Wednesday Open Thread

From The Columbian, Battleground SD has taken to ditching the cardboard single use milk cartons in their cafeterias.  Wish SPS would consider this; in my tutoring time, I go to lunch with the kids and see a lot of waste.

Where's the greenest school classroom in the U.S? In Seattle (but not at a Seattle public school).  From Crosscut:

Last year, the SEED classroom notched another milestone by being classified as a Living Building — a prestigious international certification that shows it meets certain stringent environmental requirements, including using rain for all water needs and independently generating all electricity. But for Dash, who calls the classroom her “pride and joy,” the certification is a footnote to its greater contribution to school culture. Its array of green technology has seeped into the very fabric of the school, infiltrating everything from its curriculum and surrounding classrooms to the terms facility and parents use to describe the school.

On the teachers strike front, it appears that an impasse has been reached in Los Angeles with their union saying they will strike on January 10th.  From the LA Times:

According to this narrative, Beutner, a wealthy businessman with no prior work experience in a school system, wants to increase the number of privately operated, nonunion charter schools and weaken the union’s influence. 

“Beutner is intentionally starving our schools by hoarding the reserves so that cuts can be justified, opening the pathway for his ultimate goal: to break up the school district into 32 networks, making our neediest schools more vulnerable to takeover attempts by corporate interests,” the union said in a statement Tuesday.

On the same topic, there was a teachers strike recently of great import because it happened to be charter school teachers who went out.  From the Washington Post

More than 500 teachers and other staff members at 15 charter schools operated by the nonprofit Acero Schools walked out of the classroom after failing to reach a new contract. Issues in dispute include pay; class size, now set at 32 students; and the length of the school day and school year.

The educators are represented by the Chicago Teachers Union, which has organized about 25 percent of charter schools in the city. Nationally, about 11 percent of charters operate under collective bargaining agreements, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

This one only lasted a short times as

The nation’s first strike of teachers from a charter school network was suspended in Chicago when their union announced it had won salary hikes, sanctuary for undocumented students and other concessions. Educators returned to their classrooms Monday. 

Meanwhile, 

In California, teachers at the state’s largest virtual charter school, the for-profit California Virtual Academies, won a landmark union contract only after threatening to strike. A pact securing a pay raise and due-process rights was won from the school’s operator, education giant K12 Inc., after years of organizing and negotiations.

 I suspect there will be a lot more organizing by charter school teachers especially for charter groups like Green Dot and Summit.

There are no district meetings this week.

One last thing - in doing some research, I was checking several schools' PTA sites.  I found this at one of them:

Vote Yes for the Seattle Operations and Capital Levy Renewals
The XXX PTSA Board urges everyone to vote YES on both levies on February 12th. 

Nope.  Your PTSA can say that their group voted to support the levy.  They can urge parents to "consider" voting yes for the levies. You can also encourage people to get out and vote but, as a non-profit, you cannot tell people how to vote. 

What's on your mind?