This and That, June 28, 2024
A sweet story in the Times about the late former School Board director Cheryl Chow. She was such an accomplished person (and a fellow shortie) and cared deeply about her community. She has a street named after her in the Mount Baker neighborhood near Franklin High School (which she attended and was principal). Her daughter, Liliana, is now on the Franklin girls basketball team.
The Times article is attached to the celebration of 50 year of gay pride in Seattle. Chow came out just before she passed away too soon at the age of 66.
In that interview in 2012, Chow said, “If I can save one child from feeling bad or even committing suicide because they felt terrible because they were gay, then I would have succeeded in my last crusade.”
In a ruling from the Oklahoma Supreme Court this week, the Court said no to a religious charter school that was to be virtual. From the NY Times:
Yet it was divisive within the school choice movement and even within Oklahoma’s Republican Party.
Gov. Kevin Stitt and his superintendent of public instruction, Ryan Walters, both Republicans, supported the new school. But the state’s Republican attorney general, Gentner Drummond, was a key opponent of the school, and personally argued against it before the Oklahoma Supreme Court.
The case comes down to “two competing constitutional claims,” said Justin Driver, a professor at Yale Law School: “Nondiscrimination against religion, on the one hand, and the nonestablishment of religion on the other.”
The answer may lie in a more philosophical question: What, exactly, is a charter school? “Is a charter school a public school?” Mr. Driver said. “Or is a charter school, in effect, a quasi private entity?”
The case is likely to be appealed, potentially pushing it toward the U.S. Supreme Court, whose conservative majority has broadly embraced the role of religion in public life and signaled an openness to directing taxpayer money to religious schools.
I'll just note that in other court cases about charter schools, sometimes they argue they ARE public schools and in other cases, not so much. Looks like a line needs to be drawn. As well, if you open that door to religion, then it will have to be ALL religions.
Washington State Schools Missed 8,500 Kids for Special Ed Referrals During COVID
In Washington state, about 8,500 fewer children than typically expected — enough to fill 450 classrooms — in grades K-5 were identified as needing special education between March 2020 and the start of the 2021-22 school year, according to a new brief from CALDER, the American Institutes for Research’s Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research. Compared to 2018-19, the identification rate was 23% lower in 2019-20 and 20% lower in 2020-21.
It’s too soon to know whether these dips mean support for the students was delayed or whether many have simply fallen through the cracks. Rates have since returned to pre-pandemic levels, with no indication the children who were not evaluated during COVID have since been identified.
Whether crucial supports are delayed or denied, the data is alarming, says Roddy Theobald, CALDER deputy director and one of the report’s authors: “There are going to be long-term consequences. At the very least, probably those students are missing out on two years of needed services. But it’s also possible that this means they will miss 13 years.”
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