News-Record.com

The school board might finalize tonight a final project list and amount for the proposed November bond referendum. The meeting is at 6:30 p.m. on Eugene Street. Look for a wrap-up in Friday's paper.

The Board of Education began prioritizing its project list Thursday and will continue discussions of the proposed bond referendum at its March 13 meeeting. The updated list:

Making the cut
* Jamestown Middle, new school, $28.1 million
* Ragsdale High, combine with existing Jamestown Middle and possible facility for autistic students, $28 million
* Special Education West, additional funding for new center, $6.8 million
* Southeast High, classrooms, media center and gym, $28 million
* Summerfield Elementary, classrooms, media center and cafeteria expansion, $15 million
* Southwest High, classrooms, media center and gym, $26 million
* New elementary schools at Alamance and Southeast Guilford, estimated costs to be revised
* Allen Middle, classrooms and auxiliary gym, $7.6 million
* Airport middle and high schools, $100 million
* Improved athletic facilities at Dudley High, Page High, Simeon Stadium, $9 million
* McIver Education Center, renovated for performing arts facility for Weaver Education Center, cost figure to be revised
* Small elementary school to relieve Jesse Wharton and Brightwood areas, $22 million
* More mobile classrooms; HVAC, video surveillance, tennis court and track upgrades, $14 million

Still guessing
* Rebuilding or renovating Hunter Elementary, $17 million?
* Craven school, renovating it for students with autism,$12 million
* Renovating Dudley High for academy, $11.7 million
* Cafeteria expansion and gym renovations at Grimsley, $10 million
* High Point Central, upgraded lighting and technology and gym renovations, $7 million
* Technology upgrades district-wide, $4 million

Likely to get nixed
* McLeansville Elementary, classroom addition, $3.4 million
* Small academy high school for about 300 students, $20 million
* Brooks Global high school academy, renovations at existing school, 49.6 million
* $ 3 million to purchase future school sites
* Guilford Middle, $200,000 demolition of elementary classroom wing and landscaping of area
* $5 million for district-wide fire alarms and sprinklers

Update: A parent passed this along to me offering a counter viewpoint that supports NCLB's measurement of students with disabilities.

Check out a two-part series by Jennifer and me this weekend on No Child Left Behind's effects on students with disabilities and limited English proficiency.

What makes these stories relevant is the fact that NCLB is up for reauthorization this year. Guilford County Schools also entered improvement last year because the two subgroups failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress for two consecutive years. My story on students with disabilities runs Saturday.

Do you believe the federal law fairly measures the progress of students with disabilities? If not, what would you change?

In today's paper we explored how the district is serving the needs of students who speak limited English and their families. Many of these children come from war-torn nations or poverty and already lag behind in their own language.

Educators here and across the nation say that the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which seeks to get all students proficient in reading and math by 2014, is flawed when it comes to these students. Legislators will look at revising the bill this year.

What changes should be made?

Should Guilford pursue plans to create a separate school for these students who are the farthest behind?

This is the second of a two-day series that looks at the law's impact locally. On Saturday, Morgan explored the effect on students with disabilities and their families.

The News & Record will move its blogs to a new hosting environment on Wednesday afternoon. During the move, the blogs will not be accessible. The blogs should look the same after the move and you won’t need to change your bookmarks.

Read for yourself the final improvement plan addressing student achievement and teacher training sent to the state Friday. Also check out a fuller story to run Wednesday.

What do you think of the plan? What do you like? What should be included?

Guilford County Schools plans to seek approval on March 29 of opt-out lists for magnet programs and schools sanctioned by No Child Left Behind. The preliminary lists show what options students would have for transferring if their home school fails to make Adequate Yearly Progress again.

The last eight schools on the NCLB list, Alderman through Sedgefield, may get to offer tutoring instead of transfers if the U.S. Department of Education approves North Carolina to switch the order of its sanctions for a second year.

No Child Left Behind — up for reauthorization this year — requires that federally subsidized schools failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress in reading or math for two consecutive years offer students the choice to transfer to another school or receive extra tutoring. The district also offers options for parents who don’t want their children participating in a magnet program at their home school.

Check out Morgan’s story on Friday.

We found out late Monday that demolition had begun at Eastern Guilford. D.H. Griffin Wrecking Co. estimates it will take four to six weeks to clear the school, which was gutted by fire Nov. 1. And it will cost about $250,000.

No word yet on how the length of the demolition will affect the placement of modular classrooms - the so-called "pod village" - on a section of the school property to house students next school year. David Deatherage, vice president of D.H. Griffin, didn't know about that aspect of the work at Eastern. District officials either did not have information on the demolition or did not return our calls yesterday.

Apparently word spread quickly among students and the community. By lunch time, students had lined up outside the chain link fence across from what was the front of the school to watch workers scrape away pieces of crumbling concrete and rusty steel. The workers started separating the trash into piles, which will be taken to a local landfill.

Lisa Walker, an English teacher and yearbook adviser, stopped by with students to take photos by the school sign for the yearbook. They ended up pressed against the fence to watch the destruction, too.

"I think it's progress," Walker said. "And it's time to move on."

The district already has started the process of rebuilding the school.

The school board is expected to get an update on Eastern at tonight's meeting.

The school board decided last night that it was easier to keep school resource officers in middle and high schools rather than sort through the budgetary ramifications of giving principals the choice to keep them. However, the board did decide to meet with school safety personnel to discuss concerns and look for ways to better track racial disparities in short-term suspensions.

One of the concerns was the use of county funds to hire sheriff's deputies. Superintendent Terry Grier said the county routed about $955,000 from the Sheriff's Office to the school system in 2001 to pay for resource officers. If principals decided they did not want to keep their SROs, would the county request the leftover funds back?

While the SRO issue may be over for the time being, board member Amos Quick still questions their need in schools. Nancy Routh and Alan Duncan are still uneasy about deputies carrying Tasers, a concern that started this whole discussion last year.

"I am not happy about Tasers being put in our middle schools," Duncan said. "This was a decision that was made that I wish was not made."

In a related vein, two recent release of two reports underline the disparity between minority and white students. Action for Children North Carolina published a report earlier this month showing that the rate of short-term suspensions in the state is 45 percent higher than the national rate. The group, which analyzed three years of data, also points out that suspensions double between the fifth and sixth grades, peaking in ninth grade.

The Guilford County Disproportionate Minority Contact group also met with school officials in late February to discuss some disparity data. Interesting points: High Point Police's arrests of juveniles increased 33 percent between 2004 and 2005 while the number of Greensboro Police arrests declined 23 percent during the same time frame.

Maybe the school board will finalize its project list this month, maybe it won't. Chairman Alan Duncan is anxious to get his fellow board members to that point soon.

The board heard an hour-long update on the proposed November bond referendum at 10 p.m. Tuesday. Members plan to discuss it again on March 29. The list now has 33 projects and totals $512 million, including inflation. Here are the five-year projections for the district.

I will post the project list package once I get electronic copies, but let me know if you have any specific questions. One question that came up on The Chalkboard recently was the fate of students with autism in the county. The current list specifies autism facilities at four locations: Ragsdale High, Southeast area elementary school, airport area middle school and Craven.

States anxious to free themselves from the bureaucratic clutches of the No Child Left Behind Act might get their chance. More than 50 members of the House and Senate will introduce legislation today that would give states the ability to opt out of its testing mandates while still being eligible for federal funding, the Washington Post reported.

How could states do that? Under the House bill, a state could hold a referendum or two of three elected entities -- the governor, the legislature and the state's highest education official -- could decide to bypass the law's mandates (special education is the exception). States already have the ability to refuse federal mandates as long as they are willing to forfeit millions in federal education funds.

Guilford County Schools officials have long questioned the efficacy of the law, saying it penalizes both strong and low-performing schools through sanctions, student transfers, etc.

Do you support this move? Should North Carolina give NCLB another five years or say, "Sayonara!"

We ran a story Saturday on a proposed bill that would add back five teacher workdays that were dropped when the state pushed back the start of school. I forgot to create a corresponding post. Sorry about that.

What should districts do if they get extra teacher workdays: give all the time to teachers to plan, let principals and teachers decide school-wide training, use them for districtwide training, or some combination of the three?

READ THE BILL
Name: Increase Number of Teacher Workdays.
Filed: Feb. 15.
Status: Referred Feb. 19 to Committee on Education/Higher Education.
More: Go to the General Assembly Web site. On the right side of the screen, type S191 in the bill search menu.

I couldn't get a link to the story, so I posted it below.

Guilford spent the past few weeks tracking hundreds of students to verify who transferred and who dropped out. As a result, the district on Monday revised its 2006 graduation rate to 74 percent, up from the original 63.5 percent that the state reported earlier this month.

Districts had to prove students had transferred by tracking down the proper documents. The state helped by sharing information on where students may have gone after leaving Guilford and Dare County Schools, the other district that disputed its graduation rate.

Districts will be graded by how well they improve this graduation rate, which tracks "cohorts" of students from when they enter as freshmen to graduation within the next four years. It is considered a far better measure than the on-time rate North Carolina has been using. That rate just looked at a graduating senior class to see how many finished in four years, so it did not reflect the large numbers of students who drop out as freshmen or sophomores.

The cohort rate better reflects dropouts, but is not perfect. It doesn't account for students who go on to get their GED or students with disabilities who leave school with a certificate instead of a diploma.

But a state rate of 68 percent is much more reflective of what's actually happening than something in the 90 percent range, which was just ludicrous, as many national studies pointed out over the years.

Guilford County Schools opened bids today on phase one of the combined site work for the pod village and new high school. I should know tomorrow who turned out to be the lowest bidder. Barnhill Contracting Co. is the construction manager at risk. On Thursday, the school board will vote to approve the site work contract and the guaranteed maximum price for the new Eastern. The "GMP" is the the most the district will pay to have the school built; anything more than that is a loss for Barnhill. I'm not sure if Barnhill could pocket the difference if the construction costs less than the GMP, but it's possible. Stay tuned...

Check out details of the projects on the preliminary bond project list discussed last week. The document is about 60 pages long and includes breakdowns on most construction.

Here are the bid tabulations that came in yesterday on site work for the new Eastern Guilford High School and pod village. The school board will vote on contracts tomorrow.

GCS expects to award construction contracts in June.

Update: School officials postponed the board vote on the bids until next Thursday's meeting.

Most states are struggling to monitor the impact of tutoring and remediation available to students in schools sanctioned by No Child Left Behind, according to a report released last week by the Center on Education Policy in Washington, D.C.

Twelve percent of all Title 1 districts representing 12.5 million students were required to offer supplemental services in 2005-06, according to CEP.

North Carolina is not mentioned specificically in the report, but we ran a story in December about the state hiring the Center for Research in Education Policy in Tennessee to evaluate about 50 tutoring companies. School board members here have complained about the district's lack of authority in evaluating these companies.

A teacher at Jamestown Middle is the new Employee of the Month for her efforts to save a student who collapsed last month during track tryouts.

If you haven't seen it, check out an online guide Jennifer and I did about the proposed November bond referendum, featuring some audio by Joe Hill, GCS facilities consultant. Also, in case you missed it, here is a preliminary budget study I posted recently that gives some financial details for most of the projects.

I was unable to preview all of the notable items on the board agenda and wanted to mention that members will discuss middle school scheduling. Darlene Garrett requested this be added to the agenda because she is concerned about schools losing some freedom in scheduling classes. Next year, middle schools will have to offer at least 75 minutes each in math and language arts, with encore classes limited to 90 minutes for the day. The board agenda has attached a list of schools affected.

"I think it's a one-size fits all philosopy," Garrett said today. "It takes away choices and options for kids."

Also, Garth Hebert will propose a plan to allow some High Point families to opt out of this school year's redistricting plan (choice between Andrews/Welborn and Southwest High/Southwest Middle). Check out a preview story on that Thursday.

It's only been two years and legislators are starting to rethink the school calendar bill, which forced school districts to start the year no earlier than Aug. 25. The law passed in 2004 but the first long summer break and late start didn't come until the 2005-06 school year.

Do you think local districts should have control over that again?

Many districts, including Guilford, had pushed the first day of school to early August. The thinking behind that was to allow high schools on block schedules to finish exams before Christmas. Schools on a 4x4 block have students taking a yearlong course in one semester. Students and teachers argued that waiting to take exams after the long winter break was difficult.

But other parents and the tourism industry argued that families and the economy needed the long summer break.

What do you think?

UPDATE: School calendar bill passes House education committee