a small unpublished study of the effects of helicopter parenting on college students, Keene State's Montgomery did not discover any sense of entitlement or tendency to take advantage of people among students who were closely monitored by their parents; to the contrary, such students tended to be somewhat anxious -- and also had positive qualities, such as "the capacity to love, feel supported and seek out social connections."
Neither logic nor evidence seems to support the widely accepted charge that we're too easy on our children. Yet that assumption continues to find favor across the political spectrum. It seems that we've finally found something to bring the left and the right together: an unsubstantiated knock on parents, an unflattering view of kids and a dubious belief that the two are connected.

Bristor might keep Trinity coaching job

2010-07-15T20:31:00.001-04:00

Levi Bristor might keep his coaching job.
The Trinity School Board approved a policy tonight that does not allow administrators to be coaches.
As the policy has been discussed over the past three months, three administrators had the potential to be impacted.
Ed Dalton was the varsity head football coach and athletic director. However, the board transferred him to a teaching position and kept him as coach. High School Assistant Principal Chad Daloia was an assistant football coach. The board accepted his resignation as assistant principal Thursday. Bristor is the varsity baseball coach and director of transportation.
Though the policy specifically lists his position as an administrator who can’t be a coach, Superintendent Paul Kasunich would not say Thursday night that Bristor has to make a choice between his two positions.
Find out more in Friday's Observer Reporter.

Districts weigh in on AP exams

2010-07-12T16:07:00.000-04:00

Trinity Area School District is the latest area district to mandate that students take Advanced Placement end-of-course exams.

AP courses are college-level classes for high schools that are approved by the College Board, which also runs the SAT. Students can receive college credit if they score well on the AP exams, which are separate from the tests that schools give during the course.

Sandra Riley, a spokeswoman for the College Board, said more than 17,000 schools in the United States offer AP courses and 75 percent of them responded to its most recent survey for the 2009-10 school year.

In that survey, 35 percent of schools said they require students to take the AP tests and 59 percent said they require students to pay for the test.

Trinity Superintendent Paul Kasunich said the mandated test was one of the ideas that he brought to the district when he started in April. Kasunich said he's a big proponent of AP because of its rigorous curriculum.

"I believe the test is part of the curriculum," he said.

He said a mandatory AP test makes sense because it validates what students learned and also gives detailed feedback to teachers to help make the curriculum better.

Currently, Trinity has 14 AP classes, said high school Principal Donald Snoke. They are English 11 and 12, Calculus AB/BC, music theory, U.S. history, European history, psychology, biology, chemistry, statistics, calculus AB, calculus BC, Java and art history.

Snoke said it's not clear how many students will take AP classes during the upcoming year because the schedule will not be complete until the end of this month.

That means it's not clear how much it will cost Trinity since the school board has agreed to pay the test-taking fee for each student, which is $86 per exam.

"If you mandate it, you have to pay for it," Kasunich said.

He said the exam score cannot be part of a student's final grade because districts receive the results in July. However, if students do not take the AP test, they will not pass the class, he said.

He hopes to expand the number of AP courses by four or six over the next few years.

Trinity Area Middle School will pilot pre-AP courses in English and social studies in 2010-11. The pilot program will allow students to experience academic rigor of advanced classes and prepare them for AP classes at the high school.

Not all Washington and Greene County schools handle AP courses and exams the same way.

Chartiers-Houston doesn't require students to take AP exams, though some choose to, said high school Principal Phil Mary. He said Chartiers-Houston offers AP classes for English, chemistry, physics, calculus AB and history.

Charleroi, which offers AP courses in English, chemistry, physics, biology and history, also doesn't mandate the AP exam, said Superintendent Brad Ferko.

"If you require students to take it, you have the obligation to pay for it," he said.

Roughly six years ago, Bentworth School District started offering AP classes. The district mandated the tests from the beginning, said high school Principal George Lammay.

He said the external test helps ensure students are achieving at the level that is expected.

Bentworth offers six AP courses, which are English, psychology, chemistry, biology, calculus AB and calculus BC.

Students are notified at the time they sign up for the course that the test is required, he said. The district does not pay for the cost of testing. However, low-income students will receive help, he said.

Riley said the College Board reduces the exam fee by $22 for low-income students and in most states, local or state governments chip in most or all of the rest so those students end up paying between nothing and $5 for the exam fee.

Join the Observer-Reporter's conversation about education at our blog at http://www.observer-reporter.com/or/behinddesk/.

Celebrating 50 years of "To Kill a Mockingbird"

2010-07-09T16:44:00.002-04:00

For those who somehow missed it, Sunday is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Harper Lee’s classic novel “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and dozens of events -- readings, mock trials, silent auctions, birthday parties -- are being held across the country to celebrate, according to the Washington Post. In a country with an attention span of about 10 seconds, this is quite an achievement.

And for those who somehow never read it, or who never watched the great movie adaptation with Gregory Peck, or who never listened to a discussion in English class, or who never listened to Sissy Spacek’s pleasurable reading on tape (or CD), Mockingbird is a novel of racism and redemption. It tells the story of a Southern lawyer, Atticus Finch, who defends a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman, and the related tale of his young children -- Scout and Jem -- and their fascination with a mysterious neighbor, Boo Radley.

Seen through the adult eyes of one of the main characters, Scout, who remembers back to the events when she was 6 years old, the book still delights and moves young people as much as it did when it was first published (I’ve watched this with my own children and their classmates).

Find out more at the Washington Post blog The Answer Sheet.

Coach's death blamed on heat

2010-07-08T15:26:00.001-04:00

No team can practice to avoid this type of loss.

When Mike Czerwien played football at Waynesburg University, he used his bowling ball frame of 5-8 and 225 pounds to terrorize quarterbacks, rolling past overmatched offensive linemen and registering sacks at a prolific rate. Czerwien was determined, powerful and passionate about the game. He seemed unstoppable.

That's why his death seems so unreal.

Czerwien, 25, who apparently suffered a heat-related problem, was taken by medical helicopter from Rices Landing, where he was doing construction Tuesday work for a local contractor. He died at Ruby Memorial Hospital in Morgantown, W.Va., at 7:22 p.m. Tuesday.

A spokeswoman with the West Virginia Medical Examiner's office said information about the cause of death would not be released. She said an autopsy has not been planned because it is "unnecessary in this case."

Czerwien was a graduate assistant coach at Waynesburg and his death stunned the university, especially those in the athletic department.

"He was a phenomenal young man," Waynesburg football coach and athletic director Rick Shepas said in a shaky voice Wednesday. "As with anyone in graduate school, any chance he had to work, he did. I got the call about 5:30 (Tuesday) and there were few details. I just knew they were life-flighting him. I was worried immediately."

Before receiving his degree two years ago, Czerwien carved out an outstanding playing career for the Yellow Jackets. In his senior season, Czerwien led all NCAA divisions with 2.1 sacks per game and 3.1 tackles for loss per game. He started all four years at Waynesburg and was a four-time first-team member on the All-PAC team.

During his time with the Yellow Jackets, the North Hills graduate racked up 273 tackles and 53.5 sacks, which is the NCAA all-divisions record.

"He was a tremendous young man," said Westminster football coach Jeff Hand, who recruited Czerwien when Hand was coach at Waynesburg. "My heart goes out to his family and the Waynesburg family. It's such a tremendous loss."

Czerwien was such a prolific player that opposing coaches designed offensive game plans for the opposite side of the field that Czerwien was on.

"He was a relentless player," said Washington & Jefferson football coach Mike Sirianni. "He just wouldn't quit. He played every play like it was his last. He's the best defensive lineman I've ever seen in our conference."

While coaches marveled at his skill level, those who knew him were impressed with his ability to work with other people.

"He had a huge heart," said Shepas. "He really wanted everything he did to mean something. He lived with that type of passion. He worked with that type of passion. He was one of those guys who come around once every 10 years. He was complete as a player and complete as a person."

Hand said an education was important to Czerwien and he aggressively worked to that end. He had one year remaining to finish his master's degree.

"He had such great leadership qualities," Hand said. "He was always joking and he wanted to enjoy his life and the people around him. He's among the best, if not the best, I've seen at the Division III level."

Canon-Mac unlikely to renew Southpointe LERTA

2010-07-07T15:39:00.000-04:00

Business tax breaks for Southpointe II have expired and it’s unlikely the Canon-McMillan School Board will renew them.
William Sember, Washington County Authority director of operations, asked the board in May to renew the Local Economic Revitalization Tax Assistance for Southpointe II.
The five-year LERTA expired on June 30 without any school board action.

Rendell signs state budget with education increases

2010-07-06T14:20:00.001-04:00

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Pennsylvania's $28 billion state budget has been signed into law.

At a signing ceremony Tuesday in Mechanicsburg, Gov. Ed Rendell said the budget does not increase taxes and clamps down on spending in response to a stubborn revenue slump that left last year's budget more than $1 billion in the red.

Rendell says deep spending cuts in some areas, such as social services, allowed for significant increases elsewhere, notably a 4.5 percent boost in spending for the state's public schools.

Hundreds of state employees are expected to be laid off as a result of the cuts.

The budget also contains hundreds of millions of dollars for projects to be picked by the governor and legislators.

©2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

McGuffey passes budget with tax increase

2010-06-25T14:34:00.000-04:00

McGuffey School Board cut student field trips and student rewards and reduced its distribution of its district newsletter before adopting the 2010-11 operating budget with a tax increase Thursday night.
The $28,533,258 budget has a 1.5 mill tax increase, bringing the total millage rate to 114. That means a homeowner with property that has an assessed value of $25,000 will see a tax increase of roughly $38.
Business Manager Scott Burchill said the board made adjustments to reduce the budget before Thursday night’s meeting. He said the reductions made at the meeting will save the district an additional $67,000.

Intermediate Unit 1 creates cyber school

2010-06-24T15:31:00.001-04:00

Schools within Intermediate Unit 1 are creating their own cyber school to stem of the flow of money sent to online schools outside the three-county area.
School districts must pay tuition for students who go to cyber schools, though some of the money is reimbursed by the state. IU1 executive director Charles Mahoney said in a three-year period schools within IU1 sent $10 million to cyber schools outside the area. IU1 includes Washington, Greene and Fayette counties.
As a result, IU1 began studying the possibility of creating its own cyber school, he said. Ringgold, Avella and Uniontown have signed on to be part of the consortium to create an online school. The project is open to all districts in the intermediate unit. Other districts are choosing to create their own cyber school.
Find out more in Sunday's Observer-Reporter.

Canon-Mac passes budget with tax increase

2010-06-22T12:36:00.001-04:00

The Canon-McMillan School Board on Monday approved its 2010-11 operating budget with a 3.56 mill increase.
That brings the millage rate to 105.41 for the $61,685,839 budget.
The average cost of a home in Canonsburg is $149,000 and the average tax increase will be $50.49. In Cecil, it’s $185,000 and $88.99 respectively and in North Strabane, it is $214,800 and $107.89, respectively.
Director of Business and Finance Joni Mansmann said it is a 3 percent increase over this year’s budget. The 2009-10 budget was $59,780,084.
The primary increases are for salary, health care and retirement. The board is also trying to restore its fiscal health and establish a savings account- it has been tracked by the auditor general’s office for deficit spending.
Qualified homeowners will see a real estate reduction on their tax bills of $96.60 because of state gambling revenues.

Trinity outs Dalton as AD; transfers him to teaching position

2010-06-18T12:45:00.001-04:00

Trinity Area School Board decided by an 8-1 vote Thursday night to transfer Ed Dalton to a teaching position and advertise for a new athletic director.
The decision came in front of a crowd of at least 200 people who applauded as speakers voiced their support for Dalton, baseball coach Levi Bristor and other coaches. Dalton will remain the varsity football coach.
Audience members booed as the roll call vote was taken to transfer Dalton to a teaching position.
Board member Jim Knapp was the only school board member to vote against the move.
“As a former union president, I think we’re going to have legal issues,” said Knapp, who is a Bethel Park guidance counselor. “I don’t think we should be doing this.”
Dalton’s contract as athletic director is up this month. He was hired as Trinity’s athletic director and football coach in 1999 and came to Trinity after successful coaching stints at Altoona, Mt. Pleasant and Purchase Line.
Superintendent Paul Kasunich said it was “not a matter of not wanting” Dalton to stay on as athletic director.
Kasunich and board President Tom Bodnovich said after the meeting that an offer was made for a new contract, but Dalton rejected it.
Bodnovich said Dalton was offered more money, but he turned it down because he didn’t like new language in the contract. Bodnovich said that legally he couldn’t describe the new language.
Dalton said the two sides were negotiating, but that he was not given an offer. He said he was not accusing the superintendent of lying, but that the board’s attorney has a different interpretation of the negotiations than his attorney.
Dalton’s contract states that the board has the prerogative to place him in the classroom or renew his contract, Kasunich said.
His contract requires that he be paid at the top of the teachers’ pay scale if he is transferred. That top teacher pay is $80,350 for the upcoming school year.
Dalton said he did not know that the board was going to take the action until just before the meeting.
He said he’s had 12 ratings as athletic director and all have been commendable, excellent or satisfactory. He said he was never given an improvement plan in writing.
With a 54-56 record and a string of five WPIAL playoff appearances, Dalton ranks second to Milton Decker on Trinity’s all-time wins list.
Dalton said he was told in February that this was going to happen, which negates any due process. He said he was asked to take a pay cut, which is discriminatory because he is over the age of 40. He said he plans to sue the district.
When asked if he would take the teaching position, Dalton said, “I’ll do what I’m told.”
However, he said, if that does happen, it has to be a created position; no one can be furloughed to make room for him.
Dalton said he will do a great job as a teacher.
“But I love being the athletic director,” he said.
He questioned where the dissenters are, those who oppose him as athletic director.
“Obviously, there are people in support,” he said after the meeting.
One former player spoke passionately during the meeting about the impact of Dalton on his life. Another described him as a father figure.
Parent Ed Brownlee told the board members that everyone in the audience was against them. He said board members were elected and thought they could change the world and do whatever they wanted.
“We don’t want that change,” he said.
Brownlee told them he was running for school board.
“It’s going to take us 31⁄2 years to get you out of here, but we will,” he said.
After the meeting, one parent yelled at the board members to make sure they looked at the kids they destroyed by making this decision.
Others in the audience yelled at board members and called them names.
It’s the second time Trinity has been through this in the past seven months.
When new board members were seated in December, they voted to open fall sports coaching positions and not to renew the athletic director and food services director contracts.
The board rescinded that decision in January because the way the decision was made was against school policy.
The board also accepted the retirement of food services director Thomas Sabol at Thursday’s meeting.
Board member Dennis McWreath asked that the board be given his retirement package at the next meeting. The board is considering whether to have a private company run the district cafeterias.

Ringgold puts off middle school site

2010-06-17T17:27:00.000-04:00

Ringgold School Board did not pick a new middle school site during Wednesday night’s school board meeting.
The board had discussed four possibilities during a work session Monday and said a vote might occur Wednesday night.
School board President Denise Kuhn said the board instead directed the architect to pare down the building project to reduce costs.
Depending on the site, architects estimate building a new middle school to cost between $38.3 million and almost $46.3 million.
HHSDR architect Matthew P. Franz told the board during Monday’s work session that the way to reduce costs is to reduce the square footage of the building.
The square footage for the proposed buildings is 150,000, while the square footage of the existing middle school is 110,000.
Three of the sites are around the high school, and the fourth is building a new school at the existing middle school site by building onto the auditorium.

Trinity considers changing academic requirements for participation in sports and activities

2010-06-16T15:34:00.002-04:00

The Trinity School Board is considering whether to change the academic requirements for participation in extra-curricular activities.
The proposed change came up during the board’s policy committee meeting Tuesday.
The change calls for a 2.0 Grade Point Average in core subject areas to participate in those activities. The existing policy states that any student who receives two or more Fs at the end of a marking period will be academically ineligible to participate in any extracurricular activity. Currently, the district follows PIAA rules, which states that athletes must be passing four classes with a D, said Athletic Director Ed Dalton.
Policy Committee Chairwoman Colleen Interval said if students know they need a 2.0 GPA, it may be the added pressure to help keep their grades up.
However, one mom told the committee that her son struggles to get Ds and that the only thing he loves about high school is playing football. She said she didn’t know if he would stay in school if he couldn’t play the sport.
Trinity graduate and self-described future teacher Katie Piatt said the district needs to make sure it has help available for those students.
“”Extracurricular activities may be the reason some who struggle stay in school,” she said.
Committee members agreed that struggling students would have assistance available, such as tutoring.
Dalton said one way to handle the matter may be allowing students to get help to see if they can bring their grades up before declaring them ineligible. He said that’s how colleges handle it.
He said teachers report to him weekly if students are not passing courses. If they are failing two classes, then he checks the Edline software that tracks their grades. He said it would be beneficial to have teachers report the grades of all participating students regardless of whether they are passing.
Dalton is responsible for all extracurricular activities, not just athletics, meaning he is responsible for determining if students are eligible to participate in all of them.
There was also a discussion about what entails extracurricular activities. All sports are included. There were questions about whether an orchestra concert, marching band and the French Club are extracurricular activities.
Superintendent Paul Kasunich said the board will clarify what is considered an extracurricular activity and what is considered the extension of a class.

McGuffey teachers approve contract

2010-06-15T15:32:00.000-04:00

The McGuffey teachers union overwhelmingly voted in favor of a new contract Monday.
The union vote came less than a week after the union and school board reached a tentative agreement to avoid a strike for the second time this year. The tentative agreement addressed salary, health care, retirement incentive and length of contract.
Union spokesman Andrew MacBeth said McGuffey teachers are pleased that they can accept the agreement that both negotiating teams approved.
“We’re glad we voted to accept it, and we hope the board follows through and does the same,” he said.
Now, the union waits for a board decision.
The board is expected to vote on the contract Wednesday. MacBeth said specific details of the agreement won’t be released unless the school board ratifies it as well.
The two sides had been negotiating for 18 months before the tentative agreement was reached last week.
The union struck earlier this year and was prepared to strike again if an agreement couldn’t be reached.
As a part of the negotiating process, both sides agreed to bring in an independent fact-finder. The union voted for the fact-finder’s recommendations, while the board said those suggestions were unaffordable.
After the first strike, both sides began nonbinding arbitration. That arbitration panel again recommended the fact-finder’s report.
The union again supported it, saying it was fair. The board again rejected it, saying it was too costly.
That led to the late-night negotiating session that ran from Wednesday evening into Thursday morning, when the tentative agreement was reached.

Join the Observer-Reporter’s conversation about education at our blog at http://www.observer-reporter.com/or/behinddesk/.

Bachelor's degree doesn't equal job

2010-06-14T17:48:00.002-04:00

A bachelor’s degree no longer guarantees a good-paying job.
Federal statistics show that almost 1.5 million people are graduated with bachelor’s degrees each year, while there are an estimated 750,000 jobs available each year that require those same degrees.
At the same time, there is at least a 1 to 1 ratio for jobs for students who go to trade schools or earn technical degrees, said James Knapp, a Bethel Park guidance counselor and Trinity School Board member. Teachers at Greene County Career and Technical Center say that’s because baby boomers are retiring from high-paying skilled trades and there aren’t enough trained workers to replace them.
Yet today, 70 percent of high school graduates attend college to earn a bachelor’s degree, with even more saying they want to, said Ken Gray, a Penn State professor emeritus of workforce development. Only about half of those who start college actually graduate, he said.
“Mostly they are saying what they think the community wants to hear,” said Gray, who is the co-author of “Other Ways to Win.”
Find out more at the Observer-Reporter website, where we take a look at why this is is true, talk to graduates who can't find work and talk to those who have found jobs in their fields.

Trainer: Teach middle class rules to get out of poverty

2010-06-11T15:17:00.001-04:00

Schools and businesses use hidden middle class rules, and to pull people out of generational poverty, they must be taught those rules, a teacher trainer said Friday.
Barbara Miller, director of training and development for Community Action Southwest, spoke to Washington School District teachers about “Bridges out of Poverty.” She has spoken around the state and at conferences about the issue, but said this is the first school district in Washington County where she’s presented the information.
“We have to understand the hidden rules and then we have to teach them the (middle class) rules without telling them their rules are wrong,” she said. “You should expect nothing less from them than anyone else, but understand they have barriers.”
Middle class children grow up knowing those rules because they are taught them, she said. However, parents who are in generational poverty don’t know those rules to teach them to their children, she said.
For example, she said people in poverty use language more casually while the middle class uses correct grammar.
A 5-year-old in poverty is exposed to 10 million words, while a 5-year-old in a middle class home is exposed to 20 million words and a wealthy 5-year-old, 30 million, she said.
Education is abstract for those who live in poverty, while it is viewed as a necessity for the middle class. Those in poverty may not graduate from high school, much less consider additional training or education, she said.
The opposite is true for the middle class, who think, “Of course, my children are going to go to school,” Miller said.
She said people in poverty think of money to be spent; the middle class plans how to use their money, and the wealthy invest their money to make money, she said.
“I’m all about planning, but I learned that,” Miller said. “It’s hard to think that way when you are pouring coins into a Coinstar to buy bread. You’re not thinking about buying a home when you are homeless. You’re not thinking about how pretty the food is when you are starving. You’re not thinking about going to college when no one is helping you get through the third grade.”
When she was growing up in her upper middle class home, Miller said she had dinner after school, helped her mother clean the kitchen, did her homework and her parents checked it.
“Do you think that’s what kids in poverty go home to?” she questioned, saying that some don’t know if they will go home to dinner or have parents home when they get there.
If children are raised in a family that’s been in poverty for generations, that’s all they know, she said. There are hidden rules for poverty, just as there are for the middle class and wealthy, she said.
“They are born into it,” she said. “They love their parents just like your kids love you. They think what their parents are doing is right.”
It doesn’t happen because those parents are bad, Miller said.
“It’s because their parents are living the lives they were living when they were kids,” she said. “So we’re trying to teach them something new.”
Teachers and schools play a significant role in helping students learn ways to pull themselves out of poverty, she said.
It’s complicated because kids in poverty don’t have the same resources. They may not have a computer or transportation to the library to work on a report after school, she said.
Resources are not just financial, though that is part of the picture, she said. It’s also about having emotional support, mental resources, spiritual resources, physical resources, support systems, relationships and role models.
“We can’t blame kids for being born into poverty. It’s not their fault,” she said. “This ‘Bridges out of Poverty’ is to help get out of poverty. We need your help and encouragement.”

Trinity considers cutting some vocational programming, electives

2010-06-09T14:15:00.000-04:00

Trinity School Board will consider whether to cut some vocational programming and electives as a way to save money.
Superintendent Paul Kasunich is meeting with Western Area Career and Technology Director Joseph Ianetti to determine whether vocational courses offered at the high school are the same as those offered at Western Area.
For example, Kasunich said, he wants to know the difference between drafting at Western Area and drafting at the high school, and between carpentry at Western Area and woodworking at the high school.
“I’ll lay it out for you and you decide,” he told board members at Trinity’s finance committee meeting Tuesday.
Kasunich said the board also needs to determine the minimum number of students it wants in each class, That could be 10 or 15 and could determine if certain elective classes are offered, he said.
“There are going to be hard choices,” he said.
The discussion came up after school board President Tom Bodnovich asked why the superintendent isn’t willing to cut more positions considering the expected rate spikes for pension costs.
Kasunich, who started in April, said he wants more time to assess the vocational programs and electives before making any recommendations.
During the budget discussions, Kasunich said two teaching positions are being eliminated. He said where they will be cut from hasn’t been determined yet.
He said he is considering the elimination of other positions that will be based on upcoming negotiations with the clerical staff.
If there are retirements, Kasunich said he will considering not filling those positions.
The proposed budget for the 2010-11 budget is $45.8 million and has a projected deficit of $250,000.
The budget does not have $600,000 in cuts to salary and benefits that would be set aside for retirement costs as board member Jack Keisling had requested.
That kind of cut would impact programming, Kasunich said.
He said there is a deficit with the idea that the budget will be cut as the year progresses.
“You don’t have to spend it all,” he said about the projected budget. “That’s not the way it needs to work.”
This year, Trinity projects a $300,000 surplus, said Business Manager James Shargots.

Join the Observer-Reporter’s conversation about education at our blog at http://www.observer-reporter.com/or/behinddesk/

Trinity approves nepotism policy

2010-06-07T16:14:00.000-04:00

Relatives of Trinity School District employees and board members need not apply.
By a 5-2-2 vote, the school board approved an updated nepotism policy Thursday that prevents the hiring of relatives of employees and board members.
Board member Tamara Salvatori asked that the policy be sent back to the policy committee for review, but a majority of the board did not want that to happen.
She said she’s concerned the district may miss out on good teachers by drawing this line in the sand.
However, board member Colleen Interval said the opposite is true – Trinity has missed out on good teachers by hiring relatives instead of the best candidates.
Board member Henry Clemens said he would like to see a stronger hiring policy instead of the focus on nepotism. Then, he said, there wouldn’t be discussion of voting to suspend a policy to hire someone.
“If you have a policy, you should stand by the policy,” he said.
Interval and board members Sandra Clutter, Scott Day, Jack Keisling and Tom Bodnovich voted for the policy. Interval and board member Jim Knapp voted against it. Clemens and board member Dennis McWreath abstained.
The board also voted on the policy in May, but it was not passed because it was a 4-3 vote. Trinity needs a majority of the board, or five members, to approve policy changes.
The board also discussed the process of approving policies after community members again asked about those procedures.
Superintendent Paul Kasunich said a policy brought up for the first time Thursday would be up for a vote at the meeting later this month unless it was referred to the policy committee. Then it would come up again at the first meeting next month before final approval.
McWreath questioned if that’s how the district’s policy approval reads.
Solicitor Dennis Makel said the policy says nothing about first or second readings. However, that has been the practice of the board. Makel said the Trinity documents are “vaguely worded” and suggested the board come up with a more specific policy.
Kasunich said he would bring an updated policy to the board that includes information about first and second readings.
The questions came up from Trinity residents concerned about a new policy for hiring athletic coaches, directors and supervisors. The board decided to send that to the policy committee for review. The next policy committee will be 4 p.m. June 15 in the administrative offices.

McGuffey teachers OK strike if board doesn't approve panel recommendation

2010-06-02T18:15:00.001-04:00

McGuffey teachers voted Tuesday night to strike if the school board doesn’t approve the contract recommendation of an arbitration panel.
Teachers struck for two days earlier this year, which led to the arbitration. The two sides have not reached agreement on salary, health care, retirement incentive and length of the contract.
As a part of the arbitration, the board and union each made a last best offer. The arbitration panel also considered a recommendation by an independent fact-finder, Matthew M. Franckiewicz.
The arbitration panel had to choose one of the three options and selected the fact-finder’s report, said Andrew MacBeth, a spokesman for the union.
Franckiewicz’s report calls for starting teachers to get a $1,075 increase this year to $34,096. It calls for the maximum salary to be $73,942 this year, an increase of $960. To receive the maximum salary, a teacher must have a doctorate. No McGuffey teachers have a doctorate.
It calls for the starting salary to be $41,789 in 2013-14, the last year of the contract. That year, it calls for the maximum salary to be $79,243.
The report calls for the monthly health insurance premiums to stay the same this year and next year at a cost of $15 per month for single coverage and $30 for any other coverage. It would jump to $20 and $40, respectively, for the next two years of the contract and to $25 and $50 for the last year of the contract.
Both sides voted on that fact-finder’s report earlier this school year – the union supported it and the board said it was unaffordable.
The union again voted in support of the fact-finder’s report Tuesday night, MacBeth said. Both sides have 10 calendar days from when the arbitration panel’s recommendation was issued to consider the report, he said. The report was issued Friday. If either side doesn’t vote on the panel recommendation, then it is considered rejected, he said.
MacBeth said that means the board has until Monday to take action on the report. Should the board not approve the recommendation, the teachers will strike again before the end of the school year, he said. The union must give a 48-hour strike notice before the strike can occur, he said.
He said the teachers are pleased with the arbitrators’ recommendation and teachers showed their commitment to ending the impasse by approving that recommendation.
“By choosing the fact-finder’s proposal, the neutral arbitrator once again has confirmed that this compromise works best for our students, our community and our members,” MacBeth said. “Now it is time for the school board to do the same.”
School board member Doug Teagarden, who is on the board’s negotiating team, could not be reached for comment Tuesday night.

Join the Observer-Reporter’s conversation about education at our blog at http://www.observer-reporter.com/or/behinddesk/.

W&J grad hopes telling her story will save others from domestic abuse

2010-06-01T14:17:00.001-04:00

Nicole Rosellini wasn't sure if she wanted to talk publicly about her abuse.

Then she heard what happened to Yeardley Love. The University of Virginia lacrosse player was murdered earlier this month. Love's former boyfriend, George Huguely, 22, was arrested in the case after he confessed to police that he kicked in the door to her bedroom and shook her violently, repeatedly banging her head against a wall.

That, Rosellini says, could have been her.

Rosellini pressed charges in December after her former boyfriend, Nicholas Masters, 22, a Washington & Jefferson College student from Glen Rock, choked her until she passed out. He pleaded guilty in April to simple assault and was accepted into the Accelerated Rehabilitative Disposition program. He received one year of probation, had to follow the conditions of a protection-from-abuse order, perform 50 hours of community service and have a drug and alcohol evaluation, according to court documents.

Masters' attorney, Vern Parkinson, did not return calls for comment for this story.

Rosellini is unhappy with how W&J handled the situation. However, she said she felt safe at the school and is not trying to make W&J look bad.

W&J President Tori Haring-Smith said she could not comment on any issue involving a student and legal issues. However, she said the college does everything in its power to protect its students.

"Whenever something comes to our attention, we take every action to assure the safety of our students," she said in a statement. "We will take measures which may take the form of something as simple as forbidding contacts between individuals or we may take more aggressive action. But we always protect our students."

Rosellini said she is not trying to single out W&J, as abuse is an issue that all colleges and universities need to face. Dating violence occurs in 1 in 5 college relationships, according to the Red Flag Campaign, a program designed to address and prevent dating violence.

Girls are dying because of domestic violence, Rosellini said. That's why she was willing to tell her story.

92 participate in Science Olympiad

2010-05-28T10:34:00.001-04:00

Fourth-grader Kimber Rogers and third-grader Dale Soltis spooned sand into a clear plastic cup as they tried to estimate how much would equal 100 grams.

That was just one experiment the students had at Joe Walker Elementary School for the Science Olympiad Thursday. Ninety-two students, including several gifted students from Claysville Elementary, participated in the McGuffey district event.

The cup was roughly a quarter of the way full when Dale had a question.

"How many scoops has that been so far?" he asked.

"I don't know. I wasn't counting," Kimber said as she eyed the sand in the cup and then the spoonful in his hand. "I'd put that scoop back."

He did.

Then she put the cup of sand on the gram scale to measure how much they had in the cup.

They ended up with 150.2 grams.

"Oh, that's terrible," Kimber said.

Teacher Elaine Calvert came over to ask how their experiment was going.

Kimber told her the results.

"No kidding?" Calvert said. "I guess grams must be really small."

The purpose of the experiment was not for students to be exactly right, but to get an idea of how small grams really are.

For each experiment students had to work with a different student, said Kelley McGuier, McGuffey gifted teacher. She said all Joe Walker third- and fourth-graders were participants. They had the chance to experiment with a variety of ideas, including density, an owl's food chain, building a barge, building rotary flying devices and magnets.

"It's been a wonderful experience to watch the students learning about things they don't have a strong background in," she said.

The Spectroscopy Society of Pittsburgh donated $2,000 to the school for the science equipment used during the event. Parents donated other materials, and the PTO gave money for each of the students to get an Olympiad T-shirt.

"It's the Joe Walker community that allowed this to be so successful," McGuier said, adding that she plans to have another Science Olympiad next year.

Parents and high school gifted students volunteered in the classrooms for the event, which senior Morgan MacBeth said was really nice.

"I wish I would have done it in fourth grade," she said.

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West Greene, teachers reach contract agreement

2010-05-27T10:11:00.000-04:00

ROGERSVILLE - Negotiations between West Greene School District and its teachers union have lasted more than a year, and the process finally bore fruit.

The school board approved a new three-year pact at a special meeting Monday.

Teachers will receive raises of $1,600 this year, $1,700 next year and $2,100 in 2011-12. In exchange, they will begin paying for a portion of their medical insurance coverage in the final year of the contract.

Teachers worked most of this school year without a contract since the old one expired June 30. The changes are retroactive to that date, so teachers will get their raise for this year in a lump sum.

"In these negotiations, it always seems to come down to salaries and benefits. It's just a matter of hashing that out and coming to a resolution," said Thelma Szarell, district superintendent.

The road to that resolution was a long one. Representatives from the district and the teachers union started negotiating well over a year ago. The union never publicly threatened to strike, but stalled talks prompted several educators to resign from club sponsorship positions at the beginning of the school year. Administrators took the reigns of many of those clubs.

"We are pleased that we have reached an agreement that reflects compromises made by the bargaining unit and the board that are in the interests of students and the community," said Myleen McCollum, president of West Greene Education Association. "We feel it is good for the members of the bargaining unit and affordable to the district."

She said the teachers wanted their salaries increased so they would be paid similarly to teachers in neighboring school districts.

A teacher with a bachelor's degree but little or no experience will make $30,300 this year, and the starting salary will jump to $34,100 in 2011-12. At the top end of the scale, teachers with 30 years of experience, a master's degree and at least 30 credits beyond that degree will make $59,975, and in the final year of the pact, the top salary will be $63,775.

Teachers' health insurance will be relatively unchanged for the first two years of the contract. Teachers pay a $10 co-pay for every doctor visit, but they pay nothing toward the premium. In the final year of the agreement, the teachers will pay between $20 and $34 each two-week pay period for medical insurance. The cost for a single person is $20, $26 for a parent and children, $30 for a couple and $34 for a family.

The school board approved the contract with a 8-0 vote. Director James Handley, whose wife is a teacher, abstained.

"We are glad to go about the business of educating the students after two years of preparing and negotiating," McCollum said.

However, the district will soon have to begin negotiations again, since the newly approved contract expires in a little over two years.

Pre-school considered after closure at Penn-Pitt

2010-05-26T13:01:00.000-04:00

MAPLETOWN - A Southeastern Greene School Board committee agreed Tuesday to investigate starting a preschool program to replace one being closed at the end of the school year by Community Action Southwest.

Parent Travis Barkley spoke of how Community Action's pre-kindergarten program, operated at the Penn Pitt school, had benefited his six-year-old son. He cited studies that emphasized the importance of preschool education on a child's later success in school.

Heather Franks, another parent, also urged the board to consider the program, saying having to drive her child to the nearest pre-kindergarten programs in Waynesburg or Jefferson would be too costly. "This program is important to me and to my son," she told the board.

Community Action is ending the pre-kindergarten program at Penn Pitt because of state budget cuts and low enrollment. The program was supposed to serve 17 children but only 13 are enrolled. Barkley noted, however, in two of the last three years the program had started late.

Board member Janet Pennington said her education committee would discuss the program, including whether the district can afford it, at its meeting at 11 a.m. Thursday at the high school.

She said that though state money is not available, after the first year students in the program can be included in the district's enrollment for its basic state subsidy, which could help make the program self-sufficient.

In other business, the board failed to approve a motion to extend the contracts of the district's five teaching coaches, after administrators spoke of their importance in analyzing test scores and helping teachers develop strategies to address deficiencies.

The motion to extend the contracts failed with four members voting for it and three against. The motion needed five votes to pass. Voting for it were Tom Howard, Gary Yoskovich, Dave Richter and Ed Kamenos; voting against were Pennington, Richard Barzanti and Joe Spiker. Leonard Novak and Sam Cossick were absent.

The coaches have been used in the district the past three years and are paid through federal funds, which are available for another year. Former board member Ginny Eberhart, who attended the meeting, said she believes the coaches have been an "integral part" of the district's success.

Blog: Kids need to focus not multi-task

2010-05-25T17:12:00.001-04:00

By Daniel Willingham on The Answer Sheet Blog on www.washingtonpost.com

How often have you heard someone say “kids today learn differently—they multitask constantly.” The implication often drawn is that kids "need" to multitask in order to be engaged, or perhaps we should even say that that’s how they think best.

The data suggest otherwise.

It is true that kids today multitask a lot, usually with media. That is, they have music or videos on while they do other things.

It’s also true that kids are better at multitasking than older people. That advantage is supported by better working memory, and young people have better raw processing speed on those sorts of functions.

So it’s not likely that young people are better at multitasking than old people because they have practiced it a lot. It’s likely that young people have always been better at multi-tasking than older people.

If doing a lot of multitasking made you better at it, we should see differences in multitasking ability among kids who do a lot and kids who do very little. But those differences are not observed.

In fact, college kids who report being chronic multitaskers are actually somewhat "worse" than their peers at some basic components of cognitive control (like switching attention).

There is not good evidence that students today “must” multitask. But there is good evidence that multi-tasking is seldom a good idea, if you really care about the task you’re working on.

Doing two things at once usually is detrimental. No big surprise there.

Somewhat more surprising is that even just having the television on as background noise produces negative effects.

The impact of background music on cognitive tasks is more complex: Sometimes it hurts and sometimes it doesn’t. Whether the differences are due to the type of music, type of task, type of person, or a combination of factors is still unknown.

Kids today may "want" to multitask because they are used to doing it. But that doesn’t mean they should.

Trinity doesn't approve nepotism policy after all

2010-05-24T16:02:00.000-04:00

After a brief discussion, it appeared that Trinity Area School Board passed a new nepotism policy by a 4-3 vote Thursday.

However, that was not the case.

After the meeting, solicitor Dennis Makel checked the district's policy for approval of policies.

Trinity policy dictates that any policy must have the approval of five board members, he said. That means that even though a majority of the members present voted for the policy, it was not enough to reach the threshold for approval.

The policy can be brought up for approval again if it is the wish of the board.

The policy states that no one can be hired if they are related to an employee or a school board member.

Board member Tamara Salvatori, who voted against approving the policy, said there is so much nepotism at Trinity that she understands the need for the policy.

However, it seems to blanket everyone, when the best candidate for a job may be related to someone in the district, she said.

"I fear that we may be knocking out people who would be good for the district," she said.

School board member Jim Knapp, who is a Bethel Park guidance counselor, said he's been in education for 22 years and he thinks it's a bad policy. He said it backfired at a district where he worked.

Superintendent Paul Kasunich said nepotism reflects the hiring policy of a school district.

"If a hiring policy is sound, typically you won't need a nepotism policy that's so stringent," he said.

He said what he hears from the board is a dissatisfaction with the process in place. He said he would be willing to bring an updated hiring policy before the board.

Salvatori and Knapp asked for the nepotism policy to be tabled while the issue was revisited. However, that motion did not pass.

After that, the board voted on approving the nepotism policy and it was a 4-3 vote. School board members Sandy Clutter, Scott Day, Colleen Interval and Dennis McWreath voted for the nepotism policy. Salvatori, Knapp and William Clemens voted against the policy. Tom Bodnovich and Jack Keisling were not present at the meeting.

After the vote, three residents told the board they disagreed with the just-approved nepotism policy and thought employees should be hired based on their credentials without worrying about whether they already have family working at Trinity.

Earlier in the meeting, there was not a second for a motion to hire Frederick Ullom, who is Clutter's cousin, as a substitute custodian. Clutter said at a previous meeting that she did not want the existing nepotism policy waived so her relative could be hired.

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Trinity dispels rumors of alleged sexual assault

2010-05-20T16:42:00.001-04:00

Widespread rumors about an alleged sexual assault at Trinity High School prompted Principal Donald Snoke to send a message to parents today disputing the allegation.

He sent the message through an automated call and via e-mail. His message was also posted on the district Web site.

The messages came after students started a Facebook page demanding that a student be removed from school for a sexual assault.

Students also posted posters on school walls Wednesday with statistics about unreported rapes. Staff members removed the posters.

Superintendent Paul Kasunich said Wednesday that there was an inappropriate interaction between two special education students. He said the matter was handled by the special education office and the administration.

He said no rape occurred. He said he could not provide more details because of federal student privacy law.

Snoke said the incident was investigated by the administration and law officials.

“However, let me make it clear, no sexual assault of any fashion occurred,” he wrote in the statement on the district website.

Trinity School Board meets tonight for its regularly scheduled meeting at 6:30 in the administrative offices.

Chartiers-Houston approves lease for baseball field

2010-05-18T16:12:00.001-04:00

The Chartiers-Houston School Board approved a lease with Chartiers Township Monday night for property to be used as a baseball field.
The township approved the lease earlier this month. The district will not pay to lease the property, but will be responsible for building the new baseball field, said Business Manager Don Bennett.
He said the lease calls for the district and township to maintain the property. Chartiers-Houston will maintain the ball field and dugout areas, and the township will take care of the rest of the property, he said.
The Patsch family donated 13.5 acres across from the high school to the township so it could be used for a baseball field, he said.
A new baseball field is necessary because of renovation plans for the junior/senior high and new gym that will use the existing baseball field.
The architect has not scheduled a timetable for the completion of the field, Bennett said.
However, a new timetable has been set for the rest of the renovation project. Chartiers-Houston plans to advertise for bids on May 24, June 1 and June 7 and wants to receive bids on June 30.
The completion, which remains the same, is Aug. 24, 2012.

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Waynesburg Central students show their vision through recycled window project

2010-05-17T15:47:00.002-04:00

WAYNESBURG - The directions were simple: Here's a window, here's an art book. Paint what interests you.

Students in the advanced art class at Waynesburg Central High School took their cue and responded in a big way. Using their imaginations, not to mention suggestions from some rather unorthodox sources, they created thought-provoking, inspirational works of art.

"It was my favorite project," said Jessica Rogers, who used a peace sign as the backdrop for her colorful piece. "I liked doing it. I never did anything like this before."

The repurposed art project, "Windows of Opportunity," was a collaborative effort conceived by Sandi Kern, manager of Washington County Habitat for Humanity's ReStore at Renovation Station, and Adrienne Day, a student teacher at Waynesburg. The purpose of the project, in addition to teaching students about recycled and repurposed art, was to encourage students to become more involved in their communities and to cultivate a sense of respect and responsibility as individual artists.

"I love to paint on old windows. To me it's very Zen," said Kern, who donated the windows from Renovation Station for the project. "I like to try to find ways to help different nonprofits. I love collaborative efforts. It broadens your exposure and makes a bigger impact in the community.

"This way, the kids can show off something. A lot of them are applying to art school. It helps us, it helps them and it helps the environment. It completes the circle for a lot of these materials. It's definitely a trash-to-treasure story."

And that's exactly what Day hoped to achieve. Day previously worked full time at Washington Community Arts and Cultural Center, borrowing some ideas - at least in the beginning - from director and founder Sandee Umbach, and she has brainstormed on more than one occasion with Kern, whom Day called the "visionary" of this project.

"Repurposed art is the most common art," Day said. "It was a great adventure for the art students. This is an amazing school, and the kids are so talented."

The students' finished pieces will be auctioned later this summer at the grand opening of the ReStore's new location on East Maiden Street in Washington, site of the former Maiden Street Foodland near the entrance to Washington Park. Kern said she hopes the grand opening will coincide with the city's bicentennial celebration. Proceeds from the auction will be evenly distributed between Renovation Station and the high school's art club.

Waynesburg art teacher Joe Kuhns said the project was a "fantastic" idea, and he could almost see the "wheels start to spin" in the students' minds as they processed Day's assignment. Still, "I didn't know what to expect," he said.

Neither did Day.

But in no way was she disappointed.

"I was really surprised by their work," she said. "A lot of kids went back to art history, and some painted in their own style. They really made it meaningful to them."

Even though Day taught at Waynesburg for just seven weeks, she made quite an impact on the students.

Brittany Koval, for instance, may buy back her painting at the auction.

And nobody could blame her. Her window features an anchor flanked by the words love and stability, and rosary beads are intertwined around the anchor in lieu of a chain. It's a tribute to her older sister, Kelli, and resembles the siblings' matching tattoos.

"Getting the tattoos was a bonding experience for us. We're each other's anchor," said Brittany, who sought advice for the painting from her tattoo artist.

Love and stability are painted in bright, bold paint, because, Brittany said, "We wanted it girlie. We didn't want the anchor to be dominant."

Kristen Tustin's inspiration came from a Renaissance painting of two angels that hangs in the family's bathroom. However, it was a bit challenging for her: Tustin never before embarked on a full-scale painting project.

"I just draw with paper and pencil. I usually don't do anything in color," she said. "It was a little frustrating at times. I couldn't get the colors to match. There are a million different colors on the face."

Regardless, the painting is stunning.

"The project itself was cool," Tustin said, "but the picture I chose was a challenge."

Erin Rishell's piece is a work in progress. She's using pencil eraser tips as her paint brush, dotting the window with paint to create a tropical scene.

"I just thought it would be cool to do," said Rishell, who serves as president of the art club. "Repurposed art is not as easy as I thought. You have to put a lot of effort into it to make something cool. But it's nice to know we're giving back to the community."

Kern has yet to see the finished pieces, but she hopes to make "Windows of Opportunity" an ongoing project with the help of more schools in Washington and Greene counties or artists in the community.

"What a great program for the students. They really took to it," Kern said. "It's such a rewarding thing."

West Greene students take flight with Civil Air Patrol

2010-05-14T13:41:00.001-04:00

West Greene High School senior Blaise Loughman, junior Jacob Durbin and sophomore Peter Coote recently found a very interesting way to put their math and science skills to the test.

They have become involved in the Civil Air Patrol Morgantown Composite Squadron. The squadron, under the command of Lt. Eric Judy and Cadet Cmdr. Loughman, is the official U.S. Air Force auxiliary.
Recently, these West Greene students were invited to participate with their squadron in the 171st Air Refueling Wing for its annual open house.
Loughman experienced the thrill of taking flight in a KC-135 Stratotanker for a mid-air refueling of four F-22 Raptors, the Air Force's newest attack planes. Durbin and Coote participated with the rest of the squadron in intense ground activities and competitions with other local junior ROTC units.
"We are very proud and thrilled that these students are representing West Greene in such a worthwhile and challenging activity," said Anthony Paull, principal at West Greene.
The Morgantown Composite Squadron meets on Mondays at the Morgantown airport from 6:30 to 9 p.m. Anyone interested in becoming involved with CAP should visit www.gocivilairpatrol.gov for more information.

Washington School Board approves bids for renovation

2010-05-13T15:00:00.001-04:00

Construction bids for the Washington High School renovation project came in at $13.24 million, roughly $270,000 less than architects estimated.
The school board approved bids for the project at Monday night’s meeting. They were awarded based on state Department of Education approval of district documents about the construction project.
The awarded bids are: Alex Roofing & Construction Co., $615,900 for roofing construction; East End Plumbing & Mechanical, $798,000 for plumbing/fire suppression construction; ABMECH, INC., $73,600 for hazardous materials abatement; TriMark SS Kemp, $412,685 for food service construction; Waller Corp., $5.14 million for general construction; DeGol Carpet, $1 million for flooring construction; R&B Mechanical, $2.55 million for HVAC construction; Vern’s Electric, Inc., at a cost of $1.2 million for electrical construction; and Information Technologies, $847,945 for security and communications construction.
Business Manager Rick Mancini said the board is still considering whether to have one or two offices in the renovated school. He said that will likely be discussed at Monday’s meeting.
Work is expected to begin as soon. In the fall, while work is being completed on the cafeteria, meals will be made at the Washington Park School and sent to the high school.
Contractors will do the work in small phases so as classrooms are worked on, students are moved to other areas. There will likely be work on the project during two summers.

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McGuffey board, union meets with arbitration panel

2010-05-12T16:06:00.000-04:00

McGuffey School Board and teachers union representatives met with an arbitration panel Monday night to discuss a new contract.
Each side presented a shortened version of its last best offer to the three-member panel, said school board member Doug Teagarden. The unresolved issues are salary, health care, length of contract and retirement incentive.
Teagarden said the panel met for about 20 minutes in executive session before adjourning the meeting.
The panel will meet again in the next 10 days and will come back with a proposal. If necessary, it will issue a finding, Teagarden said. However, the finding is nonbinding.
The panel can come back with one of three findings: supporting the union offer, supporting the board offer or supporting the fact-finder’s report.
The board and union have been negotiating for more than 15 months. Together, they decided to bring in a fact-finder. The union accepted the fact-finder’s report, while the school board rejected it.
The union struck for two days earlier this year and the arbitration began.

Authority wants Canon-Mac to extend tax breaks

2010-05-11T13:43:00.001-04:00

The Washington County Authority director of operations wants the Canon-McMillan School Board to renew business tax breaks at Southpointe II for five years.
The current five-year Local Economic Revitalization Tax Assistance, or LERTA, at Southpointe II ends in June. Board President Manuel Pihakis said the board would consider the request.
Under the existing LERTA, businesses get a 100 percent tax break on buildings in the first year, 80 percent the second year, 60 percent the third year, 40 percent the fourth year and 20 percent the fifth year.
Cecil Township renewed the LERTA for five years in April. The county’s LERTA for Southpointe II runs until 2013.
“We ask this because it’s been a great marketing tool for us,” William Sember, director of operations for the authority, told the school board Monday night.
When businesses consider locating at Southpointe II, one of the first questions they ask is about tax breaks, he said. Currently there are roughly 100 businesses and 8,000 workers at the Southpointe properties, he said. There is $30 million in assessed value and in the last few years $100 million has been invested in Southpointe II, he said.
Sember anticipates this will be the last time the authority asks for the LERTA extension because he expects Southpointe II to be full within five years.
He said there were some concerns for Southpointe I that business owners would appeal assessment values after the LERTA was over. Of the 45 properties, 11 appealed and the value of nine did not change, Sember said.

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Trinity approves preliminary budget without tax increase

2010-05-07T12:57:00.001-04:00

Trinity School Board approved a 2010-11 preliminary budget worth $46 million at Thursday’s meeting, which is roughly $1.6 million more than this school year.
The budget does not include a property tax increase. The millage rate will remain 103.
However, board member Jack Keisling said he doesn’t see how the board can continue without a tax increase because of future costs, including the skyrocketing employee pension rate.
“We had some tough decisions to get where we are,” he said.
He said full-day kindergarten is in the budget. However, the board doesn’t know the final staff numbers because final student numbers aren’t available. There could be a reduction in staff, Keisling said.
Keisling said he is a proponent of half-day kindergarten, except for those who need extra help.
He said there will be tough choices for Trinity ahead.
Board member Jim Knapp said that in two recent years the board reduced taxes, even though it was aware of the coming pension crisis. He said he didn’t support those tax reduction because of the pension projections.
Board member Dennis McWreath agree with Knapp, saying enough money wasn’t set aside in the past, but the board needs to start now.
“We couldn’t get board members to start squirreling money away a few years ago,” he said.
McWreath said as the administration and board continues to work on a preliminary budget, he said he would like to see a 2 to 3 percent reduction in expenses to put toward the retirement costs. That would bring the amount in the retirement fund to $1.2 million.
But that will not be enough to pay the costs, which are set by the state. Employees, the state and districts pay into the pension system. District rates are set by the state retirement board. The school rates are estimated to jump from 4.78 percent this year to 33.6 percent in 2014-15. The state reimburses districts roughly 50 percent of what it pays into the system. Most teachers pay 7.5 percent into the system.
A Pennsylvania School Boards Association representative recently told the district’s finance committee that the pension increases are equal to at least 19 mills and that no district can meet those increases by only cutting costs.
The school board must approve a final budget by June 30.

State Board of Eduation proposes new nutrition, physical activity standards

2010-05-06T16:42:00.002-04:00

The State Board of Education today advanced proposed student nutrition and physical activity standards, according to a state BOE news release.
“Today’s schoolchildren are part of what may be the first generation with a shorter life expectancy than its predecessor’s,” said State Board Chair Joe Torsella said in the release. “Getting junk foods out of our schools - and getting healthier food options and 30 minutes of daily physical activity into them - are simple steps that can have a tremendous impact for our young people.”
The Board’s regulations would set baseline nutritional standards for foods provided outside reimbursable school meals, including items dispensed from school vending machines and sold through fundraisers.
Torsella said that the regulation takes a “common sense” approach by exempting homemade and home-baked goods from the requirements while providing schools with “important flexibility to ensure successful integration of the standards with local food service programs.”
“These comprehensive standards will not only curb childhood obesity but are good for all students to ensure they get the proper nutrition and enough exercise to develop strong bones, healthy hearts and sharp minds,” said Secretary of Health Everette James. “Schools play a crucial role in the health of our children.”
The regulation also requires 30 minutes of daily physical activity for every student, while giving schools broad discretion in implementation. Students could satisfy requirements through physical education classes, recess, classroom “energizers” or curriculum-based physical activity.
“The research is clear: young people need at least 60 minutes of physical activity every day,” said Torsella. “With children spending nearly one-third to one-half of their waking hours in school each day, we have an obligation to meet them halfway on a critical public health goal.”

Principal puckers up for diabetes

2010-05-04T14:24:00.004-04:00

AVELLA – Daisy rolled on her side in the grass, getting a belly rub as she waited for her big smooch.
Inside, Avella Area Elementary students were chanting: “Kiss the pig! Kiss the pig!”
They knew what was coming.
Their principal made a promise. And the time had come for him to pay the piper.
Principal Joel Kirsch promised that if students raised at least $2,000 for diabetes research, he would kiss a big pig.
They raised $5,900. It’s an issue that hits close to home because three students in the school have diabetes, Kirsch said.
“You guys really came through,” he told them before Daisy was brought into the school.
He said he was assured that she was nice so he wasn’t worried.
“Let’s give Miss Daisy a big round of applause,” he said.
The students did, but perhaps a bit too loud. She didn’t enter.
“Where is my girlfriend?” Kirsch asked, walking over to the door. “C’mon, Daisy.”
She slowly meandered in the school door, wearing a pink ribbon.
He tried a couple times before scoring a kiss.
“Let’s hear it for Daisy,” Kirsch said as she headed for the door.
Kirsch was a good sport about the whole thing.
“It was wonderful,” he said. “She smelled very beautiful. She wasn’t that dirty.”
He said the families in the area were fantastic to support the cause of diabetes research.
“Any little thing I can do, I will,” he said.
The students thought it was hilarious.
“He deserved it,” said fifth-grader Mitchell Macik. Turning to his principal, he added with a grin, “You don’t like to get dirty.”
First-grader Christopher Peterson thought it was great.
“He kissed a pig!” he said as he chortled.
It’s a great cause and a good time, said fifth-grader Victoria Clarchick.
“It’s helping the diabetes association and watching our principal kiss a pig,” she said.

State education secretary: Students benefit from transfer system

2010-04-29T13:54:00.002-04:00

Thousands of college transfer students from across Pennsylvania have benefited from a new, statewide system designed to maximize the number of credits they can transfer and count towards a college degree, according to a new report announced today by Education Secretary Gerald L. Zahorchak.
The report on the Pennsylvania College Credit Transfer System revealed that in 2009 alone, students saved nearly $35.4 million by having their transferred credits count towards a degree, according to a state Department of Education news release.
The report also shows that since 2007, there has been a 15 percent increase in the number of students transferring from Pennsylvania community colleges to the universities in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, or PASSHE. In 2006, Governor Edward G. Rendell signed into law Act 114, which required all community colleges and PASSHE schools to identify a minimum of 30 credits that would be guaranteed to transfer between schools.
Thirty-two institutions have guaranteed credit transfers through PA TRAC. Three private institutions and one state-related university also participate. Penn State, Temple and Pitt will join Lincoln University and the Pennsylvania College of Technology in the credit transfer system starting this fall.
The new system created a “Transfer Credit Framework,” which is a list of courses that represents the type of coursework that is generally completed during the first and second year of a student’s bachelor degree program. Students can transfer up to 30 credits, or 10 courses, of Framework courses to any of the participating institutions and have those credits count toward their degree.

Fort Cherry drills Range Resources about its plans

2010-04-28T13:18:00.000-04:00

McDONALD – Range Resources representatives met with Fort Cherry School Board and district residents Monday night to answer questions about potential gas well drilling on school property.
Board members questioned attorneys about air quality, safety of students and truck traffic. Range already has property leased for drilling around the school property.
The company has leased enough property around the school campus to begin drilling, said oil and gas properties broker Lawrence Edelstein.
“We’re not here to force the district to participate. We’d love it if you will,” he said.
He said Range will drill vertically 6,500 feet to the Marcellus Shale and then drill horizontally. From the well site near the school, Range plans to drill 10 wells. Five wells will be to the west and five to the southeast, said Range contract landman Michael Hopkins. Should the board agree to a lease, there will be no surface drilling on school property, Edelstein said.
School board member Chris Lauff asked what Range does about air quality because that issue came up during the public comment portion of the meeting.
“We abide by all laws,” Edelstein said, adding that other environmental concerns are brought up in communities, but air quality doesn’t come up that often.
He said Range has worked hand in hand with other municipalities to resolve environmental issues and would do the same with Fort Cherry.
Lauff also questioned the truck traffic that would occur at the entrance to the drilling site that is across the street from the entrance to the school property.
Edelstein said Range had to come up with a similar solution for Trinity Area School District. He said some trucks will be staged to reduce traffic during hours when buses are running.
“It is not in our best interest to compete with bus traffic,” he said.
Since the school is across the street from the drilling site, Lauff asked how Range will protect students from accessing ponds and equipment there.
Edelstein said the site will be fenced in and the company will have security there.
Lauff also questioned whether Range has background checks for its employees and subcontractors. Edelstein said there is some level of checks, but he didn’t have more details.
Board member Brant T. Miller questioned if Range was planning to have bunkhouses on the site, and if so, would employees have the same clearances as school employees.
Edelstein said a decision hasn’t been made about the bunkhouses.
Range is working on the site now and within months will begin drilling. The length of time will depend on how many wells are drilled, Edelstein said.
The discussion came after a few residents questioned the board about the drilling.
Dorothy Bassett of Midway told the board about articles she read in oil and gas journals about vapor capture technology that prevents toxic gases from going into the air and eliminates need for giant frac pits, she said. The wells should not be completed without that technology, Bassett said.
Lillian Reynolds of Robinson Township said she is worried about the air quality since some students have respiratory problems.

Rendell nominates new education secretary

2010-04-27T15:18:00.000-04:00

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Gov. Ed Rendell is nominating a veteran of the state Education Department to be next state education secretary.
Rendell announced the nomination of 52-year-old Thomas Gluck on Monday.
Gluck has served as the No. 2 administrator in the department for the past five years. He will succeed his boss, Gerald Zahorchak, who is taking a new job as superintendent of the Allentown School District.
Gluck worked at the Milton Hershey School in Hershey, the State System of Higher Education and the state Senate before joining the Education Department.
The Pennsylvania School Boards Association praised the nomination, which must be confirmed by the Senate.

Trinity may shuffle some students

2010-04-26T16:42:00.001-04:00

Trinity Area School Board is considering whether to move eighth-graders to the high school and fifth-graders to the middle school.
The board also is considering whether to end full-day kindergarten and whether to redistrict students out of Trinity West Elementary because of overcrowding concerns.
The discussions came up during Thursday’s school board finance committee meeting. No decisions have been made.
Finance committee members asked Superintendent Paul Kasunich to come up with a preliminary report about the impact of those changes on education programs and finances. He will have a report for the board in May.
Jim Manley, the consultant hired by the board to review the district, recommended in his March report that the board consider redistricting as well as moving eighth-graders to the high school and creating primary centers. He said all options should be considered to gain space.
School board member Dennis McWreath said there would probably be greater flexibility of educational programs for eighth-graders if they were at the high school and for fifth-graders if they moved to the middle school.
McWreath said he also wanted to know if it would be better for the district financially.
If fifth-graders were moved to the middle school, there would be enough space at Trinity West and no need for redistricting, he said. McWreath said there is enough room at the middle and high schools to move the students to those facilities.
“If it is a good idea from an educational standpoint and it’s a good idea from a financial standpoint, then I think it should be done sooner rather than later,” McWreath said after the meeting.
During the meeting, he questioned whether the changes could be done for the fall.
Superintendent Paul Kasunich said it would be a more efficient use of staff and it would give eighth-graders more educational opportunities.
However, he said when it happened at a previous district he worked at, there were parental concerns about eighth-graders being in the same building as 12th-graders. He said the district didn’t see a lot of problems from having that grade grouping in one building.
Logistically, he said, the change would not be a problem. But should the board decide it wants to go that route, Kasunich suggesting explaining it to the community over the course of a year.
“It’s one thing to see it on paper,” he said. “It’s another when it affects your son or daughter. Then it’s personal.”
Kasunich said he’s concerned that the community buy in to the idea, or at least, understand the benefits of it.
“If implemented correctly, none of them would be detrimental to kids,” Kasunich said.
Board member Colleen Interval said if it’s going to give students more educational value, then it should be done.
“That’s what this new board is about,” she said.
From a financial standpoint, moving the grades makes a lot of sense, said board member Scott Day.
“But September is not that far away,” he said, suggesting it might be better to wait a year.
McWreath said that he was a big supporter of full-day kindergarten. However, he questioned whether it is effective since 10 percent of Trinity kindergartners were held back this year. He said Trinity never had a retention rate that high with half-day kindergarten.

Trinity considers moving eighth graders to high school, fifth graders to middle school

2010-04-23T13:26:00.001-04:00

Trinity School Board is considering whether to move eighth graders to the high school and fifth graders to the middle school.
Trinity is also considering whether to end full-day kindergarten and whether to redistrict student out of Trinity West Elementary because it is overcrowded.
The discussions came up during Thursday’s school board finance committee meeting. No decisions have been made.
However, committee members asked Superintendent Paul Kasunich to come up with a preliminary report about the impact of those changes on education and on finances. He will have a report for the board in May.

Canonsburg students plant seedlings for Earth Day

2010-04-22T15:58:00.000-04:00

Nine Canonsburg Middle School seventh-graders spent today planting trees at the borough park to celebrate Earth Day.
The students said that all seventh-graders had to write an essay explaining why community service is important for teens. The top three essay writers on each seventh-grade team came out to plant the trees in partnership with the borough.
Science teachers Brian Cornali and Chris Hairn planned the event. Cornali said 70 seedlings were provided through the Pennsylvania Game Commission's Seedlings to Schools Program.
The student planted white pine, pinoak and viburnum seedlings.

Want to blog?

2010-04-21T15:01:00.000-04:00

When we started this blog, we wanted to create a community conversation about education. We asked a variety of community members to participate - teachers, administrators, parents, students and school board members.
If you would like to blog here weekly or if you know someone who you think would be good at that, please e-mail me at dgoodman@observer-reporter.com.

J-M considers drug testing

2010-04-20T15:31:00.000-04:00

JEFFERSON – Jefferson-Morgan School Board asked district administrators Monday to investigate developing a policy requiring drug screenings for new employees and students participating in extracurricular activities.
The motion was presented by board member Mark Pochron, who said the board has talked for some time about having drug screening as part of the district’s pre-employment requirements.
In light of discipline approved by the board earlier in the meeting for a drug-related incident involving a student, Pochron said he also wanted the district to go a step further and look into requiring screenings, and possibly random drug testing, for students participating in extracurricular activities.
Board President Donna Brown later agreed the board should investigate such policy, which it has discussed in the past. “Drugs are getting more rampant,” she said.
Pochron and Superintendent Donna Furnier discussed who would be responsible for paying for the costs of the screenings. If it were decided the district will pay the costs for the students, Pochron said, the board will want to consider adding money to next year’s budget.
The board also discussed whether the tests would be given to just athletes or to students participating in other activities such as clubs.
Furnier said she knows of other districts that have included drug screening as part of their required pre-employment physical and would look at policies adopted by other districts as well as information from the Pennsylvania School Board Associations.
Furnier also said she recently talked with representatives of a new occupational medicine provider in the county and the provider could possibly be used for pre-employment testing to ensure consistency among applicants.

Teacher pensions may trump curbs on tax increases

2010-04-19T17:43:00.002-04:00

Area school district business managers estimate that if nothing changes with the state retirement system, projected rate spikes would be the equivalent of 20 to 25 mills.
And school boards may not need voter approval to raise taxes that high.
State law says that school boards can raise property taxes up to an annual rate, and if they want to go above that rate, they must get voter approval.
However, there are 10 exceptions to that law. One of those exceptions is retirement contributions.
“PDE strictly follows the law of the exceptions,” spokesman Leah Harris said, referring to the list on the department’s website.
If the anticipated increase in a school district’s share of payments to the Public School Employees’ Retirement System is greater than the school district’s index, the school district will be eligible for an exception equal to the portion of the payment increase that exceeds its index, according to documents on the PDE website.
The index rates are based on a state formula, but they are not the same in every school district. Typically, they have been between 3 and 4.5 percent.
That is less than school districts would need to pay for projected pension costs, which are estimated to jump from 4.78 percent this year to 33.6 percent in 2014-15.
PDE will approve the referendum exception request if a review of the data demonstrates that the school district qualifies for one or more of the exceptions, the documents state.
If the request for an exception is approved, PDE will determine the dollar amount of the expenditure for which the exception is sought and the tax rate increase required to fund the exception.
However, if PDE denies the request, the school district must reduce the tax rate increase to no more than its index or submit a referendum question for voter approval.
School boards are not yet discussing the possibility of raising taxes that high. Instead, they are lobbying the state Legislature to reform the pension system so they won’t see the high pension rate spikes.
The state kept the rate that districts pay into the system artificially low over the past decade. A majority of teachers union members have contributed 7.5 percent since 2001. Over the past decade, they have paid more than $7.3 billion into the system, while the state and districts combined paid $3.765 billion into the system.
In preparation for the rate spikes to come, some districts are putting money aside.
Trinity Area School Board member Scott Day, who is also on the board’s finance committee, said he would like to carve 5 to 10 percent out of the 2010-11 budget to put aside for pension costs.
“My intent is not to raise taxes,” he said. “For the next couple years, we are going to try and hold the line.”

Gunman disarmed at Pa. school

2010-04-14T17:26:00.001-04:00

PITTSBURGH (AP) — A man with a gun who entered a public school for performing arts students was arrested Wednesday afternoon after he fought with a security guard who confronted him and both men crashed through a large window near the school’s entrance.
A 23-year-old man was in custody shortly after he entered the Creative & Performing Arts school downtown with the gun, police said. Pittsburgh Public Schools spokeswoman Ebony Pugh said she wasn’t sure how he got inside because the school’s only two entrances have metal detectors.
Police had not immediately decided what charges the man would face.
The suspect tried to run away after a student spotted him with the gun in a restroom and alerted a security guard, Pugh said. The guard grabbed the suspect before he could run out of the school, and the two men scuffled before crashing through the front window, she said.
School police said the gun was not loaded when the security guard fought with the suspect. Pugh could not say if the man had been brandishing the gun or how the student had spotted it.
“(The suspect) mentioned he was there to meet a student, his relative,” Pugh said. “But we have no indication what the intention was with the weapon.”
The security guard was taken to a hospital with injuries he suffered from the broken glass. Pugh couldn’t detail the guard’s injuries but said they’re not believed to be serious.
The weapon was never fired and no students were hurt. The magnet school serves students in grades 6 through 12.
© 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Report: Teacher pension funding gaps bigger than estimated

2010-04-13T17:29:00.004-04:00

Teacher pension funding gaps are three times bigger than states are estimating and have become the nation's next greatest unfunded liability, according to a report by the Manhattan Institute and Foundation for Educational Choice.
The two groups released Tuesday their jointly sponsored report titled "Underfunded Teacher Pension Plans: It's worse Than You Think."
According to the 59 funds own financial statements, their unfunded liabilities are $332 billion. But the authors of the reports say the liabilities are $933 billion. Pennsylvania's officially stated funding gap is $9.4 billion while the report estimates it is $43.2 billion.
Find out more in Wednesday's Observer-Reporter.

Should high schoolers read aloud in class

2010-04-12T17:22:00.001-04:00

Jay Mathews takes on this topic in the Washington Post. Teachers come down on both sides of the issue. What do you think?

Teacher dies after collapsing in Western Pennsylvania classroom

2010-04-09T14:23:00.000-04:00

NEW CASTLE, Pa. (AP) — An autopsy is set on a 44-year-old teacher who died shortly after collapsing while tutoring four students during lunchtime at a western Pennsylvania high school.
Lawrence County Coroner Russell Noga says Neshannock High School teacher John Thompson, of Grove City, had a family history of heart problems. The autopsy was set for Friday.
Noga says Thompson collapsed Thursday and was pronounced dead a short time later at Jameson Hospital in New Castle. That’s about 45 miles northwest of Pittsburgh.
School superintendent Mary Todora says Thompson was tutoring four students when “he just fell over.”
Students summoned another teacher, and a school nurse tried to revive Thompson with cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Thompson was hired in 1994.

© 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Offers on the table at McGuffey

2010-04-08T09:54:00.000-04:00

McGuffey School Board and teachers union have submitted their final best offers as part of the arbitration process.
The submittals, which were released Wednesday, are the latest step in negotiations that have lasted more than 15 months. Teachers struck for two days in March before the mandatory nonbinding arbitration.
The best offers show that the two sides have differences on salary, benefits, retirement incentive and length of contract. The union wants a five-year deal while the board wants it to last three years.
The board wants a retroactive 3.59 percent salary increase for 2009-10, 3.53 percent for 2010-11 and 3.59 percent for 2011-12. The starting salary for 2009-10 would be $33,500 while the maximum would be $73,732 for teachers with doctorate degrees. No teachers in McGuffey have doctorate degrees. In the third year of the contract, the board wants a starting salary of $34,700 and a maximum of $75,732.
The union wants a 4.16 increase for each year of the contract. It also wants to eliminate the doctorate pay scale from the contract.
In 2009-10, the union wants the starting salary to be $34,420 and the maximum to be $78,623. The maximum is for a teacher with a master’s degree plus 30 credit hours. In the fifth year of the contract, the union wants the starting salary to be $43,304 and the maximum to be $78,623.
School board member Doug Teagarden said the sides are close on salaries. He said he hopes that the negotiations can be resolved soon.
However, the district’s stance on health insurance is firm, said Teagarden, who is also on the negotiating team.
“I don’t know how you can get much more fair than that,” he said of the district’s proposal.
The board wants the amount teachers pay for health care to remain the same for this school year at $15 for single coverage and $30 for family coverage. However, it wants teachers to pay half the cost of increases in premiums for future years of the contract.
The union wants to pay $15 for single coverage and $30 for family coverage in the 2009-10 school year, $20 and $40 respectively for the 2010-11 and 2011-12 school years, $25 and $50 respectively for the 2012-13 school year and $30 and $60 respectively for the 2013-14 school year.
The board wants a retirement incentive that pays $10,000 a year for eight years or until age of Medicare eligibility. The board also wants to offer the incentive in one of the last two years of the contract.
The union wants a retirement incentive of $9,500 deposited into a tax-sheltered retirement account for nine years or until the age of Medicare eligibility.
After perusing the board’s best offer, union spokesman Andrew MacBeth said that this is definitely moving in the right direction.
“The board submitted a credible offer,” he said. “We submitted a credible offer as well. I hope this will help us reach a fair agreement.”
The public will have 10 days to comment on the two offers. All comments should be written with name and address so the writer can be identified as a McGuffey resident.
The comments should be placed in a sealed envelope and addressed to arbitrator Robert Gifford. The envelope should be taken to the administration office and the sealed envelope will be forwarded to the arbitrator during the hearing.
The hearing will be May 10 at the district administrative offices.
A decision must be made within 20 days of the hearing and then the board and union will have to vote on the decision within 10 days.
Read the two offers at www.observer-reporter.com/OR/sourcedoc/. Copies are also available in the district administrative offices.

Pension payments loom for districts

2010-04-06T14:45:00.001-04:00

Trinity Area School Board is the latest board to consider asking the state Legislature to revamp the employee pension system because of projected escalating costs.
The pension system is set up so employees, local districts and the state pay into it. Districts must pay a certain percentage of salaries into the system each year, which is determined by the Pubic School Employees’ Retirement Board. It’s a defined benefit plan, so the amount of a member’s pension benefit is not tied to investments of the fund.
This year, districts paid 4.78 percent into the system. Next year, they will pay 8.22 percent. By 2014-15, that number is projected to be 33.6 percent.
“Realistically, within three years, that would mean a 20- to 25-mill tax increase just to pay the pension obligation,” said Trinity School Board member Scott Day, who is also on the board’s finance committee. “It’s going to be a huge problem for years to come unless they decide to do something.”
He said that is $5.1 million on top of what the district already pays. Trinity paid $470,000 into the pension this year. Even if the board wanted to raise taxes that much, which it doesn’t, it would have to take a request that high to the voters, Day said.
State law allows school districts to raise taxes by an annual index without getting voter approval. The rate varies per district, but it is usually between a 3 and 4 percent increase, which is well below what would be needed for the sharp pension increases. Day and others said voters wouldn’t approve that type of increase if it were put on the ballot.
That means cost cuts are coming, and they could be severe if the pension system doesn’t change, Day said.
Trinity brought in a financial expert from the Pennsylvania School Board Association to look at ways to cut costs to get ahead, he said.
“We are looking at doing multi-year budgeting to look at ways to save money,” Day said.
Trinity is scheduled to vote on a resolution next week asking the Legislature to make changes. The board is not alone in its concern about the skyrocketing costs of the pension fund.
State legislative committees have been holding hearings about the matter. Pennsylvania State Education Association President James Testerman testified before the state Senate Finance Committee in December, saying that the pending spike is primarily the result of significant losses in investment returns and a lack of state and district funding.
A majority of teachers union members have contributed 7.5 percent since 2001, he said. Over the past decade, they have paid more than $7.3 billion into the system, while the state and districts combined paid $3.765 billion into the system, Testerman said.
He also said the union cannot accept a resolution where pension costs were simply kicked down the road for someone else to pay. That happened because the state kept the rates artificially low for the past decade.
Testerman also said union members see harm to the retirement security as harm to the profession.
“Courts have ruled that our current members’ pension benefits are constitutionally protected against impairment,” he said. “But we know that a severe reduction in benefits for future employees would also have a devastating effect on current employees and our profession.”
Meanwhile, PSBA has been urging school boards across the state to pass a resolution asking the state to change the system.
McGuffey School Board recently did so. Business manager Scott Burchill said pensions will cost the district an additional $6.3 million over the next five years.
At that March meeting, a resident asked whether the board could have paid extra into the system over the past decade to prevent such high increases now. Burchill said the district could only pay in the percentage approved by the retirement board.
The projected increase for Washington School District is an additional $1,396,000, or an additional 23.25 mills, between the 2010-11 and 2014-15 school years.
That board also unanimously passed the resolution.
When Ringgold approved a similar resolution in March, board President Denise Kuhn described it as a desperate situation for all districts.
It would cost Ringgold an additional $20 million between 2010-11 and 2014-15.

Trinity mulls change to job expense policy

2010-04-05T10:28:00.001-04:00

By Dawn Goodman
Staff Writer
dgoodman@observer-reporter.com
Trinity Area School Board is debating whether to limit the amount that employees can spend for meals while at conferences.
A proposed change to the job-related expense policy calls for teachers to receive a maximum of $10 for breakfast, $10 for lunch and $15 for dinner. It calls for administrators to have $10 for breakfast, $10 for lunch and $25 for dinner.
Acting Superintendent James Dick suggested that the board not put the exact amount in its policy. Instead, he said at Thursday night’s meeting, that type of information should be in administrative regulations to implement the policy.
“Things are going to change with inflation,” he said. “Are you going to change the policy every year? That’s not what policies are for.”
Assistant Superintendent Yvonne Weaver said there may be times at conferences when meals are more than that amount. She questioned if the board wanted employees who attend conferences to not participate in meals that cost more than the limit. Those who attend conferences must fill out a form explaining their expenses, she said.
Board member Tamara Salvatori said preventing employees from participating in meals at conferences is not the purpose of the policy. She said the issue came up because the board has received receipts for hundreds of dollars with no justification, sometimes related to sports teams.
“When nothing is justified, then you feel it’s time to review, or do you give people leeway and hope they use common sense?” she said. “We have to vouch to the taxpayers and say we’re using money wisely.”
Dick said he asked surrounding districts for forms they use to justify expenses and said he will pass those forms on to the board.
The policy was scheduled for a first reading later this month, but the board tabled it and sent it back to the policy committee for changes.
It was one of several policies scheduled for a first reading later this month. The others are, hiring of athletic coaches/directors/supervisors, sportsmanship, sponsorship and evaluation of the athletic programs, nepotism and physical examination.
Dick said the hiring policy creates an athletic committee for hiring that doesn’t include a board member, unless a head coach is at issue. He said the district already has rules about sportsmanship, but it was not in policy format.
One resident asked whether the revisions would be available to the public. At a meeting in March, board members said they wanted them to be available publicly prior to meetings.
Dick said revised policies and new policies will be available if the board agrees to vote on them later this month at the agenda meeting. Past practice has been to require a written public records request to be approved by the superintentendent before the documents are released.
Board member Dennis McWreath said he doesn’t see how the public can comment on policy revision if they can’t see them. The policy revisions were not available before Thursday’s meeting.
“Why can’t we run a few copies so they can take them home and stew over them?” Salvatori asked.
School board members also were seeing them for the first time Thursday night. Administrators may propose changes that the board doesn’t want, which could create frustration in the community, Interval said.
School board President Tom Bodnovich said he doesn’t want the public to have the perception that the board is trying to hide something.
“There’s got to be a better way here,” he said.

Join the Observer-Reporter’s conversation about education at our blog at http://www.observer-reporter.com/or/behinddesk/.

Trinity makes money on swap agreement

2010-04-02T12:20:00.000-04:00

By Dawn Goodman
Staff Writer
dgoodman@observer-reporter.com
While many school districts and municipalities across the state lost money because of financial swap agreements, that’s not the case at Trinity School District.
Tom Kinney, who works for HT Capital Markets, updated the school board Thursday about the swap agreement Trinity entered into with Wells Fargo Bank several years ago.
At that time, the board wanted more cash up front instead of having higher monthly payments, Kinney said.
At closing in May 2005, Trinity received $431,000, he said. Since 2006, the district has earned roughly $20,000 from the swap, he said.
“The district wanted to maximize an upfront large payment instead of $10,000 a month cash flow because of the district’s capital needs,” Kinney said.
He said the district has had a positive cash flow with the agreement every year except 2009, which was because of the Lehman Brothers collapse.
That was because the district took a conservative approach to the swap deal, he said.
An interest rate swap is a financial contract between a district and bank. In Trinity’s contract, the district paid Wells Fargo the tax-exempt money market rate and Wells Fargo paid Trinity the taxable money market rate.
Typically, the taxable rate is higher, making it profitable for districts, Kinney said.
The swap must be tied to bonds, he said. Trinity’s is tied to part of its 2003 series bonds. Though they were worth $30.4 million, just $17.03 million was swapped, Kinney said.
Though the swap agreement made money for Trinity, state Auditor General Jack Wagner describes financial agreements as tantamount to gambling with taxpayer money because they are so risky. He supports legislation banning the swaps for school districts, local governments and municipal authorities.
“It’s unconscionable that greedy Wall Street bankers are rewarding themselves with excessive bonuses whose profits were derived, in part, by hard-working Pennsylvanians whose elected officials gambled away their tax dollars in risky financial schemes they didn’t understand,” Wagner said in a March news release. “Interest-rate swaps have no place in local government and the General Assembly should put a stop to this.”
Join the Observer-Reporter’s conversation about education at our blog at http://www.observer-reporter.com/or/behinddesk/

McGuffey students collect loads of clothes for poor

2010-04-01T15:18:00.002-04:00

The area’s less fortunate will be able to update their wardrobes because of students at McGuffey junior and senior high schools.

The high school German Club collected hundreds of pounds of gently worn clothes and shoes from their teachers and classmates to donate to the Washington City Mission.

“There is a mountain of clothing,” said German teacher Pam Stewart.

“There are some nice things here – teachers’ clothes, shoes. This is like consignment shop stuff,” Stewart said Thursday, when the items were delivered to the mission, which will sell them in its thrift shops in Washington and Greene counties.

The project began in January after Stewart said she “encouraged the officers to come up with something altruistic.”

Andrea Martin suggested the clothes drive, and the club added a contest to see which homeroom could donate the heaviest load.

“The winning room received a free hot breakfast with a cappuccino bar and everything,” Stewart said.

“It kind of made me feel like I was giving back to the community,” said Martin, 18. “It makes me feel a little more responsible.”

Her classmate, Brandon Gilmore, 17, also helped to oversee the effort.

“Not everybody has what we do, nice warm clothes,” he said.