Summer Break
Around the Web is taking its summer holiday and will be on hiatus for a while. Please check back in the fall.
Around the Web is taking its summer holiday and will be on hiatus for a while. Please check back in the fall.
"If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Parkview High School should be blushing." That's how Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter D. Aileen Dodd begins her story on a new high-end subdivision in Atlanta with six streets named for the nearby high school. There's Orange Jungle Way and Big Orange Pass—both playing off Parkview's school color of orange. "Selling a high-end home on a street named after a school could prove to be a winning combination," Ted Kurland, a developer and Realtor with Brokers of Atlanta, Inc., told the newspaper. "I think it's innovative," he said. "In the future there will probably be a lot of pride associated with it."
A new private school in Miami promises "customized education" for children with autism and other neurobiological disorders, The Miami Herald reports. Kevin Gersh, the school's founder, says allowing students to help design their educational plans ultimately helps them focus on learning. Gersh's Coral Rock Academy is set to open in September. Annual tuition will be $30,000, and officials plan to enroll 20 students from grades 4 to 12.
The National Retail Federation projects that back-to-school spending this year will exceed a whopping $18 billion.
According to the National Retail Federation’s 2007 Consumer Intentions and Actions Back-to-School survey, conducted by BIGresearch, American "families with school-age children are expected to spend $563.49 on back-to-school merchandise, up 6.9 percent from last year’s $527.08 average," the NRF reports. Families will pay about $94 on average for school supplies, but the biggest uptick in costs will come in the electronics category, the federation says—projecting a rise to $129.24 per family this year from $114.38 last year. In the electronics category, Americans will purchase computers, printers, and software, as well as cellphones and other items.
Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, Pa., has begun digitizing 900 episodes of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" dating to 1967 and will make them available to educators and media specialists studying child development, early learning, and children's media, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports.
Children's television icon Fred Rogers chose to house his archives at Saint Vincent before his death in 2003. He was a native of Latrobe. The college has since gone on to create the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media, which is designed "to create an environment that supports and encourages such good and important work on behalf of children and families."
Phase one of the project—digitizing 200 television episodes—should be finished by September, according to the Post-Gazette.
The International Herald Tribune offers a harrowing tale of schooling in Afghanistan. Reporter Barry Bearak opens with a scene out of a war movie—young girls trying to outrun gunmen lurking just outside the Qalai Sayedan School. Bearak says six girls were shot in the June 12 incident; two of them fatally. He cites "tools of intimidation used by the Taliban and others to shut down hundreds of schools here. To take aim at education is to make war on the government. Parents find themselves with terrible choices. 'It is better for my children to be alive even if it means they must be illiterate,' " one father tells the newspaper.
Bearak also cites encouraging statistics about education in Afghanistan: The Ministry of Education there claims that 6.2 million children are now enrolled—or about half the school-aged population. Even so, all progress is made against a backdrop of uncertainty and fear. "By attacking schools, the terrorists want to make the point of their own existence," Haneef Atmar, the minister of education, tells the Herald Tribune.
Education Week has also reported on the turbulent situation in Afghanistan. In its five-year plan, Afghanistan's Ministry of Education has set a goal of enrolling 60 percent of girls and 75 percent of boys in schools by 2010.
