Things you learn updating links

A recent comment highlighted a need to review and update links in my blogroll. The 'Snap' preview function was pointing us to the wrong place and providing erroneous RSS updates. In doing so, I tripped across a great PPoint presentation over at The Lampost, a blog written by a Durham District School Board high school teacher.
It demonstrates how some teachers, good teachers, are enabling the use of technology as another tool for teaching and learning.

NOTL shenanigans-- UPDATED

Some recent coverage of the continuing Niagara-on-the-Lake / Niagara District Secondary School / District School Board of Niagara saga. There has been almost continuous coverage since the end of October when the high school's enrolment deadline passed-- the folks at SOS do a great job of keeping track of everything published relating to NOTL schools (including posts here, natch). Those following this issue should sign up for the site's e-mail advisories.
Two things popped out in this week's Niagara Advance. The first refers to what council is doing to determine whether or what its options might be to continue advocating for NDSS and achieve a reversal of the board's decision.

At a special council meeting last Thursday, council decided four town representatives would join forces with Niagara District Secondary School supporters and the Chamber of Commerce to decide how to proceed.
Councillors began their meeting with a behind-closed-doors discussion of legal options, said (Lord Mayor Gary) Burroughs.

These meetings will continue to be private, as the article notes, so the board is not kept in the loop of committee plans. If I lived any closed closer to NOTL, I would be filing a complaint with the council closed-meeting investigator immediately after the next meeting of this committee. It's a committee of council and can only meet behind closed doors when permitted under legislation. The same rules that apply to council apply to its committees. By appointing four members of council to that committee it's a de facto council committee, per my interpretation. Even if there's a filing fee to have the closed-meeting investigator look into it, the ensuing very public spanking will be well worth the fee.
Nevermind this closed-mindedness is the exact opposite of what the Community Schools Alliance is advocating boards do. So school boards have to be open and co-operative with municipalities, but those same councils can do whatever the hell they want to screw their boards over? That's rich.
So is that why NOTL council is forcing the DSBN to waste money on an Ontario Municipal Board appeal over its preferred Virgil school site? Council is about to zone the property the board has identified residential, over the objections of the board and the community that wants, after the same review process that led to the NDSS decision, a new school.

Councillor Jack Lowrey voiced his concern with keeping the land residential, calling it the least appealing option financially. Lowrey said he believes the DSBN will take the decision to the Ontario Municipal Board, requiring the Town to hire planners, since the town planners recommended it be zoned for a school, for a case he feels the Town would lose.
"When staff makes a recommendation, the judge weighs that very heavily. I want to make sure everyone at this table knows the kind of costs we would be looking at," he said. "I don't share any confidence that we're going to win this with the school board."
Chief Administrative Officer Don Smith said there has been dialogue between both parties and the DSBN is worried about the potential delay of going through an OMB hearing.
"They left me with the impression that they would be happy to talk to the Town in trying to settle this."
Gary Zalepa Jr. said he was glad to finally get some attention from the school board and he too is worried about financial implications, but took a different tack.
"I would like to know the financial implication of losing a number of residential lots where the school would be," he said. "[The DSBN] has failed on everything else in this town in regards to schooling. Let's stick with our original plan."

This is the worst kind of 'have my cake and eat it too' being put on display by town council. You put two members on the Alliance executive, go the minister complaining those meanies in the bully school board made a decision you don't like and then turn around and proceed to use that anger to screw the board over instead of working together with it on a separate school site? Council should be congratulated-- in a couple of strokes, it has managed to not only to overlook tending to the needs of students whose school will be closing at the end of this year, but also weakened the credibility of the Alliance by behaving as though its goals only apply when it serves its purposes.

NB: The advance did publish one more thing Friday, an opinion piece laying out the two situations and how town council is dealing with them.

Town councillors have so far maintained they want control over where a school can be located, and they want residential development on that Line 2 property. And some politicians are understandably angry at the board and not about to hand them anything on a platter. Rezoning that property would seem to be giving up on the possibility of a new high school and elementary school on the NDSS property, and nobody is giving up on anything just yet.
The two elementary schools deemed decrepit have served local children well for decades, and it seems will have to continue to do so until this battle is played out, either with a decision from the Ontario Municipal Board, a change of heart from town councillors, or school trustees giving taxpayers a break and building on the property they already own.

Full-day kindergarten = ECE shortage?

Michael Purvis at the Sault Star had this article published Thursday on the pending phase-in of full-day kindergarten in school boards across Ontario and one consequence some boards may have to deal with as a result. As readers here and elsewhere will know, the government has chosen to implement full-day kindergarten in a slightly different way than Charles Pascal had envisioned in his report, assigning a kindergarten teacher and early childhood educator to work with classes that could be as large as 26 students.

"There's going to be an opportunity, I guess, for early-childhood educators, we're just not sure they're here in sufficient numbers," said John Stadnyk, director of education for the Huron-Superior Catholic District School Board, which plans to open four of the new full-day classes next September.
Stadnyk said agencies that employ ECEs in Sault Ste. Marie warned local boards that the hiring pool may not be large enough.
"They're indicating (ECEs) may be hard to come by in the northeast region, not only in the cities, but in the rural communities," said Stadnyk.

One would hope the government -- including Pascal -- had considered this before making and accepting the ECE component of the recommendation. Are there enough certified ECEs available to meet demand? Admittedly, some childcare centres will get smaller as their charges move to full-day schooling, creating opportunities for ECEs to shuffle from these childcare centres to school boards.
If there will be a shortage, perhaps it's time for the plethora of underemployed teachers' college graduates to consider enrolling in that ECE program. First, particularly if they're not already occasional teachers working in kindergarten classrooms, they might actually learn something about early childhood development that's not covered in teachers' college. Second, it might guarantee them a job, given I expect the continued impact of declining enrolment will again lead to many of the province's school boards to trim their elementary teaching ranks.
A college watching these developments would be wise to sharpen its pencil, head to the nearest teachers' college and work out some sort of condensed ECE program for teachers' college graduates.

Globe crosses into the homework debate

The Globe and Mail has published a few things this week on the great homework debate. First was Tuesday's article on a Calgary family with two lawyer parents who wrote and got the school to sign a homework contract. Subsequently, Wednesday's paper and online had a followup article on other parents who've taken similar steps to intervene with their children's homework workload.
Both articles include parents seemingly at wit's end and on the verge of tears, or speaking about their children being on the verge of tears due to the homework load.
From Tuesday:

“It was a constant homework battle every night,” Ms. (Shelli) Milley recalled. “It's hard to get a weeping child to take in math problems. They are tired. They shouldn't be working a second shift.”
It's not as if, the couple pointed out, they don't value education. They know firsthand the work involved in earning university degrees. But they wanted the academic work done at home to be on their terms, based on where they knew their children needed help. Brittany, for instance, was struggling with spelling, but “we never had any time to focus on that because she had so much homework,” Ms. Milley said.
And there were plenty of frustrating nights, she said, when her kids were so tired, “we'd stand over them, saying, ‘write this, write that.' ” If that's what families are doing, she asked, “how do the teachers even know whose work they are marking?"

The lead in this story held a pertinent piece of information -- speaking to how the family would rush their kids home from soccer and skating to then have to deal with homework. A nagging question arose when I considered the lead with the graphs I've quoted above-- could the Milley children be overprogrammed?
Similarly, from Wednesday's piece:

It never even gets that far for Shirley Munk. “I refuse to monitor, remind about, and schedule time for any homework for my elementary school child,” the Halifax health care worker says. Her daughter, who attends Grade 3 at a private school, makes good grades and talks about what she learns in school. Ms. Munk meets regularly with her teachers. But homework, spelling words included, “is not a part of our family life,” she says. “I don't see why 61/2 hours of formal schooling isn't enough for an eight-year-old.”

This issue got a lot of press (as these things usually go) in 2008 when the Toronto District School Board completed a review of its homework policies. Other boards across Ontario, and the Ministry of Education, either followed suit or were already in the midst of their own homework reviews. A general guideline used by many schools is 10 minutes per night, per grade. So a Grade 3 student would reasonably be expected to have 30 minutes of homework per school night, and so on.
This issue very quickly gets into topics of how as a society we're raising our children and what today's parents are expecting from their children and are doing to raise (or not raise) resilient children able to deal with workload, stress, failure, etc. Not having kids myself, I don't know where a parent strikes a balance between helping their kids with their homework, monitoring that it's being done versus crossing the line and doing it themselves or going to the extremes these families did when they felt the burden was overwhelming.
The comments on the Globe articles beautifully get into these issues-- give them a read if you have the time.

Four reviews, two different approaches

A quad of accommodation review committee coverage Tuesday evening, from Welland, Huron County and Petrolia.
Welland's article was all about education-- teaching us and that community about the process that lies ahead and begins with the first few meetings.
Huron County's two reviews are a little more controversial-- there was coverage earlier in the fall I was unable to get around to posting here about on how municipal councils were opposed and one situation where council members appointed to the review withdrew because they didn't feel they could approach the situation independently. However, this too was a short article on process more than substance.
Far more interesting is the Petrolia review. The municipalities and communities requested the Lambton-Kent board conduct this review, realizing their schools and community needed to go through the process and search for some solutions.
And yet...

There were enough chairs for 200 people at Petrolia's Hillcrest School Thursday night, but only 25 were filled as the first accommodation review committee (ARC) meeting for Petrolia area schools was held.
"I'm kind of surprised there's not a lot more people sitting here right now," said Beth Wilcocks, a Grade 2 French immersion teacher at Hillcrest.
She said she's concerned about students' well-being at the school.

Kudos to Tyler Kula for noting this review is further complicated by a French immersion program review that impacts the review's schools, as well as the board's decision on where to place its first allotment of full-day kindergarten classes.

The role of a caring adult

Another coherent collection of related thoughts from the Education Writers Association seminar I attended last week in San Diego. At the first opportunity when we did our first high school visit, I was paired with Cindy Flores, a Grade 9 student at the School of International Business at the Kearney High Educational Complex.
Flores attended a larger middle school before applying for and choosing to attend the SIB at Kearney. The program interested her, and an older sibling attends one of the other schools at the Kearney campus. A reminder Kearney was a 2,000+ student composite high school now broken into four small schools. Each school has its own principal and its own dedicated staff who teach only within their school.
An important question for me to ask was how Flores was finding the social environment at SIB. In covering small-school reviews in Ontario, the importance of the peer group and the intimacy of knowing every peer in your grade cohort was frequently mentioned as a benefit of these 'small by nature' schools. I was curious as to how SIB students might see this given the vast array of middle schools these students are sourced from. The school isn't a 'zone' or neighbourhood school, meaning little to no opportunity to attend with the larger age-group cohort you may have started elementary school with.
Two months into her school year, Flores confirmed she didn't really know that many other people in her grade level. This despite there only being approximately 100 students in Grade 9 and the fact in her four courses this semester she would have an opportunity to be in at least one course with most of the students in her cohort (although I will note she was taking a Grade 10 French course).
The connection she had made, however, was with her advisory. At one point in the SIB tour we were ushered into a room full of students and the principal left so we could speak freely. Each of the four (including Flores) spoke very highly of the advisory and how this adult was the person keeping in touch, encouraging them to apply to bursaries and scholarships and doing the requisite followup if grades or attendance started to slip. The advisory was backed up by the principal, who demonstrated a knowledge of knowing every student's name.
Moving to Linlcoln High School later that day we were able to witness some of that same interaction. Lincoln's setup was more of a hybrid, where 'small learning communities' are the basis of each of the school's four campuses within a campus, led by two principals, two vice-principals and an executive principal. Joe Wiseman, vice-principal of the Science and Engineering Center, led the tour with two students, Xavier McGregor and Enrique Garcia. Again, we heard about this caring adult(s) making connections with students. Wiseman certainly knew and was keeping tabs on where everyone was going and supposed to be.

From EWA San Diego 2009

I specifically asked Wiseman whether he saw himself as an instructional leader, role-modeling and guiding teachers, or as that person connecting with students. He answered he saw his role as both and intertwined, that in providing instructional leadership to his teachers, he was connecting with students and vice-versa.
These visits allowed some important connections to concepts discussed in panels-- including one not so explicitly stated but that I've pulled out of the larger narrative: the importance of a caring adult to a student's success.
"How do we ensure every student is known and cared about?" Education Trust's Karin Chenoweth said in a Sunday panel titled, 'What big districts can learn from small schools.' "Who is hired to teach and assigned to which classes? How are teachers supervised?"
This is a concept I believe -- although the only person who disagreed during the entire seminar was Michael Klonsky -- can be picked up and implemented in any high school regardless of size with the right leadership in place and the right staff working in that team.
Further, though they're not directly comparable, an advisory isn't really that different from a student success teacher, mandated in 2005 and in place as part of Ontario's student success strategy since then. They're caring adults specifically tasked to connect with high school students who are at-risk of not successfully completing the first years of high school. In many schools, they're supplemented by guidance and vice-principals who take on many of the roles we saw on display at the schools we visited in the seminar.
Most importantly for my point in this post, they're in place at every high school in Ontario, regardless of size.

Bluewater survey report

Frequent commenter RetDir mentioned this in a comment on an earlier post-- the Bluewater District School Board Parent, Staff and Community Satisfaction survey has been posted as a PDF file on the board's website. The 91-page report is not for the faint of heart, however has a more digestible executive summary in its first pages.
I am reading through the report currently and may add to this post when complete. 
So far, I am struck by the common-sense nature of many of the comments in the executive summary. I would, as a skeptic, suspect if you were to do surveys of a similar size and scope at a number of other Ontario school boards you would find very similar results.
As RetDir mentioned, we're more comfortable with our classrooms, teachers and schools and the further away we get from that nucleus the less trust and understanding there is of who people are and what they do.
Despite any additional comments I may add here, the question now remains what the trustees will do with this information. What policies and procedures are they going to change as a result? Further and perhaps more importantly, how are they going to openly and obviously show that they've learned something since April and are working towards addressing the concerns raised from parents and staff? What things will they identify that haven't been done yet but need to be?
No doubt this report will make the rounds through either the Ministry of Education, the Council of Directors of Education (CODE) and/or the Ontario Public School Boards' Association, as this report has a lot to say about this board and by extension many others.