February 2009 Archives

The growing number of home foreclosures around the country is having an impact on classrooms, with more teachers working with unstable student enrollments, according to a CNN.com report. At Fairview Elementary School in Modesto, Calif., an area badly hit by the economic downturn, 50 students have left and 50 new ones have started in the last couple months, according to Principal Heather Sharp. California 4th grade teacher Suzell Tougas, meanwhile, says she's down 10 kids from the start of this year and expects to lose more. "It's like a ghost town,” she says of her classroom. Educators stress that ...

At Keller’s Trinity Meadows Intermediate School in Texas, cellphones aren’t confiscated—they are dispersed. According to The Dallas Morning News, 53 5th graders are using Verizon smartphones instead of laptops in their classrooms as part of a push to equip every child with a computer. While phone calls and text messages are disabled on the devices, students can use them to access the internet, take pictures and videos, sketch drawings, and beam information to one another. "Laptops are oh so '90s – they're your parents' generation," said Elliot Soloway, the University of Michigan professor who created the software the ...

School superintendents in the Washington, D.C. region’s largest districts take as much as 12 weeks of paid leave a year for “vacation, personal matters and professional travel to such destinations as Florida, Europe and Asia,” according to the Washington Post. The paid leave is in addition to salary and benefit packages ranging from $341,530 to $489,763. Loudoun County, Va. Superintendent Edgar B. Hatrick III took a total of 60 days of paid leave between July 2007 and June 2008. Of those days, 49 were spent on several speaking engagements and tours in the U.S., Rome, ...

In 2007, an Oregon law was enacted preventing the sale of high-calorie snacks on school campuses, according to The Oregonian. Intending to curb the growing problem of child obesity, schools did away with vending machines that sold Cokes and candy. However, as an additional consequence of the law, teachers have also lost access to junk-food vending machines. And they’re not happy about it. On Friday, a group of teachers appealed to the House Education Committee to ask that the vending machines be returned to employee-only areas. "We are adults," said 4th grade teacher Dorothy Powers from Hillsboro. "We have ...

In an effort to engage his high school sophomores, a veteran sex education teacher in Portland, Ore., put underwear over his pants and a condom on his head during a lesson, reports The Oregonian. Little did he know, one of his students was filming him and he’d soon become a YouTube sensation. Norman Scott of Grant High School had intended to use humor to warn students about the dangers of STIs. However, district officials didn’t find the lesson funny at all. "What you saw in that video in no way, shape or form represents Portland Public Schools' approved ...

Parents may regret repeating the adage "practice makes perfect" to their children when they find out the latest tool to enter music teachers' classrooms around the country. Sixty music teachers are working with game manufacturer Nintendo and the National Music Education Association to bring the game “Wii Music” into classrooms, according to MSNBC. Unlike popular music-oriented video games like “Guitar Hero” and “Rock Band,” “Wii Music” doesn’t make players perform existing songs. Rather, players experiment with 60 instruments to improvise and compose their own music—a feature that appeals to S.C. music teacher Helen Krofchick. “Children spend a ...

Katherine Evans was fed up with her high school English teacher. "To those select students who have had the displeasure of having Ms. Sarah Phelps, or simply knowing her and her insane antics: Here is the place to express your feelings of hatred," she wrote on her Facebook page, according to the New York Times. Two months later, the honors student received a three-day suspension for cyberbullying. Now a freshman at the University of Florida, Evans is suing the principal of Pembroke Pines Charter High School for infringing on her freedom of speech. She is requesting compensation for her legal ...

A retired Cleveland math teacher who recently died at age 93, and whose annual salary never exceeded $40,000, has left over $2 million to her college alma mater, reports The Plain Dealer. A frugal spender who was never married and had no heirs, Laura Bickimer accumulated some of the money from her inheritance and saved the rest by living modestly. When answering an alumni survey for Baldwin-Wallace College, the beneficiary of Bickimer’s fortune, she once stated that she preferred to wash her clothes in an old-fashioned wringer. "I have discovered that one's life can be quite simple and ...

A suburban Cleveland school district might cut their sports programs to deal with a budget deficit, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Fall and winter sports in the Richmond Heights School District could join a laundry list of programs that have already been sent to the chopping block, including marching band, newspaper, and Advanced Placement classes. Facing a deficit of $238,000 and reeling from six ballot defeats for funding, the school board proposed cutting sports programs rather than pursuing another levy initiative this May. “We're hearing about all sorts of tough choices. Times are tough," said Scott Ebright, spokesman ...

While many states have scaled back on school funding due to the recession, Florida’s education system has been hit harder than most, according to a recent story on NPR’s All Things Considered. NPR’s Jacki Lyden spoke with several Floridian educators to find out what next year’s possible $100 million education budget cuts could mean for the schools. Everyone expressed concern. "In my 32 years of being a public educator, I’ve never experienced anything like this," Orange County Florida schools superintendent Ronald Blocker admits. Orange County has already reduced its teaching force by hundreds, but going ...