From the district….

Dear Parents, Guardian and Staff:

It has just come to our attention that a student who attends the Mahopac Middle
School was recently diagnosed with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus
(MRSA). The student is currently under a doctor’s care and is recovering. Upon learning
of this, we promptly informed the Putnam County Health Department and are working
with them to minimize any risks to students and to employees.

Under the circumstances, I believe it is important that all families and staff be provided
with information about the infection and about actions that can be taken to help prevent
its transmission.

Read more of this entry »

Several hundred students walked out of Clarkstown North High School this afternoon to protest conditions in the building, my colleague Steve Lieberman reports.

Here’s the story:

Several hundred students walked out of classes at Clarkstown North High School about 12:20 p.m. today, protesting conditions in the building.

The students were on the sports fields at the school, holding signs that read, among other slogans: “Walkout CSHN,” “Clean North” and “Rams not roaches.” The school mascot is the Ram.

Students chanted various slogans, including, “Save our school, roaches must go” and “No more rats.”

Standing near the fence on Congers Lake Road, students said they had first planned to march to Town Hall, but school administrators told them they would be arrested if they left campus.

The district has in recent weeks has found and removed three dead rats, including a decomposing rat that was crawling with maggots, at the high school’s annex building. District officials said they believe the rats came from a nest near a Congers Road home that was recently demolished.

Parents have criticized the administration for waiting too long to inform them of the situation.

North senior Stephen Jean-Baptiste, 17, accused the district of letting the situation fester.

“It’s disgusting,” he said. “There are roaches and rats and they’re not doing anything.”

Student Austin Abaras, 14, said he’d seen some insects in the school.

“They have roaches in the bathroom,” he said. “It’s disgusting.”

The district superintendent’s office refused to allow a reporter or photographer onto school property to speak to students and said the principal could not speak with a reporter.

“The principal is not available today,” said Maureen Sullivan, assistant to Superintendent Margaret Keller-Cogan. “He is actively working with students.”

Check back for updates on LoHud.com and read more about this story tomorrow in The Journal News. (Photos by Angie Gaul/The Journal News)

 

 

The latest to come out of the case against four Mahopac educators who stand accused of child endangerment is as follows…

• Nov. 9: The District Attorney’s Office must respond to the defense’s motions to dismiss the case. (Original response date had been set for Oct. 30, but the prosecution requested an extension.)

• Nov. 15: Justice Thomas Jacobellis will make a decision on the motions.
• Nov. 20: All parties are due back in court “for control purposes.” This essentially means the judge will review where the case is procedurally and set new trial dates, if necessary. Trial dates initially had been set for Nov. 14, 15, 16 and 19.

Please stay tuned…

Today’s word of the day is…

Renascent: coming again into being; showing renewed growth or vigor.

Today’s word of the day is…

Approbation: an expression of approval or praise.

Today’s word of the day is…

Prescience:  knowledge of actions or events before they occur; foresight.

Today’s word of the day is…

Poniard: a dagger with a thin triangular or square blade.

Today’s word of the day is…

Gambol: a playful skipping or frolicking about.

The morning evacuation and Spitzer absence notwithstanding, NYSSBA Executive Director Timothy Kremer said that Day 2 of the convention (it started yesterday and ends Sunday afternoon) went well.

There’s been lots of positive feedback, he said. “People feel they’ve had a worthwhile day.”

NYSSBA officials said that today’s most popular seminars included one on tech-savvy “millenial children” and another entitled “Building Connections—100+ Ideas to Improve School Climate.”

The latter, on helping schools create cultures in which staff and students feel united, left East Ramapo school board member Mimi Calhoun so impressed that she had to stop presenter Mark Schrarenbroich as he made his way out of the seminar room. “We can’t stop talking about your ideas,” she told him.

Joining Calhoun at the session was fellow East Ramapo board member Suzanne Young-Mercer, who, like Calhoun, was very excited about Schrarenbroich’s presentation. Among the ideas the women were buzzing about:

• * Bringing senior citizens in once a week to greet children in the mornings.


• * Allowing students to paint dreary school bathrooms with their own designs.


• * Having school staff post family and other personal pictures in school hallways.

The women agreed that improving a school’s culture helps motivate students to perform better academically. Young-Mercer said that, in East Ramapo, there are already efforts in place that are in line with Schrarenbroich’s ideas.

But, she added, “we may have to step it up a notch.”

No education conference these days would be complete without talk of the federal No Child Left Behind law, and this year’s NYSSBA convention is no exception.

New York state Education Commissioner Richard Mills defended the law during question and answer session this afternoon. He said that NCLB, despite its “rough edges”, has “helped us in a major way.”

He expressed support for the grades 3 through 8 standardized testing implemented under the law. Unlike the former system—which only tested students in grade 4 and 8—the new testing practices have shown that performance trails off after grade 5, Mills said.

The tests, he said, help school officials “to find the danger points and intervene.”

A school board member from Long Beach challenged Mills: she voiced an oft-heard criticism—that all the testing stymies creativity and forces teachers “to teach to the test.” Read more of this entry »

Gov. Eliot Spitzer was supposed to be at today’s convention to receive the NYSSBA 2007 President’s Award “for his significant contributions to state public education”, according to the convention program…but, as I just learned, he didn’t show.

Why? Blame the goings-on in our nation’s capital. Apparently Spitzer attended a meeting in Washington D.C. this morning that should have been over in time for the governor to high-tail it back to New York. No such luck—NYSSBA officials tell me the meeting ended up being a day-long affair. (Instead, state education director Manuel Rivera accepted the award on his behalf.)

Last year’s NYSSBA conference also included a prominent absence. Then-state Comptroller Alan Hevesi, who at the time was embroiled in a high-profile scandal, canceled his planned speech on pension reform, fiscal oversight and audits.

Stephanie Gouss, the spokeswoman for the Rockland Board of Cooperative Educational Services, was unfazed this afternoon by the governor’s absence.

“When you have a politician or politico, you have to figure that there are chances they may not come,” she said.

There’s a neat perk for school officials registered for today’s conference: NYSSBA is giving all of them a chance to get their photos taken in front of New York City landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty and Times Square…without leaving the hotel.

Conference participants stand in front of a green screen—the same type of screen often used to insert out-of-this-world backgrounds in sci-fi movies and the like—to get their photo taken and then wait for NYSSBA photo pros to superimpose a city image over the green space.

Ifay Chang (pictured below), a school board member with Read more of this entry »

While I was at the cyberbullying session, Clarkstown school board president John Davidson was a seminar on “green design” for school buildings. According to the NYSSBA brochure, “better designed buildings can preserve energy and natural resources for future generations.”

Preserving energy, of course, can make for lower school electricity bills—music to the ears of any taxpayer and school finance officer.

But, as Davidson warily pointed out to me after the seminar, to reap the cost benefits of green facilities, districts first need to shell out some money to build said facilities.

“Green construction is like window-shopping on Fifth Avenue,” he said. “It all comes down to whether you can afford it.”

So will green design play into Clarkstown’s plans to renovate the ailing Clarkstown North High School building?

Fortunately, I was able to pose that question to North Principal Harry Leonardatos, also an attendee at this conference.

Unfortunately, Leonardatos was non-committal: He said he still needed more information.

When I walked into a session entitled “Tackling Cyberbullying Through Policy”, I was surprised to see that there were well over a dozen chairs still empty in the conference room.

Judith Schurmacher, a school board member with the North Salem school district, was surprised too.

Schurmacher said that she personally didn’t know of cyberbullying in her district, but if it happens, she said, “I want to be ready.”

By about 15 minutes into the session, most of the seats were filled and there was also no shortage of crowd participation.

When Jessica Goldstein, a senior policy consultant with NYSSBA, asked the crowd to define popular abbreviations teens use when talking to their peers online, many (though by far, not everyone) responded aloud and in unison, correctly identifying “OMG” as meaning “Oh my God”, “WU” as “What’s up?”, “GTG” as “got to go” and, perhaps most importantly, “PAW” as “parents are watching.”

“You guys are sharp,” Goldstein said. “This is awesome.”

The seminar included some discussion of the nexus between school and online bullying that takes place after school hours. The presenters said that while school officials may not be able to discipline students for the cyberbullying that they do from the comforts of their home computers, it might make sense at to bring the cyberbully, his/her victim and their parents in for a meeting at school anyway. It could be the case that the cyberbully’s online antics are related to frustration over bullying that he or she has personally experienced at school—perhaps at the hands of the child who later became the cyberbullying victim. How’s that for role reversal?

More later. GTG.

I found Mt. Pleasant superintendent Alfred Lodovico relaxing on a chair just outside a conference room. He had just finished attending a seminar on “identifying and developing aspiring administrators”—in other words, it was about convincing teachers to give up their 186-day work year to become administrators.

Lodovico said generally, that’s not easy. Besides the difference in work hours—administrators are at their jobs year-round—Lodovico said that another issue keeping teachers from climbing the administrative ladder is the salaries. When you compare salaries to time spent on the job, he said, some teachers actually earn more than their administrative superiors (on an hourly basis, anyway.)

Speakers at the seminar suggested using internships to draw more teachers to administrative positions. As Lodovico explained it, teachers can get their feet wet in (paid) administrative internships for a year. If they like it and decide that administrative work is for them, they get a leg up when it comes to applying to admin positions in their district. If they don’t like it, they can go back to their teaching positions, no harm, no foul.

Lodovico said he’ll be discussing bringing administrative internships to Mt. Pleasant with the district’s school board.

“When you like (your experience) as an administrator, the emphasis on money diminishes somewhat,” Lodovico said with a smile. “That’s the trick.”