News-Record.com

Good thing the Guilford County Board of Education doesn't get paid by the hour. If they did, we, the taxpayers, might go broke this month.

The board has eight meetings set for September, including the already-completed Sept. 1 emergency meeting to discuss the effects of Hurricane Katrina:

- Tuesday, Sept. 13: Regular board meeting, GCS Central Office, 5:30 p.m.
- Thursday, Sept. 15: Redistricting meeting, Northeast High School, 7 p.m.
- Tuesday, Sept. 20: Redistricting meeting, Penn-Griffin Middle School, 7 p.m.
- Saturday, Sept. 24: Fall retreat, GCS Central Office, Time TBA
- Sunday, Sept. 25: Fall retreat, GCS Central Office, Time TBA
- Tuesday, Sept. 27: Redistricting meeting, Northwest High School, 7 p.m.
- Thursday, Sept. 29: Regular board meeting, GCS Central Office, 5:30 p.m.

An Olympic gold medalist will help honor some local students at a Monday night banquet.

Win-Win Resolutions Inc. will recognize six Guilford County Schools students at its Young Peacemaker Awards Banquet. The middle students helped promote non-violent conflict resolution and peer mediation at their schools.

Jackie Joyner-Jersee, a two-time Olympic gold medalist in track, will be the keynote speaker.

The banquet takes place at 6:30 p.m. Monday at the Embassy Suites Hotel, 204 Centrepoint Drive in Greensboro. Tickets are $50, $25 for students, and are available here. Call 230-1232 for more information.

At its meeting Tuesday, the Guilford school board will look at a third proposal for potential redistricting in High Point. It is the first to include Ragsdale High School in the mix.

If any of the plans are approved, it would herald the dismantling of the controversial reassignment plan now in its second year. The reassignment plan now in place shuffles students from Andrews, Central and Southwest high schools via a computerized lottery, with each school given an academic theme to attract students.

Read the News & Record Monday for a story on this latest proposal and how it compares to the previous two. There also will be a map showing what areas would be affected.

You also can see the proposal on the school board's agenda.

Other items to be discussed Tuesday include:
* A proposal to place classroom trailers on a site at Chestnut Street in High Point to create a SCALE alternative school for students in that area. Currently, students across the district who are long-term suspended travel to Greensboro to take classes at SCALE. Here's the cost analysis that will be presented Tuesday.
* Construction contracts for Peck, Morehead and Peeler elementary schools
* A proposal to shift $300,000 from construction projects at 12 schools to complete renovation work at McLeansville Elementary. This money is available "due to favorable bids, untapped contingencies and/or sales tax refunds," according to the request on the agenda.
*An update on class sizes throughout the district
*An update on SAT scores

The board meets at 5:30 p.m. at its Eugene Street offices in Greensboro.

That was the scene at Tuesday night's school board meeting, as nearly 100 red-clad citizens showed up to protest teacher assistant cuts.

Five years ago, Guilford County Schools had nearly 1,300 teacher assistants. That number is down to 370 now.

On Wednesday night, the best of the best were recognized by Guilford County Schools and SunTrust Bank, which sponsors the district's annual Teacher of the Year contest.

Winner J. Todd Cayton, an eighth-grade English teacher at Guilford Middle School, will be profiled in Friday's paper. Catch photos of him in action and comments from his principal and students. And oh yeah, don't call him Jason - the "J" in J. Todd. Not even his parents call him that! It's "Todd," he says.

In today's paper we ran a story with basic information about the winners. Read the story here and the district press release here.

Unfortunately, photos of only three finalists made it into the paper. Two finalists, including High School Teacher of the Year winner Franklin "Chris" Goins from Dudley, didn't appear today. Their photos will run in Friday's paper.

We apologize to Mr. Goins and Susan Marshall, finalist from Kernodle Middle School, for inadvertently omitting their pictures.

Congratulations to all of the finalists, who were the top five teachers in the district. Considering there are about 4,400 teachers, that's quite an honor.

Listen here for applause. (All right, you caught me. I'm not tech savvy enough to add cool sound effects like that. But just wait, one day I'll figure it out and Wow you!)

Okay, I hope everyone has had a chance to read about last night's redistricting forum.

Most of the discussion centered around the new Northern Middle School. Many residents who live near the school but who are scheduled to stay at Northeast Middle want to go to the new school. They asked the school board to redraw the lines and put them in Northern Middle.

But there were a few other items, most notably:

Once again, we had a lot more from the redistricting forum than we could fit in the paper. So here is more from Tuesday night's forum at Penn-Griffin Middle School:

- No one spoke in favor of the redistricting plans on the table. Many of the speakers also oppose the current High Point reassignment plan and say they are tired of the board constantly redrawing lines.

"We've created a Frankenstein school system," said David Thompson.

"This is the third time in four years I've done this," said John Gerhis.

"Please, when you consider redistricting, consider neighborhood schools," said Kay Underwood (By the way, it was nice to meet Kay at the forum - she says she's a regular Chalkboard reader).

"Give us back neighborhood schools," said Martin Phillips.

"Don't shuffle the problem; fix the problem. We can't wait three more years," said Garth Hebert, who ran for the at-large school board seat last year.

Over at Hogg's Blog, JWG asked about 10-day enrollment figures by school.

Two weeks ago we reported that enrollment had risen by about 1,600 students. I recently received the school-by-school breakout. You can can see where your school stands here.

I can't find last year's Excel sheet on enrollment. I just have a hard copy. If I get a chance, I'll create a file so you can compare the past two years at least.

But here's a few examples, looking at areas of high growth, where the construction bond money is being focused, where redistricting is being explored:

Northwest High: Increased from 2,105 to 2,279
Northeast High: Increased from 1,167 to 1,212
Colfax Elementary: Increased from 898 to 930
Summerfield Elementary: Increased from 744 to 746
Alamance Elementary: Decreased from 856 to 850
Southwest High: Increased from 1,211 to 1,308
Andrews High: Decreased from 1,212 to 1,079
High Point Central: Decreased from 1,426 to 1,347
Oak View Elementary: Increased from 516 to 614
Ragsdale High: Increased from 1,337 to 1,477

Many of you may know Derran Eaddy, the Guilford County Schools spokesman for the last few years. Derran is the go-to person for the press and frequently represents the district on TV. He's also a fixture at school board meetings.

Well, Friday is his last day of work with the district, as he's taking a media relations job in Washington, D.C.

Derran always has been polite and helpful to us - even when we were pestering him for information. We're sorry to see him leave but we wish him nothing but the best in D.C.

It took us a while to track these numbers down, but we finally got the appeals results for the 2005 High Point high school lottery.

Basically, only 69 of the 149 students assigned to Andrews and Central actually are enrolled there. Forty-eight ended up at Southwest, where they wanted to go to begin with. Others went to other GCS schools or private schools (there's a chart with the story).

I know anything about the High Point reassignment plan is going to generate input, so I'll just step back and let you have at it!

We told you a couple of months ago that nine Guilford County high schools had been placed on a state watch list for failing to have at least a 60 percent passing rate on End-of-Course exams. These nine are among 44 statewide that will get state assistance teams, as ordered by Gov. Mike Easley.

Well, six of these schools also earned teacher pay bonuses under the state's ABCs of Public Education plan. Click the above link for the full story.

The other three GCS high schools on the watch list are Andrews, High Point Central and the A&T Middle College.

The New York Times came to Raleigh recently to do a story on their student reassignment plan. The High Point reassignment plan was based in part on the Raleigh plan, which buses students in order to create socio-economically diverse schools.

Many of the debates taking place there are similar to the ones going on here.

Jennifer had this story in today's paper about construction cost overruns.

Right now, the district is running $10.8 million over budget on the $300 million school bond projects. That's a sharp contrast to the $200 construction bond campaign which finished up last year millions of dollars under budget.

Three middle schools will be without gyms for a few months due to repairs.

The three schools, Eastern, Hairston and Kernodle, are the newest middle schools in the district and were built according to the same set of blueprints. But architects say the supports that hold up the gym roofs may not be strong enough to withstand heavy winds or snow.

We will be following up on this story, including finding out how much these repairs will cost.

We had a request to start a thread about the ongoing red light camera debate, so as promised, here it is:

Earlier this year, Guilford County Superior Court ruled that 90 percent of the money collected by red light cameras in Greensboro and High Point should go to the Guilford County Schools. The case is under appeal, but if the ruling stands, the school district would stand to gain $4.5 million.

For those of you who don't know, these unmanned cameras photograph the license plates of drivers who run red lights, who must pay a fine of $50.

By North Carolina law, fines for breaching state penal laws are supposed to go to the county school system. But city officials have argued that if the school system gets $45 of each $50, they would lose money on the red light camera program and, as a result, they wouldn't be able to do it.

What do you think should happen?