Public schools need the support of their communities to succeed. They are, after all, public and open to all. It is our responsibility as members of the community to give whatever help and support we can to our neighborhood schools. No one can argue that receiving such support from both individual citizens as well as businesses and corporations are a hindrance. They enable the school communities to feel that they are a part of the neighborhood they serve, and that they are partners in educating tomorrow’s leaders.
In Oregon, Portland Public Schools are benefiting from a great relationship with the surrounding communities. The residents, business owners, school administrators, teachers, students and parents all see the need to work together to ensure the best education possible for Portland Schools students.
For example, Portland Schools have called upon volunteers to come out and work at 65 schools to complete tasks around the grounds. Such tasks include weeding, pruning, mowing, and mulching. The volunteers are needed to do these jobs, since Portland Schools have had to drastically cut its grounds keeping staff. Currently, the district employs only 4 full-time groundskeepers, who must maintain the Portland Schools 750 acres of property. That’s a lot of mowing! Participants of Community Career Day, as the effort has been named, had as many as 1,800 people participating in previous years. After all that hard work, all volunteers can head over to one of the Portland Schools benefiting from this beautification project – Roseway Heights – for a cook-out, music, and the dedication of new playground equipment.
Another example of the community and Portland Schools working together is the Summer Food Service Program being offered to kids aged 1 – 18. In conjunction with the city’s Parks & Recreation department, Portland Schools will offer the free meals at over 60 sites throughout the city. Parks, Portland Schools, pools, community centers and other child-friendly locations are among the different types of locations kids can go to get lunch. Any child can come have lunch on the schools and the city will pick up the tab; economic background is not considered in any way.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture funds the project, for cities that have schools where more than 50% of students are eligible for free or reduced lunches.
Big corporations can also get into programs that support public schools. Recently, Portland Schools partnered with the Nike School Innovation Fund to launch a new Summer Academy. This program is intended to help more than 400 students prepare for first grade. Nine Portland Schools offered the Summer Academy, which are being fiscally supported by a $250,000 grant from Nike.
While 20 Portland Schools have summer school programs in place, the Summer Academy strives to offer its students a bit more. The program offers its services to all Portland Schools students who demonstrate a need for an additional learning “boost”. Another way that this program differs from other summer programs is its target student body; only exiting kindergartners who need help reaching and exceeding achievement standards participate. Also, Nike volunteers visit the schools and volunteer their time by giving individual tutoring, buddy reading, leading arts and crafts projects, as well as organized games.
By: Patricia Hawke
Posts Tagged ‘School Administrators’
Community Involvement Important for Portland Schools
January 13th, 2010How Test Scores Affect School Rankings
January 13th, 2010If you’ve got a child in public school as young as third grade, you’re already starting to feel the testing frenzy. School administrators, teachers, and your child are all feeling the pressure to take and live up to state and national standards of learning. Those test results will be published in your local paper, appear on websites, and will be incorporated into every school rankings publication that exists.
What’s the Purpose of School rankings?
If you’re not familiar with the term, school rankings is the generic title give to any number of compilations of school assessments on the Internet, or in magazines and newspapers around the nation. Sometimes you’ll get a very specific set of school rankings, like Newsweek Magazine’s annual list of the best high schools in the country. Other times you’ll get a broader overview of the school demographics, test scores, ratios and facilities. The basic purpose of all of these is to help parents understand how well their child’s school is doing or to evaluate prospective new schools.
Test Scores and School rankings
How test scores impact school rankings depends on the specific assessment that it’s applied to. In a forum that attempts to compare schools across the nation, school rankings run into a very basic problem of apples and oranges. Because each state issues its own standardized test there’s no good way to compare a “B” rated school in Florida with a “B” rated school in New York State. For this reason test results for school rankings are a lot more useful when comparing schools at a local level.
Now throw private schools into the mix and your ability to decipher school rankings seems even more complicated. But here, you really just need to know what information you want. Some school rankings can be very useful for learning about the socio-economic status of a specific school. Another area I always recommend you check out in school ranking for k-12 gen interest is teacher turnover. This rate will tell you more about the overall climate of the school than any other.
Keep in mind that school rankings won’t always account for the special populations reported on the school’s testing. An inner city school that houses a magnet school may have high test scores for its magnet students, but a lower overall score because of the low-income neighborhood kids who attend. Sad- but a real factor of poverty that impacts school rankings k-12 gen interest.
You can use school rankings to help you evaluate schools in several ways. But just like any test the school gives your child, it’s one part of a bigger picture.
By: Patricia Hawke
