News-Record.com

Check out the progress North Carolina and other states have made, according to a round up by the Southern Regional Education Board.

The Guilford County Board of Education will meet twice next week to narrow down the list of candidates for the superintendent position, Deena Hayes told me today. I'm assuming those meetings will take place on July 9 and 10 as I received special meeting notices for those dates today.

Hayes said the board still hopes to have someone in place by the start of school. Just in case you missed the announcement last week, Ray and Associates received 135 applications from 33 states, including North Carolina. Thirty-one people passed through the screening procedures and eight made the semi-finalist list (although the board plans to review all 31 applications).

The semi-finalists are from Alabama, Georgia, Ohio, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia.

I'll update as I get more information.

Concerned citizens in Guilford County are mobilizing to help the Board of Education address the challenges facing black males in the district as well as overcome the hurdles imposed by standardized testing.

This comes with the release of preliminary suspension numbers by Guilford County Schools. The file is too large to upload, so if you are interested in the full report, e-mail me at morgan.josey@news-record.com.

Next week: The long-awaited magnet schools study makes its way to Tuesday's school board meeting. Check out the first half of the report here.

Over the past two weeks, the editorial department has been interviewing school board candidates (at-large and District 3) for its endorsement process. Check out the questionnaires for Sandra Alexander, Michael McKinney, Darlene Garrett and Mike Stone. I will upload audio files in the coming weeks.

I was talking today with Howard Lee, state school board chairman, about the current budget proposal and toward the end of our conversation I asked him about the four-day school week idea being offered as a possible solution to rising transportation costs.

The doubling of fuel costs over the past year caught both state lawmakers and educators off guard and most of the fretting that typically takes place around budget season had to do with possible shortfalls in the fuel budget.

"It's an unanticipated predicament we find ourselves in" Lee said. "We cannot stop running the school buses and we cannot shut schools down just because of a lack of money for fuel."

(Fortunately, Lee told me, the state budget up for final approval this week makes those cost manageable for the time being).

You may be aware that the News & Record is switching its online publishing system to Drupal. I'm not the best person to detail the benefits of this new system, but I wanted to advise you of the following: only online stories as of December 2007 will be relinked on news-record.com. Visitors to the main site may not care about this, but I understand that any previous stories linked on this blog will be inaccessible. I will try to keep this in mind as I write future posts that include references to past stories or historical data. I might have to re-upload documents on my hard drive that were given URLs, but I will deal with that on a case by case basis. Thanks.

Back in June we ran a story about the Advanced Learning Department's efforts make sure the district's gifted student population is diverse and well-served. I included in that story the results of the pilot program review that took place in the spring. I received on Thursday the district-wide program review results. I haven't read through it yet, but roughly one in three schools were not in full compliance with the district's Advanced Learning plan. Here are the highlights, followed by the school by school checklist.

I plan to follow up with a story on this next week.

I, like you all, am awaiting today's release of the finalists names for the superintendent position. Lekan Oguntoyinbo, district relations officer for Guilford County Schools, said this morning he doesn't expect to release the information until after 5 p.m. today.

Remember that a public meeting with the finalists is scheduled for 5-7 p.m. Wednesday at central office. Any of you going and what do you plan to ask?