Neither Principal Mike Havener nor any of his administrators preview stories the students at Kirkwood High School produce for their TV broadcast, or for The Kirkwood Call newspaper or its website. Giving the high school journalists in the suburban-St. Louis district leeway to create stories that occasionally upset readers (even administrators) teaches them the full […]
Pre-K programs for students with special needs vary widely in quality and scope. Some states and districts have long included students with special needs in pre-K classes alongside their more typically developing peers.
Learning social skills such as sharing and teamwork in preschool has become all the more critical as kindergarten has become more rigorous and focused on academic assessments, says Jenifer Cline, student services coordinator in Great Falls Public Schools in Montana. In the past, students learned to play cooperatively and to follow instructions in kindergarten. But […]
High school students in the tiny Magazine School District in Arkansas receive three hours of sex education a year in grades 9 through 12—an approach that Superintendent Brett Bunch acknowledges is inadequate.
Millard Public Schools near Omaha, Nebraska, will switch to a college-like ranking system that designates graduates as magna cum laude, summa cum laude and cum laude. This was after administrators there discovered students had been loading their school-year schedules with honors and AP classes, and taking required, unweighted courses during summer school. “We want students […]
Albemarle County, Virginia—A snake bit Pam Moran in front of her class on her first day of teaching 40 years ago. Moran, now a superintendent in Virginia, had no one to blame but herself on that fateful day in 1975. Thinking it would be an unconventional way to introduce herself, Moran had brought a garter […]
Patricia Baltzley Board chair, Gardiner School District (Mont.) “The way high schools are currently designed—both with architecture and teaching and learning—needs to be revisioned in all high schools, not just those considered innovative. Instructional needs of the students are different and will continue to be different. We need to get out of the Industrial Age […]
Try to stay calm. Don’t start cursing. Keep your hands off the cops. But know that you have rights—like remaining silent, dissenting to a search and taking note of witnesses. Such knowledge can prevent police interactions from escalating out of control when teenagers get pulled over for a motor vehicle stop or otherwise encounter law […]
Bigger paychecks offered by wealthier suburban districts sometimes lure teachers away from St. Louis Public Schools. But a promising solution to a teacher-housing problem faced by many districts has emerged out of another challenge confronting St Louis: a collection of more than two dozen vacant school buildings on the selling block. While big city districts […]
Young refugees who have fled foreign war zones, religious violence and dire poverty represent some of the country’s most “at-risk” students. In one New York district, for instance, refugee students who recently heard alarms during a fire drill worried the school was being bombed. About 61,000 refugees age 17 and younger entered the U.S. between […]
