News-Record.com

The Office of the State Auditor has issued a special review on accusations that the first section chief of the Department of Public Instruction and a Raleigh vendor for the Reading First program stole a portion of teacher registration fees for a 2003 state Reading First conference. Guilford County Schools uses the Reading First program in some elementary schools.

You can read more about the report here.

Guilford County Schools Board of Education approved its list of opt-out schools for the 2006-2007. I'll try to follow up with more detail later. Opt-outs are schools students have the option of transferring to if their original school did not make adequate yearly progress (AYP) for two or more consecutive years.

• click here for the list of public schools

• click here for the list of magnet and year-round programs

Newsweek's list of top high schools comes out Monday, although you can view it online now. This list has caused some discussion on the Chalkboard in the past because it is based just on the number of Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate tests taken compared with the number of graduating students.

The competing theories:
*just taking the advanced classes prepares students better for college
*how well students do on the tests should be used to determine which high schools are truly "the best"

What's your take?

Check out the conversation on these other education blogs (you might have to scroll down through other topics)
Get Schooled (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
Gradebook (Miami Herald)
School Zone (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

Guilford County Board of Education is scheduled to discuss school resource officers carrying Tasers at Tuesday's board meeting. Most SROs received Tasers last month as the Sheriff's Department started purchasing them in 2003 and giving them to deputies. Should have something more on this in the paper soon.

Given that SROs already carry pepper spray and guns, are you concerned about them carrying Tasers as well?

In case you all were wondering what was happening at Andrews/Welborn today, this came from our friendly neighborhood reporter in High Point, Jonathan Jones:

There’s a lockdown at Andrews and Welborn going on right now (about 3:20 p.m.). There was a robbery nearby and the suspects were seen running to the nearby greenway. Police are detaining two suspects but the lockdown is in place while they search the area for additional suspects.

Have you heard about this at any other schools?

The district is looking into the incidents. In the meantime, what can parents do?

Experts say that, just like with any other drug abuse, you should watch for signs, talk with your children, and keep an eye on medicines in your own home.

Kevin Lear, GCS chief operating officer, will update the Board of Education tonight on what his staff is doing to bring this five-year-old project to a close. GCS is scrambling to fix the problems at Dudley High School (and thus appease members of the Dudley community),but their troubles don't end there.

GCS also faces a lawsuit with a contractor and possible fines from the state for a subcontractor planting the wrong type of grass at the school. You can read more about it in today's paper.

What do you think? Do the project team's complaints indicate a bigger problem or is this just an example of run-of-the-mill blunders encountered in construction projects?

Guilford County Board of Education will hold public forums on the proposed 2006-2007 budget this month:

2 p.m. tomorrow, Greensboro Coliseum Special Events Center, 1921 W. Lee St.
7 p.m. Monday, Laughlin Primary, 7911 Summerfield Road in Summerfield
7:30 a.m. Tuesday, High Point Chamber of Commerce, 1101 N. Main St.
7 p.m. Monday, May 22, Gibsonville Town Hall, 129 W. Main St.

Just wanted to pass this along:

The project team for the new southern area middle school is accepting nominations for the naming of the school. Nominations will be accepted through June 12 at 5 p.m.

Submissions can be made by e-mail, webmaster@gcsnc.com, or by mail. If mailing, please send to: Sonya Conway, Executive Director of District Relations, Guilford County Schools, 712 N. Eugene St., Greensboro, NC 27401.

North Carolina is a leader when it comes to teachers getting National Board Certification. North Carolina has about 9,800 of the more than 47,000 National Board Certified teachers in the nation. Guilford accounts for about 400 of those.

The lengthy process also is costly (I believe around $2,300), a tab that the state picks up, along with offering financial incentives (12 percent raise) for teachers who receive the certification.

Research has so far indicated that board certified teachers are the cream of the crop. Not so the latest study, which used N.C. data from Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Wake County school systems, according to this Edweek article. Here's a link to Eduwonk, an education blog that questioned why the board hadn't released the study.

What the study looked at was whether students achieve more under board certified teachers.

Edweek writes this observation from the researcher: To choose the board-certified teacher over the teacher without the credential would be "only trivially better than a coin flip."

So has North Carolina's (and Guilford's) investment been wasted? Any educators out there willing to weigh in on this?

BTW: The researcher is none other than William Sanders, who brought you the value-added data system that Guilford is relying heavily on to determine whether students are gaining one or more years of academic growth.

Check out this story by Margaret Moffett Banks from Sunday, detailing some of the problems at Dudley and how they happened.

Here's today's story.

And don't forget to pick up a copy of tomorrow's paper to see what the district plans to do to fix the construction problems at the school.

North Carolina Public Radio spent about five months at Western High School, interviewing students and teachers in an effort to capture the essence of a typical high school today.

Check out the series here. The sections featuring Western begin airing between 5 a.m.-9 a.m. on Monday.

The Wake County Board of Education is tweaking a $1 billion construction plan that would convert traditional schools to a year-round calendar as a way to cope with booming student populations.

You can read more about the Wake County school board's proposal here.

Guilford's school board hasn't yet proposed plans to expand the number of current year-round schools but with another possible construction bond referendum (and those infamous school trailers) a reality do you see this as a viable option?

North Carolina is one of only two states approved to change how student progress is measured under the federal No Child Left Behind law.

The Education Department announced last week that North Carolina and Tennessee may track how individual students perform in math and reading over time as opposed to tracking year-to-year performance, which compares different groups of students.

North Carolina already includes a growth model (looking at individual student success year to year vs. comparing different students as a whole year to year) as part of its ABCs of Public Education testing program.

While we're talking about No Child Left Behind: Schools are still struggling to meet NCLB's "highly qualified teacher" requirement.

Following are the results from an interesting (and small-->442) survey of college students in April by Dormbuys.com about the best and worst high school graduation gifts. Where do you Guilford County parents rank in all this?

Friday was an unusual and difficult day in the schools.

Three Greensboro schools were locked down for hours while SWAT teams searched for a reported gunman, who was never found. Grimsley High, Kiser Middle and Brooks Global Elementary, which share a campus along Westover Terrace and Benjamin Parkway, were affected.

Meanwhile, across town at Western High, administrators savedthe life of a heart attack victim - a 17-year-old junior. Principal Randy Shaver and assistant principal Chris Barnes used an "automated external defibrillator" to restart the student's heart before EMS arrived.

Check out this story by Tina Firesheets. It's about a young man from Andrews High School who has music in his heart and some serious skills sharing what he knows with younger students.

And don't miss the multimedia component - a series of photos while music and a narrative play in the background.

The Nation's Report Card on science offered mixed results for Tar Heel students.

Fourth-grade scores were up, and met the national average on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the Nation's Report Card. Eighth-grade scores dipped by 3 percentage points from five years ago and were 5 points below the national average.

In 2005, a representative sample of more than 300,000 fourth-, eighth- and 12th-grade students nationwide participated in the NAEP assessment in science.

The NAEP also is given in reading and math. It is widely regarded as the best way to measure student progress across states.

Check out the Report Card Web site or go to the state Department of Public Instruction for North Carolina's take on the results.

UPDATE: The Education Trust weighs in here.

Guilford County Schools will host an open house for all High Point parents of students being relocated due to redistricting. You can see the schedule here.

Guilford County Schools Superintendent and Human Resources Director Mike Harris will meet with some art, music and PE teaches next week to discuss complaints about working conditions in elementary schools. The decision to have the meeting prevented a protest planned at Thursday's school board meeting.

Teachers complain they get the short end of the stick when it comes to prep/planning time, classroom space and funding. What do you think?

Here is an interesting read from The Charlotte Observer about a principal trying to improve EOC scores at one struggling high school. It's interesting to note the school tried signing bonuses they did not work.

The New York Times featured a couple school-related stories today, one essay criticizing the nutrional standards I wrote about last week and another about high school drop-outs being accepted to college with a diploma or GED.

Bring your questions about gang activity to a forum that takes place 7-9 p.m. tonight at the Greensboro Regional Realtors building, 23 Oak Branch Drive. Greensboro Det. Ernest Cuthbertson and Anthony Scales with the school system will speak.

Guilford County has at least 65 validated gangs with 255 members in all sectors of the community, according to the GCS Web site.

About 150 parents attend last night's forum, armed with sometimes emotional responses to the amount of gang activity in Greensboro and High Point.

At the meeting, school safety coordinator Anthony Scales said the number of gang-related reported incidents rose from eight last school year to 47 so far this school year. You can read more about this in tomorrow's paper.