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Recent State and Local Education News
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Germanna Foundation to honor donors who helped reach $12 million goal
The Daily Progress
May 23, 2016
Germanna Community Educational Foundation and Germanna Community College officials will honor the donors who helped the school reach its $12 million goal.
The money was raised through the comprehensive capital campaign over a five-year period.
A reception will take place at Germanna’s Locust Grove Campus (2130 Germanna Highway) in Orange at 6 p.m. on Tuesday. Free and open to the public.
Germanna president David A. Sam called the fundraiser a historic milestone, saying it is one of the highest totals ever raised by a community college campaign in Virginia.
Chesapeake, Norfolk, Virginia Beach schools recognized for academic successes
Virginian-Pilot
May 24, 2016
The state Board of Education on Tuesday honored several South Hampton Roads schools for their academic success.
The 2016 Virginia Index of Performance awards recognize schools and school divisions for their achievements during the 2014-15 school year. They honor those that exceed state and federal accountability standards and achieve excellence goals set by the governor and the state education board, according to a news release.
Chesapeake's Grassfield High School, Hickory High and Southeastern Elementary; and Virginia Beach's Kemps Landing/Old Donation School, Kingston Elementary, Strawbridge Elementary and Thoroughgood Elementary all received the Board of Education Excellence Award, which means they met all state and federal accountability benchmarks and made significant progress toward goals for increased student achievement and expanded educational opportunities.
Two divisions – Falls Church Public Schools and West Point Public Schools – and 104 schools across the state earned that honor.
Chesapeake's Cedar Road Elementary, Grassfield Elementary, Great Bridge High, Great Bridge Intermediate, Great Bridge Middle, Great Bridge Primary and Hickory Middle; Norfolk's Larchmont Elementary and Sewells Point Elementary; and Virginia Beach's Glenwood Elementary, Great Neck Middle, John B. Dey Elementary, North Landing Elementary, Ocean Lakes High, Pembroke Elementary, Princess Anne Elementary, Princess Anne Middle, Red Mill Elementary and Three Oaks Elementary all won the Board of Education Distinguished Achievement Award.
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Recent National Education News
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Everyone’s Waiting for Trump’s Higher-Education Platform. In the Meantime, Here are Some Clues.
Chronicle of Higher Education
May 24, 2016
What might a Donald J. Trump presidency mean for higher education? Now that the Republican field has narrowed to a single candidate, it’s inevitable that higher-ed policy watchers are wondering. But it’s not an easy question to answer.
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, the remaining Democrats, have each unveiled comprehensive higher-education plans. Not so Mr. Trump.
Representatives of the Clinton and Sanders campaigns are slated to attend a presidential forum put on by the Committee for Education Funding, an advocacy group, in Washington this week. The group has not been able to line up a representative of the Trump campaign, though "we’ve done as much outreach as possible," said Ally Bernstein, a member of the committee’s board. When the group held a similar forum during the 2012 campaign season, representatives of both President Obama and Mitt Romney, his Republican challenger, attended, Ms. Bernstein said.
Mr. Trump has no previous experience in elected office that fans or foes can point to. On top of that, he just doesn’t seem to be that interested in talking about policy. Ahead of the first Republican presidential debate, an article in The New York Times attributed Mr. Trump’s appeal to "unfettered style," not "his positions," and said "he may be the first post-policy candidate."
Besides, as the Times article and many others have pointed out, when Mr. Trump does describe his positions, he reveals them to be inconsistent.
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Does Virginia have a school suspension crisis?
Virginia landed on national education news pages like
Education Week and
Christian Science Monitor because of a recent
non-profit report by the JustChildren Program of the Legal Aid Justice Center that concluded schools in the commonwealth exhibited "widespread, discriminatory overuse" of suspension and expulsion. African-American boys and those with disabilities were disproportionately the target of suspensions. The news also received significant play across the state in places ranging from
Newport News and
Richmond to
Charlottesville and
Danville. One article looked at efforts in
Roanoke to reduce suspensions.
The report made
eight recommendations for policymakers:
- The General Assembly should provide school divisions with additional funding needed to implement proven methods of preventing and addressing misbehavior without using suspension and expulsion.
- The General Assembly should pass legislation that appropriately limits the use of suspension and expulsion.
- The General Assembly should change the definition of “long-term suspension.”
- The Virginia Board of Education (VBOE) and VDOE should issue guidance to all school divisions about proven behavioral interventions and alternatives to suspension and expulsion.
- The VBOE and VDOE should issue a model student code of conduct.
- The VBOE and VDOE should include school discipline and climate throughout its plan to comply with the federal Every Student Succeeds Act.
- Local school boards should improve their code of student conduct.
- Local school boards should adopt a policy requiring stakeholder involvement.
At CEPI we wanted to note these recommendations (which didn't make it in detail into much of the news coverage) as one interesting viewpoint without endorsing or critiquing them.
At the same time, we were interested in seeing how the data from the
report's appendix mapped out visually by school system. Below are two maps developed with Tableaux Public - one noting the difference in risk of suspension for students with disabilities and the other for African-American students. In each, red shading indicates those groups were more likely to face suspension. For exact definitions, please refer to the report's appendix, linked above. Counties not shaded were null values in the report, likely because the number of students from one group were less than 10 students, making a precise calculation impossible.
Difference in Suspension Rate for Students with Disabilities compared to rate for Students without disabilities. (
Click here for interactive map)
Difference in Suspension Rate for African-American Students to rate for White Students. (
Click here for interactive map)
The clear take away is that a greater risk of suspension for these two groups is relatively widespread, though some systems have much greater disparity than others.
These gaps highlight the importance of one of the areas noted by CEPI's Senior Fellow, Dr. Richard Vacca, in his
annual preview of what education law issues are likely to emerge in 2016-17 - school safety and security.
"In 2016-2017, involvement of local police agencies in assisting school principals in providing and maintaining school security and safety will continue to raise questions of policy and practice. Generally referred to as School Resource Officers (SRO), armed police officers, while not employees of the school system, have nonetheless become a visible and integral part of the school environment, including their presence in school hallways, and at school system activities and events. In recent years, as the need to protect the safety of school students and staff from violence and disruption has grown, the involvement of the SRO has sometimes developed to an extent where the prerogatives and lines of authority between school administrators and the SRO are blurred. Critics claim that too many routine student disciplinary problems, usually the prerogative of a principal or assistant principal, are too often handled as a police matter by the SRO. In 2016-2017, where this is happening, local school system policy-makers must continue to work toward clarifying the disciplinary authority, roles, functions, and expectations of the SRO in student disciplinary matters vis-à-vis building administrators."
We excerpt other portions of his May Education Law newsletter
below.
Sincerely,
CEPI
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Education Law Newsletter - Potential Issues 2016-2017
Excerpted from the May edition of CEPI's Education Law Newsletter. This wrap-up issue for the year is written by Dr. Richard Vacca and looks ahead at issues likely to face school systems in the coming school year. Read the full newsletter on our
website.
"In keeping with past practice this final commentary of the 2015-2016 series is devoted to predicting potential legal and policy issues to watch next school year—a risky business to say the least. The paragraphs below are the results of this year’s “issue spotting” exercise.
At Risk and Special Needs Students
In 2016-2017, emerging issues involving a growing population of students from families where the primary language spoken is not English—students who enter school with little to no understanding or speaking ability in English (English language learners)—will require local school officials to reexamine and define the concept of “necessary related services” in a different, non-special education, context. In 2016-2017 a need to reexamine remedial education programs, as well as student identification and placement policies and procedures will be necessary. The inclusion of students from diverse cultural and language backgrounds will cause the terms “at-risk” and “special needs” to change, and the responsibility to “meet their unique needs” to become more comprehensive and demanding. In 2016-2017, school system resources (both fiscal and programmatic) will be stretched well beyond current limits as local school officials endeavor to provide all students with equal access to free, meaningful, and appropriate educational opportunities—including English language development, academic skills, and career readiness.
Student Discipline
Incidents of student-on-student harassment (including, but not limited to sexual harassment, bullying, threats of violence and harm, hate speech, use of vulgar language, sexually explicit pictures) will continue to spring up, especially at the secondary school level. Next school year, because student access to, dependence on, and use of electronic/social media have become “facts-of-life,” policy and legal issues will continue to flourish. Moreover, because much student-to-student electronic communication is created off school grounds, on non-school time, community-based conflicts, including organized protests, are likely to flare up during the school day, causing disruption on school grounds.
In 2016-2017, a rapidly developing, technology-driven, and ever changing venue of student First Amendment speech will out-pace school system policy. Thus, local school system policy-makers and their legal counsel will spend inordinate hours auditing existing policies and formulating new policies and student disciplinary procedures.
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