This and That

An excellent op-ed from Jordan Cahoon, a senior at Kent-Meridian High School, on how we talk about individual schools and the effects of a school's reputation on the students enrolled there.

In every city, there is always that high school. You know what I mean. The high school that doesn’t have great sports teams. The high school that doesn’t have a lot of money. The high school that just doesn’t get enough credit for its hard work.

After over a year at my new school, I now clearly see the gap between reputation and reality. This difference led me to reflect on the fairness of community members’ opinions and assumptions about the school and its students.

It’s heartbreaking to see my classmates start to give up because they think they aren’t “smart” or “good” enough.

How can you help support students? It can be as easy as showing up. Attend a play or concert. Take a few hours out of your day to cheer on the sports team.  When community members show they care, the students begin to emulate that care. They can graduate from high school with a can-do attitude. It’s on us to help students succeed.

Good story from EdScoop about Pennsylvania students who hacked into the Naviance website at their school.  The reason is funny; how they did it is not.

Students recently hacked a school computer system at Downingtown Area School District, a K-12 district in Eastern Pennsylvania, to uncover student addresses and gain a competitive edge in a districtwide water-gun competition.

The perpetrators obtained teacher-level login credentials to access Naviance, a college and career resource website and extracted student profile information for the entirety of DASD’s student population, including identification numbers, student directory information, gender, ethnicity, academic data and household relationship information.

The investigation is ongoing, but according to district officials, no information was altered or manipulated in any way and no Social Security numbers or credit card information for students or parents was stored in the system.

From Spokane Public Radio, a story about the University of Iowa's work for teens on the spectrum who are also gifted.

 Educators refer to teens like Alex as "twice exceptional." 

He has skipped two grades so far, and began taking college math courses last year, when he was still 15. But when he was younger, Alex's underdeveloped social skills caused him a lot of grief.

At the end of each school year, Alex didn't know what to do. "I was always that one kid who was unhappy whenever summer vacation came around," he says.
That changed when Alex's parents learned about the the Belin-Blank Center at the University of Iowa's College of Education.
Belin-Blank's mission is to identify and nurture young people who excel at math and science and the arts. And they have made a point of reaching out to, and accommodating, twice-exceptional kids.

There's also another story about the struggle for jobs for autistic adults from the New York Times. 

In 2018, Mr. Dai co-founded Daivergent, a start-up that is connecting tech companies with a pool of candidates on the autism spectrum. The company already has 20 corporate clients and has helped 75 people find work. There are about 1,100 candidates in the Daivergent pool.

It’s not that their abilities are lacking, said David Kearon, the director of adult services for the advocacy group Autism Speaks. “Anecdotally what we hear all the time is that autistic adults have the intellectual capability, but, because of their challenges with social skills, they’re often unemployed.” Brandon Dai, for example, “can focus on detail-oriented, complex, repetitive kinds of work that underlie much of the data structure that go into artificial intelligence and machine learning,” his brother said.

And Daivergent is working with the software giant SAP, which is a leader in employing those on the spectrum through its Autism at Work initiative, which started in 2013.