Farmington/ FMS Maintenance Department Wins Ben Luján Gold Award
By Joshua Kellogg
Farmington Daily Times
November 14, 2012
After coming close in past years, the Farmington school district won the Ben Lujan Gold award for best maintenance department of all 89 New Mexico school districts.
The award, sponsored by the Public School Facility Authority and the Cooperative Education Services, honors the best maintained schools in the state. Farmington Municipal Schools has come close to winning the gold in the past with bronze awards in 2006-2009 and silver awards in 2010 and 2011.
Steve Vollmert, plant operations supervisor, was excited about being first in the state after the department faced setbacks at the beginning of the school year.
- "That was amazing, actually," Vollmert said. "It was a really tough year. A lot of our veteran technicians retired. We lost eight in the last 18 months that had to be replaced while maintaining a good production output and retraining. They did a great job and paid attention to detail and worked really hard."
The program sends inspectors to schools to evaluate compliance with the state-mandated Preventive Maintenance Program, as well as looking at energy issues, record-keeping and equipment inventory, and tracking data in the state Facility Information Management System software program.
A team evaluated Farmington schools in October, touring two schools Mesa View Middle School and Esperanza Elementary School.
"We kept bouncing around to Mesa View and Esperanza. They looked at field work and inspected the schools, the grounds and the mechanical rooms and overall conditions of the facilities," Vollmert said.
"We've been pretty much been hitting the silver (award) for a few years. When they came up this year, they were very impressed with the program."
Vollmert said observers told him the district was very consistent with its life safety issues, along with maintenance, cleanliness and professional development.
A lot of effort was placed recently in training employees in handling the new work order system, which transitioned from paper to computer forms.
Vollmert said employees were taught to use the computer to input accurate data. He said it was a challenge adjusting to the system while ensuring smooth operations.
Superintendent Janel Ryan said the Ben Lujan Gold Award was well deserved by the maintenance department.
- "They take care of everything here and the safety of the kids," Ryan said. "They repair the buildings, I have some of the most conscientious people I've ever seen."
- The state's preventive maintenance program and facilities management system are both required to get funding by the Public School Capital Outlay Council, so the effort of the 106 maintenance, grounds, warehouse, custodian, office and department workers are helping the district make strides toward the future.
- Their work had a direct influence on FMS receiving $3.1 million for work on Farmington High School this past August.
- "We not only received the award, it helps with the PSOC," Ryan said. "We are starting the architecture process for FHS, they look at the maintenance and five-year plan. They always used Farmington as a plan for what they want (from other schools)."
Vollmert was excited to see the work done in previous years come to fruition.
"It took a lot of years to get to a place were we were comfortable as new schools were added and other schools remodeled and re-inventoried," Vollmert said. "Fortunately, a lot of good guys have stepped up and helped."
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ABQ/Charter School Online Class Credit to be Limited
By Hailey Heinz
ABQ Journal Staff Writer
November 14, 2012
Albuquerque Public Schools students seeking to take online classes from a charter school or other organization will soon find it harder to do so.
An APS board committee voted 6-1 Tuesday night to approve a new rule that sets a number of parameters for when the district will accept credits from charter schools.
- A key limitation under the new policy is that students will be able to take outside credit only if they are taking a class that isn't reasonably offered by APS.
- The new policy also says students must pass an approved final exam after taking an online course, to show they have learned the content.
The full school board still must approve the policy, which is scheduled for a vote Friday morning. However, all APS committees comprise the whole seven-member board, so votes rarely change between committee votes and full board votes.
The controversy over online credits from charter schools arose last May, when a senior at Albuquerque High School completed a semester English course in one weekend, allowing him to graduate with his class.
The student learned on a Thursday that he had failed his English class, so he enrolled in an online course through Southwest Secondary charter school. He paid $200 for the class, and on the following Monday he submitted a transcript from Southwest Secondary that showed he had passed the class with a "C" grade.
APS Superintendent Winston Brooks and members of the school board raised concerns at the time that a weekend was not sufficient to learn a semester's worth of material, and that the situation was unfair to students who worked hard to graduate on time.
At Brooks' request, the state Public Education Department did an audit of the specific Albuquerque High incident, and of online credits from Southwest Secondary in general.
- It found the English course the student took met state academic standards, and that there was no wrongdoing in the case.
- The PED report also encouraged districts to enter into written agreements with charter schools and to establish guidelines about accepting credits.
The dissenting vote Tuesday night came from Analee Maestas, who is a charter school administrator and advocate as well as a board member. She said APS is making a mistake by putting limits on the classes students can take.
- "I think this policy could actually push more students into the charter schools," she said.
- "If it's going to be so difficult to take one course that they need at a charter school, they may decide just not to come back to an APS school. And so I think it's really dangerous for us to really limit our students so much that they have fewer and fewer options."
Board member Martin Esquivel, who represents Albuquerque High and has been an outspoken critic of the incident in May, disagreed.
- "I think that certain charter schools have taken advantage of the situation and led us to this point with zero integrity," Esquivel said.
- "So I think that if anything, we're doing our students a favor, ensuring these online courses offer a shred of academic integrity."
The new policy could have widespread impact. The PED report released in July found that 259 APS students took 399 online courses from Southwest Secondary during the 2011-12 school year. The most common courses they took were government and economics.
Just because a class is offered at APS doesn't mean students won't be able to take that online class elsewhere.
- If, for example, a class is offered online through the APS eCADEMY but it fills up quickly, students can still take that class through a charter school.
- Other examples would be advanced math classes or languages not easily available to students through regular channels.
Robert Pasztor, an administrator at Southwest Secondary, said the school is pleased to enter into a written agreement with the district, although he said some aspects of the policy are vague, such as what constitutes a "reasonable" amount of time for a student to spend on an online course.
Southwest Secondary has not been enrolling APS students in online classes this semester while the written agreement is worked on, and Pasztor said there has been significant demand from students and their families.
"We have parents knocking our doors down trying to get extended learning," he said.
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ABQ/ EDITORIAL: State Fund Turnaround, a State Investment Council Success Story
ABQ Journal
November 14, 2012
It's a savings account lawmakers established with great foresight in ensuring that New Mexico's priorities have an income stream in good times and bad. Money from oil and gas royalties, fees from users of state land and state land sales go into the Land Grant Permanent Fund, and proceeds are taken out for public schools, state hospitals, jails and other basic government operations.
Four years ago the fund's bottom line was worse than bad, down $2.84 billion for 2008. The State Investment Council was plagued by pay-to-play scandals and lawsuits. Not good, considering annual distributions from the Land Grant and Severance Tax permanent funds account for about 15 percent of the state's operating budget, according to the SIC.
But this year - thanks to major changes in the SIC and the way the fund is managed - it is among the nation's top performers for funds with more than $1 billion in assets.
Under State Investment Officer Steve Moise, a holdover appointment kept in place by Gov. Susana Martinez, who also chairs the SIC, the council has spent two years building a firmer foundation for the fund.
- It fired more than a dozen underperforming investment managers,
- reallocated about $7 billion in assets to new managers hired through bidding processes,
- reduced internal management of investments from about 40 percent of assets to less than 10 percent, and
- improved accountability by webcasting meetings live and
- publishing most reports online.
The council has also shifted from investing in volatile stock markets to more stable income-producing assets, such as real estate, timber and infrastructure.
New audit, oversight and investment committees provide closer scrutiny of decisions, and the council now regularly reviews reports and has to approve any contract over $50,000.
The result?
Year-to-date returns for the first nine months of 2012 have the fund performance ranked second in the nation - up $2.3 billion since September 2011, from $13.7 billion to $16 billion.
Spokesman Charlie Wollmann says, "We've gone from one of the worst in the country in public fund performance in 2009 to one of the top-quartile funds in year-over-year returns."
The foresight behind that turnaround is vital to keeping the corpus of the fund intact, to delivering the kind of investment income New Mexico's schools, hospitals, jails and other operations depend on, and to ensuring the fund can fulfill its intended purpose.
The next step is to protect the fund from attempts to tap into tomorrow's money for today's agendas.
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Washington DC/ Common Standards Drive New Approaches to Reading
Schools across the country are undergoing huge shifts to satisfy the state-led literacy and math initiative
By Catherine Gewertz
Education Week, Vol. 32, Issue 12 [Edweek.org]
November 14, 2012
The Common Core State Standards aren't exactly new; it's been two years since most states adopted them. But it took those two years for the standards to trickle down from abstraction to daily practice, from a sheaf of papers in a state capital into a lesson plan on a teacher's desk. Now they're reshaping reading instruction in significant ways.
Whether the standards are shining a bright new light on reading or casting an ominous shadow over it remains a point of debate. But without a doubt, the shifts in literacy instruction envisioned by the common core are among the biggest in recent decades. And they're far-reaching: All but four states have adopted the literacy guidelines.
The standards paint an ambitious picture of what it means to be literate in the 21st century, said P. David Pearson, a professor of language, literacy, society, and culture at the University of California, Berkeley.
- "I think these standards have the potential to lead the parade in a different direction: toward taking as evidence of your reading ability not your score on a specific skill test-or how many letter sounds you can identify or ideas you can recall from a passage-but the ability to use the information you gain from reading, the fruits of your labor, to apply to some new situation or problem or project," he said. "That's a huge change."
Just take a look at some of the ways classroom instruction is changing because of the common standards.
- Reading instruction is no longer the sole province of the language arts teacher. The standards call for teachers of science, social studies, and other subjects to teach literacy skills unique to their disciplines, such as analyzing primary- and secondary-source documents in history, and making sense of diagrams, charts, and technical terminology in science. A 4th grade teacher in Shell Rock, Iowa, for instance, had his students write science books for 2nd graders in a bid to fuse content understanding with domain-specific literacy skills.
- Reading and writing are closely connected, and writing instruction is explicit. Teaching writing has often fallen by the wayside as teachers focus on reading, but the common core demands its return. And not just any kind of writing-writing studded with citations of details and evidence from students' reading material. Even the youngest pupils are learning to do it: First graders in Vermont are listening to a Dr. Seuss tale, over and over, searching for clues that back up the central thesis of the story.
- The scale tips toward informational text. Teachers are under new pressure to work essays, speeches, articles, biographies, and other nonfiction texts into their students' readings. In Baltimore, middle school students are reading newspaper articles about avatars and school uniforms, along with a cluster of novels, to explore the theme of individuality.
- There's a major press for curriculum materials that embody the common core. Acutely aware of states' and districts' needs, the major educational publishers rushed to issue supplements to their reading programs and followed with new-from-the-ground-up programs that purport to be "common standards aligned." An examination, however, shows that a shared definition of "alignment" can prove elusive.
- Educators are training a keen eye on ways to support students who struggle with literacy skills. The common standards make unprecedented demands on students, such as mastering the difficult academic vocabulary of each discipline, and teachers worry that many students could be left behind. In Albuquerque, N.M., educators are building supports for their many English-learners, setting up one school as a demonstration site where teachers get immersed in the standards and learn strategies for helping students who are still learning the language. Other Albuquerque teachers are working with a national expert to write specially tailored model lessons for 1st and 8th graders.
Even as the new standards dominate the reading landscape, however, other literacy issues are also coming to the fore in the common-core era. Reading proficiently by the end of 3rd grade has proved a popular rallying point for states, some of which have recently enacted policies that toughen various requirements-for teachers as well as for students-in pursuit of that goal.
New literacy research is also exerting its influence.
Findings that have been issued since the National Reading Panel's landmark report in 2000 had a key role in shaping the common standards, including a more nuanced approach to comprehension across the disciplines and media. But in an effort to focus on the end result, critics say, the standards often leave out-or get ahead of-the research on strategies teachers can use to help students achieve these new literacy skills.
False Choice?
The swirls of activity around reading, however, have raised as many or more questions than they purport to answer.
Some teachers worry that the common standards' emphasis on reading informational text, and on writing that's grounded in evidence from that text, could leave little place for reading literature and for the kinds of personal, creative writing that can unleash students' passions.
Advocates of the informational-text approach argue that it is a powerful equalizer in building content knowledge for disadvantaged children, and that it's crucial in building the skills most needed in good jobs and in college. Still others argue that nonfiction can engage some students in ways that fiction can't and that devoting more time to it needn't displace creative writing and literature.
Some reading experts are frustrated with what they see as an unnecessarily polarized debate about the standards. It's a false choice, they argue, to say that students can't write about things they're interested in and still learn to base their ideas solidly on what they've read about those topics.
It's also a false choice, those experts say, to argue that creative writing has to atrophy if expository writing expands. Or that reading great works of literature has to dwindle if students read more original historical documents. Blending all those literacy experiences into students' lives, they argue, is important for building flexible, strong minds.
How will that blend be achieved without sacrificing bulwarks of the discipline? An increasingly common element in answers: more reading.
"We have to dramatically increase the volume of reading kids are doing in English class and beyond," said Penny Kittle, an English/language arts teacher at Kennett High School in North Conway, N.H.
Where will the time come from for that additional reading?
"Time will always be something we have to wrestle with," said Dwight Davis, who is weaving more nonfiction texts, and more challenging books overall, into the poetry and novels he assigns his 5th grade students at the Wheatley Education Campus in the District of Columbia. "Do we have enough time to get it all in?"
Time isn't the only resource in scarce supply as educators put the standards into practice. There is the issue of money, as well.
How will districts and states pay for the professional development teachers need to adapt their instruction to the new expectations? And will all teachers get the support they require to provide the right kinds of help to the students with the shakiest skills?
Will schools have the funding to buy instructional materials that encompass a wider variety of text types? And even if the training, materials, and pedagogy come together well, will they indeed produce the college and career readiness that the standards promise?
In the new common-core era, question marks appear to be a key feature of the landscape.
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Halifax County VA/ Rural District Nurtures Dual-Enrollment Effort
Teachers and students targeted to make college-level courses a hot ticket
By Diette Courrégé
Education Week, Vol. 32, Issue 11 [Edweek.org]
November 7, 2012 [posted online 11/14/12]
Brittney Crews took so many dual-credit courses at rural Halifax County High in South Boston, Va., that she received an associate degree weeks before her 2011 high school graduation ceremony.
"It helps you go ahead and start your life instead of having to stay so long in school," said Ms. Crews, 19, who now attends Jefferson College of Health Sciences in Roanoke, Va.
Ms. Crews' situation isn't unique for Halifax County High.
- Nearly one-fifth of its 407 seniors earned associate degrees by the time they graduated last school year, and
- 91 percent finished high school with a college transcript.
- The approximately 1,700-student school has become a leader in dual-enrollment participation in the state for its emphasis on dual-enrollment courses.
Halifax County High has accomplished that despite its rural location, and it did so through a number of efforts, such as encouraging high school teachers to become college instructors, creating satellite sites for dual-enrollment courses, and raising its number of student participants by offering college-level classes in career and technical education areas.
The Halifax County district, which enrolls about 5,900 students, expanded its dual-enrollment portfolio under the leadership of its former superintendent, Paul Stapleton, who wanted to see more of his students go to college.
"It was like most things in education," he said. "If there's a need and you're in a rural area, you try to solve a problem. You know no one is going to come to your rescue."
Students in dual enrollment earn both high school and college credit for taking the same course.
- More than 70 percent of public high schools offered dual-credit courses about 10 years ago, according to the most recent available figures from the National Center for Education Statistics.
- But rural schools often face difficulties in offering such courses because of their distance from colleges and the high cost of transportation.
Program's Roots
Halifax County High's focus on dual enrollment can be traced back to Mr. Stapleton, who led the district from 2004 until this past June. He had been Virginia's state superintendent from 1998 to 2000.
Mr. Stapleton became an advocate for dual-enrollment courses much earlier in his career. He pushed the concept as long ago as 1987, when he was still the superintendent of the Charlotte County, Va., school system, a rural district that borders Halifax County. He saw dual-enrollment courses as a way to give rural students more opportunities and to level the playing field with more affluent areas.
The community didn't have a college-going climate, he said. Some students' parents didn't have a college education or didn't see the importance of one for their children, and some students were intimidated by the prospect of going to a major university.
"We were trying to give them some quality classes and make sure they were comfortable, and that they could see and their parents could see they were capable of doing college-level work," Mr. Stapleton said.
Halifax County had a few dual-enrollment courses in 2004 when Mr. Stapleton took over as its school superintendent, and he looked for ways to build on those.
For instance, transportation can be a huge cost for rural areas, and the nearest community college was at least a 35-minute drive from the community. Mr. Stapleton put the district's money into helping high school teachers become certified as college instructors so students could take dual-enrollment courses on the high school campus.
- For certification, high school teachers must have a master's degree in the disciplines they are teaching or a master's degree in any subject plus 18 credit hours in that discipline.
- Halifax launched an effort in 2004 to pay the cost for teachers to earn those credentials; it has assisted more than 35 teachers since then.
- In all, 48 of Halifax County High's 147 teachers now are adjunct college faculty members.
The district has since virtually eliminated that assistance for teachers because of budget cuts. It now covers only the classes required for teachers to maintain their certification to teach dual-enrollment courses.
An Educator's Experience
Sandy Wilborn is among the teachers who became a college adjunct through credits paid for by the district. Prior to deciding to become a teacher, she had earned her bachelor's degree in math and worked in a bank. When she decided to teach, she got a provisional license and a job at Halifax County Middle School as a prealgebra and algebra teacher. She realized she wanted to teach dual-enrollment courses to high school students.
"I wanted to be with students who really wanted to learn, and these students are given an opportunity to do so much more," she said.
With the cost of her graduate classes covered by the district, she earned her master's degree in 2008 and now teaches dual enrollment precalculus.
On-Site Instruction
Although many rural schools lean on virtual classes for dual-enrollment courses, none has been offered at Halifax County High within the past two years. The school has had all the dual-enrollment courses students wanted or needed on campus.
- Halifax County High students collectively earned 13,270 college credits through dual-credit courses in the 2011-12 school year.
- 63 percent of its students participated in dual-enrollment courses.
- The school has been able to reach more students by expanding its career and technical education offerings; 85 percent of those courses are dual-enrollment.
Melanie Stanley, the assistant principal for curriculum and instruction at Halifax County High, said those elective dual-enrollment classes are critical for students who otherwise might not think about college. The courses serve as an introduction to postsecondary education and show students they can do well and work toward a trade, she said.
"A lot of the kids who do not do well in academic core classes tend to have more success at tech-prep," she said. "The kids who would not have thought about going to college are now venturing out and being successful."
Unlike the core academic dual-enrollment courses, the elective dual-enrollment classes do not require a placement test or minimum state test score. Students don't have to pay extra to take the dual-enrollment classes for either kind.
The district charges Southside Virginia Community College and Danville Community College teachers' salaries, and both colleges charge the school for students' tuition. Those dollar figures end up being a wash, Ms. Stanley said.
Dual-enrollment courses are offered at the high school and three other sites within a five-minute drive. The school buses about 1,000 students to those sites during the regular school day; those classes end up being about 30 minutes shorter than the ones at the high school to compensate for the travel time.
The biggest off-campus site for dual-enrollment courses is the district's STEM center, for science, technology, engineering, and math, which is housed in a renovated shoe factory. Students also take dual-enrollment courses in a barn, which is the district's preveterinary center, and at the Southern Virginia Higher Education Center, where they learn about graphic design and high-performance manufacturing. All the sites are either in the town of Halifax or in nearby South Boston.
Researchers haven't figured out yet whether there's an ideal model for the structure of dual-enrollment courses. They have found that strong programs mimic a college environment and support the enrolled students.
Studies also have shown dual enrollment encourages college readiness and college completion. Dual-enrollment participants are more likely than their nonparticipating peers to enroll in college, and they tend to have better college grade point averages, said Melinda Karp, a senior research associate at Teachers College, Columbia University. Halifax County parents, students, and teachers say they're seeing the benefits of the dual enrollment, too.
Michael Good is a senior at Halifax County High. He plans to be a surgeon, and he'll earn an associate degree by the time he graduates next spring. He compared the difficulty of his dual-enrollment courses to that of Advanced Placement classes, and he said he expects the dual-enrollment classes to prepare him for the kind of work his college professors will expect.
"I feel like it will give me at least a jump on my general studies classes," he said.
Ms. Wilborn said the atmosphere of her precalculus classes is more like that of college. Students receive a syllabus, and they don't need a hall pass to go to the restroom.
"I have the same expectations that a college would," she said.
Financial Savings
One of the big pluses of dual-enrollment courses is financial. Students can save thousands of dollars in college tuition by completing some of their coursework while in high school.
Ms. Crews, the 2011 Halifax County High graduate who now attends Jefferson College-a small private school that costs about $32,000 a year-said she saved two years of college tuition. What's more, she'll be able to earn her master's degree in occupational therapy in the same four-year span that another student would need to earn a bachelor's degree.
School leaders say dual enrollment is doing a good job of preparing rural students for and encouraging them to go to college.
"This is the one program that is most beneficial to rural students to advance them on beyond high school," Mr. Stapleton said. "It's a great program that really does work for students."
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New York NY/ College Credit Eyed for Online Courses
By Tamar Lewin
New York Times
November 13, 2012
While massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are still in their early days, the race has begun to integrate them into traditional colleges - by making them eligible for transfer credits, and by putting them to use in introductory and remedial courses.
On Tuesday, the American Council on Education, the leading umbrella group for higher education, and Coursera, a Silicon Valley MOOC provider, announced a pilot project to determine whether some free online courses are similar enough to traditional college courses that they should be eligible for credit.
The council's credit evaluation process will begin early next year, using faculty teams to begin to assess how much students who successfully complete Coursera MOOCs have learned.
- Students who want to take the free classes for credit would have to pay a fee to take an identity-verified, proctored exam.
- If the faculty team deems the course worthy of academic credit, students who do well could pay for a transcript to submit to the college of their choice.
- Colleges are not required to accept those credits, but similar transcripts are already accepted by 2,000 United States colleges and universities for training courses offered by the military or by employers.
Coursera, founded last year by two Stanford computer professors, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, has 33 university partners and nearly two million students, who currently can earn certificates of completion, but not academic credit, for their work.
- "I feel strongly that degrees are really valuable to people, and having MOOCs allow for credit down the line will increase the number of students with the confidence and wherewithal to complete degrees," Professor Koller said. "If you're a random student from another country, what are your chances of being admitted to a university here? But if you can show you're a motivated student who's completing five courses and done well on the proctored exam, I think a university would pay attention."
The project is being watched closely by higher-education experts who expect MOOCs to broaden access to higher education and bring down the costs.
- "With the additional benefits of ACE credit recommendation for Coursera courses, students will have an unprecedented opportunity to obtain recognized credentials for their work," said William G. Bowen, the former president of Princeton University and the Mellon Foundation, and senior adviser to Ithaka, a nonprofit group devoted to digital technologies in higher education.
- Also on Tuesday, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced 13 grants, totaling more than $3 million, for MOOC research. The grants are intended to encourage the development of MOOCs in introductory courses, like developmental math and writing, to see how they might be integrated into community colleges to bolster completion, and to develop a pathway for MOOC transfer credit.
While there is some overlap between the Coursera project and the Gates grants, only four of the nine schools that received grants are putting their MOOCs on Coursera, while the others use different platforms.
The largest grants go to three groups - the American council, Ithaka and the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities - that will explore the credit issue, consider a possible consortium for collaborating on digital courseware, and research the University of Maryland's experience with MOOCs.
"It certainly appears that there is potential here, and we ought to kick all the tires and see what we can learn," said Molly Corbett Broad, the president of the American council.
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Detroit MI/ 826Michigan Expands to Detroit With $100,000 Grant for Tutoring and Writing Programs
By Kate.Abbey-Lambertz
Huffington Post
November 13, 2012
When the group that runs a robot supply store announced plans to expand to Detroit next year, it had nothing to do with the upcoming "Robocop" remake, or even the city's growing tech scene.
Instead, it's the writing and tutoring nonprofit tucked behind that Ann Arbor shop that will bring its services to Detroit students.
826Michigan, the local offshoot of a network of nonprofit tutoring centers founded 10 years ago in San Francisco by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius), will expand with help from a $100,000 DTE Energy grant. They've long wanted to bring the student-focused programs to the city, said Amanda Uhle, executive director of the Michigan chapter.
"From the outset, certainly since I started in 2006, we have aspired to do more in Detroit and serve students in a really significant way," Uhle said. "In the meantime, the economy has been challenging and we've had enough to do to stabilize our organization."
826 Michigan has run some programs for Detroit students and schools, but Uhle said the challenge has been that their volunteers are primarily Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti-based.
"That's really not our model ... we recruit volunteers who are from a certain community and allow students to be inspired by and learn from adult members of their community," she explained.
The grant will let 826Michigan hire a Detroit-based individual to recruit and train local volunteers, with the hope to have a corps of 100 by the end of the year. In Washtenaw, the nonprofit serves 2,500 students and has 400 to 500 volunteers participating annually.
The organization plans to work in schools around the city, and has begun forming relationships with DPS and charter schools as well as community organizations. They offer a range of tutoring programs and workshops, including everything from playwriting to college essay workshops in the Ann Arbor area.
"Most of our students are in the category of saying they don't like writing or they aren't good at school, and we give them the opportunity to experience other things," Uhle said. "The core of our program is one-on-one interactions between students and volunteers."
In Ann Arbor, and likely in Detroit, many of the programs happen at off-site locations, unlike some of the urban locations where students and families are more likely to be able to walk to the center.
"A lot of our programming is led by input from the students we're serving, their families and our volunteers who make it possible, where our volunteers are able to access, whether they have cars, have availability during the day," Uhle said.
Though the 826 locations are known for eccentric, kid-friendly storefronts, like Ann Arbor's Liberty Street Robot Supply & Repair and Boston's Bigfoot Research Institute, finding a permanent space is not the first priority.
"We really want the time in the community to get feedback," Uhle said. "What neighborhoods have taken to our program and which schools."
The nonprofit will likely open a center with a retail front after they have become more established. The stores may bring in some money, but they have a more important purpose than keeping robots in working order.
"They make students feel even better about coming to get help. It takes the stigma away, makes students feel that it's an engaging and fun place," Uhle said.
For more information about 826Michigan programs and volunteer opportunities, see www.826michigan.org. They will begin recruiting volunteers at the beginning of next year.
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New York NY/ Enrollment in Charter Schools Increasing
By Motoko Rich
New York Times
November 14, 2012
Although charter schools engender fierce debate - most recently over ballot measures in Georgia and Washington State - their ranks are growing rapidly, according to a new report. Between 2010-11 and 2011-12, the number of students in charter schools increased close to 13 percent, to just over two million.
The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, a nonprofit advocacy group, released the report on Wednesday. It showed that in some cities, charter schools - which are publicly financed but privately operated - enroll a significant proportion of public school students.
- New Orleans, where the city's schools were essentially destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, leads the nation in the proportion of students in charter schools, at 70 percent.
- But in six other districts, including Detroit, Washington, D.C., and St. Louis, more than 30 percent of public school students attend a charter school.
- According to the report, in 110 school districts, at least 10 percent of students now attend public charter schools, up from 96 a year earlier.
"To the extent families are in need of other options, growth does indicate there is something missing in the public school system," said Nina Rees, chief executive of the National Alliance.
Opponents argue that charters drain public resources from traditional schools, and tend to attract motivated students, leaving behind those harder to educate.
The performance of charter schools has been mixed, with some helping students achieve higher test results than traditional neighborhood schools, but many others delivering similar, or worse, results.
The fate of a ballot measure in Washington allowing charter schools in the state for the first time has not been determined. In Georgia, a measure creating a new state commission to approve charter schools passed.
In New York City, just over 48,000 - or about 5 percent - of public school students attended charter schools in 2011-12, up 24 percent from the previous year.
