Friday Open Thread

Good News

Ballard's concert choir is going to Carnegie Hall in the middle of March for the second year in a row.  Their wind ensemble has been invite to play next year there as well.  Kudos to those singers and musicians.

Cleveland High was named a STEM Lighthouse School by OSPI, one of six in the state.  Good job, Cleveland. 

Along with well-deserved recognition, Cleveland will also receive a $20,000 grant from OSPI to serve as a mentor to other schools and school districts that are creating their own STEM environments.

No director community meetings this Saturday.

News
Interesting piece from KPLU on the use of class rather than race for integration purposes.

"Stronger Together" is not the name of the latest social-media fitness app. It's a grant proposed in President Obama's new budget, reviving an idea that hasn't gotten much policy attention in decades: diversity in public schools.

When a school reaches a stable level of about 30 percent middle-class students, the lower-income students achieve at higher levels and the privileged students do no worse, says Halley Potter, the author of one of the Century Foundation reports. Similarly, the racial achievement gap shrinks in schools that have less than a "supermajority" of 60 percent of any one race. 

Good article from Ed Week Leaders about two school leaders in Vancouver, Washington getting down to the nitty-gritty of what affects student life and then, student performance.

“The district has really educated itself about the areas of poverty and trauma and mental health,” says Staci Boehlke, the center coordinator at Fruit Valley. “It’s not, ‘We’ve got to get this fixed so they can learn.’ It’s just part of the fabric.”

“To me, the community-schools work is critical to finishing that transformation,” he says. “So much of this is about recognizing the power that comes from alignment. It’s not just about additional resources.”

Any time the district finds a way to cut costs—by trimming miles off bus routes through a new GPS-mapping system, for example—it targets the freed-up funds toward its strategic vision, lending sustainability to the initiative by incorporating much of its funding into the annual operating budget rather than relying solely on philanthropy to subsidize it.

Selah School district has decided to postpone any changes to their bell times for next year.  On the other hand, Evergreen Public Schools will be changing their bell times to nearly an hour later for high schools.

What's on your mind?