news-record.com

The Guilford County Juvenile Crime Prevention Council invites parents, youth, educators, community organizers, and others to an informational meeting on Restorative Justice this week.  Attorney Jon Powell, director of the state Juvenile Justice Program, will make the presentation.

According to a press release: 

"Restorative Justice, an evidence-based practice used successfully in schools and colleges, holds at its core that if crime is about harm, justice is about healing. Through alternative approaches to discipline, Restorative Justice provides accountability and responsibility, and teaches the skills necessary to repair relationships. The result is a positive social environment and strengthening of the community."

Find here a video of the transformation made by implementing Restorative Justice in a West Philadelphia high school.

Event details: 

When: Thursday from 9:15-11:15 a.m.

Where: United Way of Greater Greensboro, 1500 Yanceyville Street
Phone: 378-6600

The U.S. Department of Education announced today that it will allow individual school districts to apply for Race to the Top money this year after previously focusing on state-level initiatives.

North Carolina was one of 46 states to receive the federal grants over the past three years to pay for extensive reforms, including linking student data with teacher evaluations and paying for technology upgrades.

North Carolina was awarded $400 million and Guilford County Schools got a share of about $10 million. You can read the district's plans here.

The federal government has allocated $400 million for school districts and it plans to start accepting applications from July through December. In the meantime, it is accepting public input on the application process.

According to a press release, the education departments wants to fund programs that focus on better teaching practices in the classroom. Awards will range from $15 million to $25 million.

From the release: 

"As proposed, applicants will be selected based on their vision and capacity for reform as well as a strong plan that provides classrooms and teachers with the resources to prepare students for college and career. Districts must effectively engage and collaborate with teachers, parents and outside organizations to create their plan and provide assistance to ensure a successful transition to proposed reforms. Plans will focus on transforming instruction so that it meets all students’ learning abilities. Teachers will track and receive real-time data and information that helps them adapt their lessons and individualize instruction to accommodate the differences among their students.... .

"Teachers will have resources inside and outside the classroom that help them build on their talent and offer tools and ideas to improve their day-to-day work. School staff will work collaboratively to grow each teacher’s instructional skillset by leveraging the support and skills of their colleagues. And all students will have equal access to high-quality learning materials inside and outside of class, be challenged to demonstrate learning before transitioning to new material, and know where he or she stands in a given subject based on performance data."

I am checking with district officials to see if they know about the new grants and if they are interested in applying. Do you think GCS needs to apply for this or is its existing federal reform grants enough to close the achievement gap in Guilford County? 

Update: Chief of staff Nora Carr said the district might be interested, based on the details of the final proposal and how it aligns with the new strategic plan.

This morning we ran a story I wrote about Eastern Guilford High getting a new principal this year. I typically don't write about principal transfers, but I did cover this because of the controversy at the school last year regarding school discipline.

There was a contingent of parents -- primarily those who grew up in the community and remember the good ole days there -- who wanted Principal Greggory Slate gone. They complained he did not do enough to address student misbehavior and violence there.

I found out yesterday that the district will transfer Marilyn Foley of Page High to Eastern, but I wasn't able to confirm it until late in the day (the district sent out a press release around 6 p.m.).

Parent Lisa Clapp told me yesterday that parents will welcome Foley with open arms, but she needs the full support of central office.

"We're a highly impacted school," Clapp said. "It doesn't matter who they send here unless they have the support of Mo Green and his administration."

Tamisha Clapp, another parent and Eastern graduate, said she supported the change.

"You've got to have the right combination in there and I don't think Eastern has had the right combination of administrators to control that school," she said. "They need an overhaul."

I'll take a look at Eastern's discipline data at the end of the year to determine if progress was indeed made in reducing fights and other misbehavior.

FYI: Law professor Gregory Malhoit at N.C. Central University has released a new parent guidebook on personal education plans.

A 3-year-old state law requires that children who do not meet grade-level proficiency are eligible for plans that specify certain interventions, such as smaller classes, tutorial sessions, extended school day, and alternative learning models.

The city of High Point made an offer this week to Guilford County Schools to buy roughly 10 acres on Shadybrook Road for $294,300, the current tax value of the property.

An April 11 letter from City Manager Strib Boynton states that Mayor Becky Smothers and the members of the City Council were briefed and support the offer. The Guilford County Board of Education, which voted to negotiate with the city last week, will likely discuss whether to accept this offer at an upcoming meeting.

The city wants to use the land to add parking, fields and other amenities to an adjacent Miracle League athletic complex. School board member Ed Price has lobbied since last fall to sell the land. Price serves on the High Point Parks and Recreation Commission and worked for years to build the complex (he's had to abstain from voting on the issue).

The property was appraised in December at $400,000. High Point officials have said they would prefer a land swap, but are willing to use general obligation bonds to buy the property.

You can read about the history of this conversation between the city and district here.

A March report by a local researcher gives an idea of where things stand with Guilford County Schools' 5-year-old teacher incentive program, called Mission Possible.

This particular report is really not the one to read if you want know if the millions of dollars spent on the program over the years have made a measurable impact on student achievement. You will get an idea in the March report, but another comprehensive report on the first set of Mission Possible schools will come out by late May.

Instead, this report includes baseline data on the 2010-11 planning year of the program's second phase. You may recall that GCS got another federal grant to add 20 schools to the Mission Possible program and change the incentives such that all employees are eligible for performance bonuses. The new phase also places more emphasis on rewarding staff for growth in student test scores, rather than just reducing turnover in hard-to-staff positions.

There is some interesting data in the report. Researcher Holli Bayonas found that 44 percent of the older Mission Possible schools performed below average on state exams in 2010-11 compared to all schools in the state. Only two of those 18 schools performed above average.

I take that to mean that the hiring and performance bonuses have not made that much difference on an academic level. The schools that were added to the Mission Possible program in 2010 fared better on state tests, but they also weren't dealing with the same level of challenges as the older schools.

The report also showed that 88 percent of the teachers remained at the older Mission Possible schools in 2011, compared to 90 percent of the teachers at the new Mission Possible schools. Also, 34 percent of the relevant teachers with value-added scores at the old MP schools had above average growth scores, compared to 44 percent of the teachers at the new schools.

This makes me wonder why the new schools were even added. Do they need these bonuses? Or did folks stay in 2011 because they knew they would be eligible for bonuses starting this year? 

Anyway, check out the report and let me know what you think.

Guilford County Schools submitted a draft rezoning application on Wednesday for land it wants to purchase in Triad Business Park, according to Jeff Hatling, community development director with the town of Kernersville. This is for the airport area high school it wants to build. (Background here.)

The application is a request to rezone the land from business industrial to institutional public-special use district on 115 acres. The district has until 5 p.m. Monday to submit a final application and site plan to get on the next planning board agenda, so I'll write a formal story about the request if they file it next week.

Government and civic leaders took another step toward addressing racial disparities in the community by bringing back john a. powell, an internationally known legal scholar and expert on implicit bias, civil rights and racial identity. He is currently director of the Haas Research Center on Diversity at UC Berkeley.

Read his CV here. Note: He writes his name in lowercase.

About 200 people attended the symposium at the High Point Theatre on Wednesday, where powell shared research and his experience tackling the unconscious racial tension that many people carry with them. powell spoke about implicit bias in Greensboro last summer, and he got such a strong response that 18 sponsors, including Guilford County Schools, brought him back this week.

"We are hopeful that this will create real, genuine, deep dialogue about race, racism, any of the 'isms,'" said Jody Clayton, program coordinator with the National Conference for Community and Justice, one of the sponsors. "Our goal is always to create inclusive communities. This event is a huge leap toward that goal."

Other sponsors included: Cone Health, the human relations departments with Greensboro, High Point and Winston-Salem, Guilford County DSS, and the Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro.

Several high school students attended as part of their work for the student human relations commission in High Point. I spotted a number of educators and school officials in the audience: Principal Will Laine with Northern High, maintenance director Gerald Greeson, school board member Nancy Routh, and Kelly Hales, director of federal programs.

"To me, it's what I like to talk about," said Dwayne Washington, assistant principal at Welborn Middle. "It's a major issue and it doesn't get discussed enough."

During the presentation, powell talked about the fact that humans are only consciously aware of a tiny percentage of their thoughts and reactions. So a person can be well-meaning but still have racial anxiety that manifests in discrimination. People also consciously refuse to accept facts and figures that challenge their mental frames and preconceived notions (commonly referred to as cognitive dissonance).

"As a society we like the idea of not having racial hostility to the other," powell said. "And yet, at an unconscious level we may have some conflict.... In our society we have a lot of unconscious racial anxiety that can be easily activated."

In other words, a person may intend to treat people the same regardless of their race, but their body may react differently when they are around black males, for example. The unconscious mind gets its cues from society, from cultural narratives, cues, images and metaphors, not from logic or reason, he said. It tends to be simplistic and think in binaries.

"We are primed by our environment all the time, 24-7," he said. "We're getting messages about what's important, who's important, who's not important. And the messages affect us in powerful ways."

He said that Americans' goal should be to consciously manage their biases and to restructure institutions so that they don't result in racial or other disparities. He gave the example of requiring everyone to take an escalator to the fourth floor of a building. A wheel chair-bound person cannot use an escalator so it's only fair to install an elevator as well. He called that "targeted universalism" that focuses on goals and outcomes rather than expectations that all people are the same.

He also criticized bathrooms in stadiums; they are often built with a bias against women who need more stalls and more space than men.

One last thing: He did have some words about school systems' attempts to narrow the black male achievement gap. He said the gap points to the  economical vulnerabilty black families have endured during America's deindustrialization over the past few decades.

"We don't say how is the structure working? Who is it defined for?" powell said. "It all becomes let's raise up the esteem of African-American males so they can perform like everybody else."

Guilford County Schools is in the process of developing some programs to address the black male achievement gap now, so powell's perspective gives me another lens with which to view and assess the district's work.

Greensboro Day School announced today that it will name its new middle school building after the Jackie and Steve Bell family, which has donated $1.15 million to the private school's capital campaign.

Greensboro Day is building a new middle school, tennis complex and front entrace on Lake Brandt Road. The additions are part of a $7 million capital campaign that began in 2010.

Jackie and Steve Bell are former members of the school's board of trustees and Jackie serves on the Head of School's Council.

The Bell’s two sons, Jon and Durant, both graduated from the school and now lead Bell Partners, a family company. Jon Bell and his wife, Allison, another alumnus, also have children at the school.

Then check out the widget to the right that will send you to a file I've created with information on the candidates.

It's a work in progress, but I've posted responses to a candidate questionnaire for the District 5 and at large folks. I'm still waiting on a response from candidate Dave Owens.

Look for a formal story on the primary races in next week's paper.

Something else: I'm in the process of updating The Chalkboard blog to include internal and external links to eduction-related sites and articles. I plan to include information on charter and private schools as well.

Let me know the kind of stuff you would like to see here.