PSFA Daily News Digest

15-17 December 2012

www.nmpsfa.org 

Barbara Riley, Editor  ·  Email:  newsdigest@nmpsfa.org 

ABQ/ APS Site Safety Plans in Place for Every School in the District

By Hailey Heinz

ABQ Journal Staff Writer

December 15, 2012  

Albuquerque Public Schools and city police officials fielded calls from parents Friday, asking about safety at local schools and what parents can do to protect their children.

The calls were in response to the shooting in Newtown, Conn., where 28 people - including 20 young children - were killed.

APS spokeswoman Monica Armenta said she told parents APS has site safety plans for every school in the district.

• "Our officers spend their days in the schools patrolling, and they have constant communication with administrators and teachers," she said. "We feel that to the extent that we can, we have the schools well-protected."

Albuquerque police Officer James Vautier, a school resource officer at Manzano High, said police can provide training on what to do if there's a shooter in a building.

• Vautier said the department's training instructs people first to run away from the shooter.
• If there is nowhere to run, they should hide.
• If neither option is viable, he said people should keep moving, because shooters generally aren't trained to hit moving targets.
• He added that fighting back can be an absolute last resort, and the best way to fight back is for multiple people to swarm the shooter.

"But that's not the first response. The first response is to run for your life," he said.

Vautier also emphasized the best way to prevent shootings is to look for red flags and strange behavior beforehand.

• "Stopping the threat before the threat becomes active is the key," he said. "That involves communication with your counselors and your teachers, and knowing those kinds of behaviors that might signal a warning."

Armenta emphasized the same thing, pointing to a September incident at Tony Hillerman Middle School. In that case, someone came forward with information about a possible school shooting plot. A psychological evaluation of two sixth-graders found the students were serious about their scheme, although they did not have guns. Those students no longer attend APS. Armenta said the person who came forward was "courageous."

• "The power we have is in information, so if you are ever aware of anything that could pose a public threat, tell someone," Armenta said.

Vautier said parents should emphasize to their children that lockdown drills should be taken seriously. "Don't take it like a joke; don't be complacent with it," he said.

There has been no directive for APS teachers to discuss the Connecticut shooting in class, Armenta said, and the district will leave it up to parents to decide if and how to talk to their children about the tragedy. There will be school counselors available Monday if students wish to talk.

• Chandra Cullen, a child psychiatrist at the University of New Mexico Children's Psychiatric Center, said younger children will need reassurance that their own schools are safe, and parents should not keep their children home from school or change plans. She said this sends a signal to children that they aren't safe.

"I would encourage parents to not change their routines, not keep their kids home from schools," Cullen said. "It's a very sad situation, but there's really no reason, especially here in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to change our daily routines for ourselves and our children, except to keep these families in our thoughts."

Talking to kids about the shooting

Things to do:

• Share accurate, confirmed information with the child
• Let your own sadness show, but be calm
• Listen to children, and validate their ideas and feelings
• Let them know it is OK to cry
• Reassure children that the death does not mean they or someone else will also die soon

Things to avoid:

• Don't tell children how they should feel
• Don't force students to talk if they aren't ready
• Don't avoid the subject because of your own discomfort
• Don't be graphic or detailed about the incident
• Don't give abstract or fantasy answers; they create confusion

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ABQ/ UNM-CEPR Presentation to PIPER Committee

UNM Center for Education Policy Research

December 14, 2012

The Center for Education Policy Research presented "Health and Academic Success Through Policy Implementation" to the Partners in Prevention, Education, and Research Committee:

http://cepr.unm.edu/news/48/15/CEPR-Presentation-to-PIPER-Committee.html

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ABQ/ NM Still Battling Teen Pregnancy

By Deborah Ziff

ABQ Journal Staff Writer

December 16, 2012  

The bridal and quinceañera salon in the heart of Albuquerque's South Valley is closed for the evening, but a small group of parents and teens gathers there.

They munch on sandwiches and chips while Jessica Salas, a promotora, or community health educator, stands in front of big flipboards of the human anatomy.

"Can any of you tell me what is the 100 percent effective way to not become pregnant or get a sexually transmitted disease?" Salas asks.

A girl raises her hand and says: "Staying abstinent." Salas nods, before launching into a list of other birth control methods.

This New Mexico Data Collaborative map uses information from the state's 109 designated "Small Areas." The state Department of Health decided to embark on the small area project - rather than just using data on the county level - to provide health information at the more localized community level. http://nmhealth.org/DDSD/nmfit/Providers/documents/Exploring%20Neighborhood%20Data%20with%20Online%20Maps%20-%20Tom%20Scharmen.pdf.

This is a home health party, a gathering put on by the New Mexico Teen Pregnancy Coalition to talk to parents and teens about anatomy, birth control, sexually transmitted diseases and communication.

It's no accident that the meeting is held in this part of town. The area where the salon is located - Isleta and Goff Boulevards SW - has one of the highest teen birth rates in the Albuquerque area.

There were an annual average of 89 live births per 1,000 teen women who live in that neighborhood between 2005 and 2009, according to a map created by the New Mexico Data Collaborative, a project that provides detailed mapping of health and social issues at the neighborhood level. That's almost three times the national average.

Using Department of Health vital statistics, the map shows hot spots scattered throughout the city with high teen birth rates.

• "What that map is telling us, in some parts of Albuquerque, the teen birth rate is much higher than the national average and much higher than the state average," said Peter Winograd, director of the Center for Education Policy Research at UNM. "It's widespread enough for this to be an issue for our city to discuss."

Having a baby as a teen makes it more difficult for both young moms and dads to finish their education, compete for good jobs and give the best health care and opportunities to their babies, experts say.

Although the South Valley did not have the highest teen birth rate in the metro area, babies born there are at the highest risk in the city for late pre-natal care, low birth weight and poverty, based on Department of Health data compiled by Winograd. In 2011, it was served by only one high-quality child care program, one city of Albuquerque pre-school and four Head Start programs.

• "As we think about trying to improve education and student success for all of our kids, one of the things there's strong agreement on is the importance of maternal health and early childhood education and health care," Winograd said.

Poverty link

It's especially important in New Mexico, where the teen birth rate is the second highest in the nation, with 53 births per 1,000 teenagers ages 15-19. The national average was 34.2 births per 1,000 teens, according to the most recent numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

• Fertility rates in New Mexico trended down by 5.3 percent for women ages 15-17 and up by 2.5 percent for women ages 18-19 between 2000 and 2009, according to the New Mexico Data Collaborative.
• The data for Albuquerque shows a clear correlation: Areas with high teen birth rates also have high poverty rates and low high school graduation rates among mothers.

"What is so important from the research is a mother's education level is such a strong predictor of a child's education level," Winograd said. "On the other hand, if a mother doesn't have a high school education and is struggling to make ends meet, it's very important that there be support."

For instance, the home health party is held in a neighborhood where nearly one-quarter of families live in poverty, the third-highest in the city. The percentage of mothers with no high school diploma is also high, at about 44 percent.

• The highest teen birth rate in the city of Albuquerque is in the southeast neighborhood in the International District. There were an annual average 122 live births for every 1,000 teen women from 2005 to 2009.
• That area also has the city's highest poverty rate - about one-third of families live in poverty - and the highest percentage of mothers with no high school diploma, at nearly 50 percent.

Support is crucial

Ashley Aragon, 19, learned she was pregnant when she was a senior at Atrisco Heritage High School. Her mom, who had two kids while in high school, insisted that she graduate.

"She just told me I have to push through and finish school," Aragon said. "Pregnancy is not an excuse to drop out. My mom did it while she graduated high school pregnant. There's no excuse to not go."

She's put her plans to go to Central New Mexico Community College on hold for one semester while she cares for baby Shawn, but expects to start in January to study cosmetology. She lives with her parents and her husband, the baby's father. He helps her care for Shawn.

Not everyone has help from their families.

"There are some young people who do OK," said Sylvia Ruiz, executive director of the New Mexico Teen Pregnancy Coalition. "With the proper support, child care, support for continuing your education, cash assistance, food stamps, housing, then, yes, young people can do OK."

She continued: "The majority of people we work with who have these risk factors don't have that. They don't have an extended family, grandparents who can step in and baby-sit and teach the young person about colic in an infant, or an immunization schedule or a well child exam. That's the population we're concerned about."

More programs are now targeting young fathers as well as mothers, Ruiz said. Teen mothers living apart from the father of their child report that half of the dads met with their child in the past month, and among those who did, about half visited at least weekly, according to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.

Proven strategies

Ruiz said there are proven strategies to prevent teen pregnancy.

"It's no secret," Ruiz said. "They are:

• male involvement,
• comprehensive sex ed in the schools,
• confidential clinic services,
• service learning programs, and
• programs that teach parents to talk to their adolescents about reproductive health."

In New Mexico public schools, the state Health Education Content Standards requires abstinence education in second through 12th grade. Abstinence education is still the core during comprehensive health education in middle and high school, but other forms of birth control are also discussed.

"When we talk about ways to prevent teen pregnancy, a lot of that education is focused on healthy relationships, decision-making and consequences of those decisions," said Kris Meurer, director of student, family and community supports at Albuquerque Public Schools.

The home health parties held by the New Mexico Teen Pregnancy Coalition are part of a program called Hablando Claro, developed by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, to teach parents to talk with their teens about sex.

The party in the South Valley starts with a pre-test where the participants are asked questions about anatomy and birth control. Over the course of the next few hours, promotoras Jessica Salas and Enriqueta Benitez give a presentation in both Spanish and English.

The subject matter is sensitive, so participants are asked to sign a consent form before they begin.

The gatherings follow a Tupperware party format and are usually held in homes - or other places where people will feel comfortable - and with food.

There were a few awkward giggles, especially during the birth control section. But as the session went on, participants began to feel more comfortable asking questions.

Fabiola Marquez, who requested the party, had her first child as a teenager. Now 39, she doesn't want her three teenage boys or 8-year-old daughter to follow her path.

"It's a commitment you have for the remainder of your life," she said in Spanish. "It changes your life. It changes your adolescence, it changes your education, everything."

If she had not had a child so young, Marquez said she would have enjoyed life more, been more adventurous, and gone to college. Now, she talks to her 19-year-old son about protection, sexually transmitted infections and pregnancy.

He's in school at CNM, and is not a teen parent.

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ABQ/ Half of Teen Moms Don't Earn Diploma

By Deborah Ziff

ABQ Journal Staff Writer

December 16, 2012  

The national teen birth average was 34.2 births per 1,000 teens, according to the most recent numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In New Mexico, the teen birth rate is the second highest in the nation, with 53 births per 1,000 teenagers ages 15-19.

• In New Mexico, only about half of teen mothers get a high school diploma by age 22, compared to 89 percent of women who didn't have a teen birth, according to a report by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.
• About 30 percent of teen girls who have dropped out of high school cite pregnancy or parenthood as a reason, according to the group.

And that's bad news in Albuquerque, where more than half the students in some high schools say they have had sexual intercourse and more than 10 percent of middle school students say they have also.

The teen birth rate in some Albuquerque Public Schools clusters is more than double the state average.

So how is APS dealing with the issue and what is it doing to help pregnant kids graduate?

• "Our goal is to graduate kids with the ability to go on to some type of career, or on to college, so they can be successful," said Kris Meurer, director of student, family and community support at Albuquerque Public Schools.

The signature APS program is New Futures High School, a school for pregnant and parenting teens.

• About 200 students - of which four are male - now attend the school.
• In addition to a regular academic load, the school has child care, provides transportation throughout the district, allows students to breastfeed in class and offers classes in child development and health.
• Unlike other schools, New Futures offers a two-week maternity leave and time to make up work.

Not all pregnant or parenting teens choose to attend New Futures, preferring to remain in their own schools.

Albuquerque Public Schools officials do not track how many pregnant or parenting teens attend each high school. There are neighborhoods with high teen birth rates scattered throughout the city.

• Highland High School is in the neighborhood with the city's highest teen birth rate - an average of 122 births a year per 1,000 teen girls.
• Both Rio Grande and Atrisco Heritage high schools draw from a neighborhood with the second highest rate, at 110 births per 1,000 teen girls.

Two APS schools offer city-run child care: Rio Grande High School and School on Wheels, an alternative, work-study, credit-recovery school.

APS high schools, except Cibola and La Cueva, have a "preschool lab" for 3- to 5-year-olds.

• Students and employees are given priority, but remaining openings go to the public.
• Sandia High has a preschool as part of its course on parenting and working with young children.

Students can also visit school-based health centers at three schools: Albuquerque High, Highland High and Rio Grande High. But only about 7 percent of students who visit the health centers visit for family planning, Meurer said.

Nearly half of high school students in Bernalillo County say they've had sex.

That's according to the 2009 New Mexico Youth Risk and Resiliency Survey, which found the percent of high school students who say they've had sex is around 47 percent.

Peter Winograd, director of the UNM Center for Education Policy Research, compiled data from the New Mexico Youth Risk and Resiliency Survey in 2009 to show where students are most sexually active in Albuquerque. APS is one of the few districts that gets enough student responses to break the data down by school.

• The Albuquerque public high school with the highest percent of students who have had sex is Del Norte at 54.4 percent.
• Rio Grande and Cibola high schools also exceeded 50 percent.
• The study did not include charter schools.

The percent of middle school students in Bernalillo County who say they have had sex is around 11 percent, according to the survey data.

• Grant Middle School in southeast Albuquerque had the highest percentage of middle-schoolers who have had sexual intercourse with 17.4 percent.

"The issue we're raising here is it appears to us there's lots of middle school students who are having sexual intercourse and high school students who are having sexual intercourse," Winograd said. "And we have a very high teen birth rate here in Albuquerque."

Whether schools should be able to distribute contraception is a controversial topic.

• APS employees cannot distribute contraceptives.
• That policy does not apply to the staff at school-based health centers, but the program staff said in the past they do not dispense birth control or condoms.
• They can write prescriptions or make referrals to a different doctor.

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Santa Fe/ COLUMN: Glenis Redmond Opens Door to Poetry in Schools

By Robert Nott [Learning Curve columnist]

The New Mexican

December 16, 2012 

''Everybody has a poet in them," educator, author, counselor and poet Glenis Redmond explained last Thursday afternoon just moments before she began the workshop, "Writing: Poetry Off the Page" for about 30 public-school teachers at Stieren Hall at The Santa Fe Opera. Speaking of her teacher students, she said, "Teachers and students alike are given the message that they cannot do this - my approach is, 'Open the door and see what happens.' "

The workshop, financed by a grant written by Andrea Fellows-Walters, education director for The Santa Fe Opera, is a component of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts' Partnership in Education program, which teams Kennedy Center artists with school districts and arts organizations that work within those districts. "It's one of the best sources for arts integration in the classroom," said Amy Summa, arts education coordinator for Santa Fe Public Schools.

Arts-education proponents argue that teachers can utilize creativity - be it theater, visual arts, poetry, dance or film - to bolster both interest and learning in core curriculum topics like math, science, reading and writing. Before the workshop, Redmond stressed the potential in poetry to engage students when it comes to developing both critical-thinking and literacy skills. "Whatever you do in life, you have to write," she said.

• Workshop participant Katherine Byrnes, who teaches special-education children at Carlos Gilbert Elementary School, agreed. She said she is always looking for a way to connect her students to the material. Speaking, reading and writing is a vital component of her teaching, so poetry, she said, "seems like a fun way for them to practice writing - or think about writing."
• Linnane Blake, who teaches fourth grade at Carlos Gilbert, said her students possess "lots of energy and independent motivation," and so using poetry in other studies - like science - allows them to find and use a voice when called upon to think about their in-class findings. "Poetry can build courage and create muscles for them to use in academics," she said. Redmond was planning to visit Blake's class Friday morning to work with her students directly as part of the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts grant.

On Thursday, Redmond immediately engaged the teachers, first with an active performance of her autobiographical poem "She" (about her late grandmother) and then via a brief introduction into the world of praise poetry. "Poetry is compressed language," she told them. "The power is in the compression." She enticed them up on their feet and rapidly guided them into choreographing a joint presentation of poet Ted Jones' poem "The Truth." In doing so, she stressed the importance of projection, planting their feet to draw and maintain attention, choosing gestures with a purpose and personalizing what the teachers say - all actions that they can use not just in terms of poetry performance, but in connecting to students in the classroom.

Poets, Redmond said, are not unlike children in that they are filled with curiosity and wonder about the world around them. Capturing that awe within a student and transferring it to the learning process is not unlike the process of the poet, she said. She next led the teachers through an exercise about using metaphors and simile in poetry (and in teaching) while looking for active, unusual verbs to build students' vocabulary skills. By the end of the roughly three-hour workshop, the teachers had written their own poems.

"Just tipping their toes into [poetry] allows them to be stewards of poetry," Redmond said. And ideally those teachers are doing just that as they return to their classrooms this week and after winter break.

Santa Fe Public Schools close for the holiday season after an early dismissal day Friday, Dec. 21, and reopens Monday, Jan. 7.

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ABQ/ COLUMN: Licenses For Young Illegal Immigrants?

By Thomas Cole

ABQ Journal

December 15, 2012 

There is a new wrinkle in the debate over driver's licenses for illegal immigrants: what to do about licenses for young people who are in the country unlawfully but have been given temporary reprieves from deportation under President Barack Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals  [DACA] program.

Currently, young illegal immigrants, like others unlawfully in this country, can obtain New Mexico driver's licenses if they provide proof of residency. That's the result of a New Mexico law enacted in 2003 that permits foreign nationals to obtain licenses regardless of immigrant status.

But Gov. Susana Martinez has been pushing to do away with licenses for illegal immigrants, and the issue will be back before the Legislature when it convenes in January.

Obama's new program Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, will certainly complicate the debate.

Now, any bill to repeal driver's licenses for illegal immigrants will have to deal with whether to exempt young people with deferred deportations and allow them to continue to obtain licenses.

There also is a question whether an exemption would comply with Real ID, the federal law tightening standards for driver's licenses and state-issued ID cards.

Martinez spokesman Enrique Knell said the administration is examining the issue.

"There are legal questions and debates about whether those illegal immigrants who are under the temporary deferred action program are considered to have legal status," Knell said. "This lack of clarity is certainly a byproduct of Washington's failure to address issues of immigration reform."

According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, there is no question about the immigration status of young illegal immigrants who have had their deportations deferred.

"Deferred action does not confer any lawful status," Immigration Services says on its website.

Under DACA, implemented this summer, illegal immigrants who came here before age 16 and were under the age of 31 as of June 15 can apply to have their deportations deferred for two years if they have a GED, are in school or are honorably discharged military veterans. Two-year deferrals can be renewed.

Illegal immigrants convicted of felonies and some other crimes aren't eligible for DACA.

Immigrants approved for the program are authorized to work in this country and obtain Social Security cards despite not having lawful immigration status.

So far, program applications from more than 53,000 immigrants have been approved, and nearly 125,000 more applications were under review as of mid-November, according to the Citizenship and Immigration Services. The agency hasn't released application numbers for New Mexico.

The issue of what to do about driver's licenses for young immigrants in the DACA program has already surfaced in several states, at times with controversy, according to Stateline, the news service of the Pew Center on the States.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer has announced her state won't issue driver's licenses to DACA participants but now faces a legal challenge from the American Civil Liberties Union and others.

In Michigan, the secretary of state also has barred DACA participants from obtaining licenses, according to Stateline.

But in some other states, like Texas, the work authorization forms and Social Security cards given to program participants will be enough for DACA participants to get driver's licenses even though those states don't specifically allow licenses for illegal immigrants.

So far, California is the only state that has enacted a law to explicitly permit driver's licenses for DACA participants, Stateline reported.

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New York NY/ Nation Heads Back to School With New Worries About Safety

By Motoko Rich

New York Times

December 16, 2012

• In Boston, the public schools have asked the police to step up visits to elementary schools throughout the day on Monday.
• In Denver, psychologists and social workers were prepared to visit students.
• Schools in New York City were encouraged to review safety measures, which include posting security officers in lobbies and requiring identification from all visitors.
• And the Chicago school district urged principals to conduct lockdown drills, with reminders to stay low, keep quiet and turn off classroom lights.

Parents, teachers and school administrators in Newtown, Conn., confront the most immediate and raw tasks of helping children respond to the horrifying killings of 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

But across the nation, as schools prepared to resume on Monday, officials and parents spent the weekend worrying about not only how to talk to students about what happened, but also how best to discourage its happening again.

Tom Boasberg, the superintendent of schools in Denver, said he had not yet determined whether to ramp up drills. "When you read the story of what happened at Sandy Hook, you realize, 'Holy cow, they did a lot of things right,' " he said.

As in Newtown, Mr. Boasberg said, many schools in Denver already have intercoms, buzzers and surveillance cameras mounted at their primary doors, and voters passed a bond measure last month to raise money so all campuses could have security equipment. But he added, "We're not going to turn our schools into police bunkers."

School officials in Newtown announced Sunday that students from Sandy Hook Elementary would be relocated indefinitely to an unused school in a neighboring town, Monroe. Newtown officials said all of the public schools would be closed Monday, though they would continue to offer counseling. Students were invited to a sports center Monday to see friends and play games.

Parents and school leaders were concerned about how to help children talk about their emotions or deal with questions nobody can answer.

In the Sandy Hook firehouse on Friday, Rashi Ray was one of the lucky ones. She flew to her 7-year-old son, shaken with fear from the long wait and almost trembling with joy at the sight of him. At home, her son, Saahil, napped, something he had not done since he was a toddler. Mrs. Ray let him sleep, knowing there was worse to come. What would she tell him about his principal, his friends, his school?

"He's just a 7-year-old boy," she said. "And slowly, he has a lot of questions, so we try and answer them to the best of our ability."

Many schools and districts around the country sent out letters to parents over the weekend with advice on how to talk to children about violence and trauma.

At Harvard/Kent Elementary School in Boston, Jason Gallagher, the principal, said teachers would be encouraged to talk about safety at "open circle" meetings with students, but for children from kindergarten through third grade, teachers were asked not to specifically mention the events in Newtown.

"There are a lot of tricky places that it could take you," Mr. Gallagher said.

If children bring it up, he said, teachers will be instructed to keep conversations focused on general safety principles, or to let the children guide discussions, with questions like "Can you tell me how that made you feel?"

He said he was dispatching art, gym and other specialized teachers to join classroom teachers in the morning so that no instructor would have to confront difficult questions alone.

 Carol Johnson, the Boston superintendent, said older children might have a more urgent desire to talk about Sandy Hook.

"I think middle and high school students will have very strong and different opinions about the causes of violence in the community," she said. "And they will want to have much more in-depth conversations about why."

Parents were making their own delicate calculations of whether or how much to talk to their children about the shooting. In some cases, decisions were forced upon them.

Shannon Casey, a mother of two in Mountain View, Calif., said that by the time she picked up her 12-year-old daughter on Friday, the girl had already seen the news on her iPad.

Ms. Casey said she advised her to avoid constantly reading about the tragedy on social media, and reminded her 9-year-old son about what to do if someone showed up with a gun. She talked to them about "the heroism of the teachers, and how much their teachers show up for them on a daily basis and will protect them if something happens."

Tenecia H. Valerio, a mother of three children ages 6 and under in Summit, N.J., said she initially vowed not to tell them anything. But she found herself tearing up throughout the day on Friday and finally decided to tell them she was so sad because "a whole bunch of people had died."

Her family made a memorial with candles and stuffed animals to set on the porch, and she planned to keep it at that. But when her 6-year-old son asked more detailed questions, she told him a "man did a really horrible, mean thing and he went to the school and he hurt and killed people including little children."

"I would rather me explain it to him as a mother and be there to help him process the information," Ms. Valerio said, "as opposed to him hearing it somewhere else and me not being able to talk to him or give him a hug when he needs it."

As it was, he responded with the heartbreaking innocence of a 6-year-old. "He said, 'I'm glad my school has a camera and a buzzer,' " Ms. Valerio recalled.

And then he asked: " 'Can we get Dunkin' Donuts?' "

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Washington DC/ Schools in Newtown Closed; Elsewhere Security Reviewed, Ramped Up

By Nirvi Shah

Education Wee [Edweek.org]

December 16, 2012

Schools in Newtown, Conn., will be closed Monday, following Friday's horrific killings of 20 of the district's 1st graders and six of its employees at Sandy Hook School.

A neighboring school district, Monroe, has offered an unused campus for when classes resume for surviving Sandy Hook students. The former middle school was closed last year to save money.

Meanwhile, schools across Connecticut and the nation are reviewing school security measures and beefing up safety precautions. Earlier Sunday, Connecticut state police Lt. J. Paul Vance said all school safety plans are being re-examined in anticipation of classes resuming across the state Monday.

"State police, local police, leaders in school systems are doing everything they can to make sure schools are safe," Vance said.

In Texas, Gov. Rick Perry has asked for a similar review.

Superintendents nationwide offered the same promises to parents via emails and other messages, adding that they will also be prepared to meet the emotional needs of students, many of whom have been steeping in the coverage of the killings for three days now.

• For example, East Lansing, Mich., Superintendent David B. Chapin said in a message that "my intent with this mailing is to assure you we will be working with increased focus next week and beyond to address the emotional comfort and physical safety of your children."

He said personnel from the East Lansing Police Department will walk through each school building in the 3,500-student district every day next week and police presence before and after school will be increased.

• In Hillsborough County, Fla., schools, the 200,000-student district said Tampa police and school security officers are expected to be more present at schools-especially elementary schools-on Monday. School security forces will do the same. And the head of the district's psychological services department has shared tips with principals and prepared school psychologists to respond, if necessary.
• In an email, Jack Dale, the superintendent of the 182,000-student Fairfax County Public Schools just outside Washington, said police will increase patrols and visibility this week "not in response to any specific threat but rather a police initiative to enhance safety and security around the schools and to help alleviate the understandably high levels of anxiety."

Sandy Hook's Security

The security system at Sandy Hook-a buzzer at the front door accompanied by a camera that required visitors to be approved to enter the school-wouldn't have kept suspected shooter Adam Lanza from entering the school, said Ken Trump, the president of National School Safety and Security Services, a Cleveland, Ohio-based company that advises districts.

Police said he shot his way into the school with a powerful rifle, the weapon he used to kill all 26 victims at Sandy Hook before using a handgun to kill himself.

The system is particularly common at elementary schools, where outside intruders, parental disputes, or other external threats are often more of a threat than fighting and other behavior issues caused by students. The devices have their flaws, such as one visitor piggybacking on another without the school's knowledge, but they are a deterrent nevertheless.

But it may have bought the school precious seconds that reduced the carnage, Trump said, because he wasn't able to walk right into the school.

"Every single second counts," he said.

President Speaks at Newtown High

President Barack Obama, who was in tears when he addressed the nation over the killings Friday, traveled to Connecticut today to comfort families and first responders in person. A ceremony including prayers representing several faiths drew more people than the auditorium at Newtown High could hold.

Before the event began, Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut spoke briefly about the idea of a violence commission idea he floated on the Sunday morning news shows.

"I'm always reluctant about commissions, but I really believe we ought to have a national commission on violence," Lieberman said to reporters traveling with the president. "These events are happening more frequently and I worry that if we don't take a thoughtful look at them, we're going to lose the hurt and the anger that we have now."

Earlier, Obama had said the nation will have to come together and take "meaningful action" to prevent similar tragedies, "regardless of the politics."

At the gathering at the high school, he fortified that message.

"We cannot tolerate this anymore," he said. "These tragedies must end, and to end them, we must change."

Earlier, former U.S. Education Secretary William J. Bennett and other politicians said one way the nation could change is by arming school employees.

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New York NY/ Tips for Talking to Children About the Shooting

By Benedict Carey

New York Times

December 14, 2012

First, find out what they have heard.

Through Facebook, Twitter, or friends, most youngsters will know about the mass shooting that took place on Friday morning at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.

Listen to their fears. Dispel rumors. And be honest, sharing as much detail as a child is able to handle.

Therapists who treat childhood trauma said on Friday that parents talking to their children about the mass shooting should address the news directly and soon, allowing the child to lead with questions and concerns. Parents can no longer control what their children know by simply turning off the television. Many children will know what is happening from mobile devices and social media; now is the time to turn those devices off, these experts said.

"It's important to open up the discussion," said Melissa Brymer, director of terrorism and disaster programs at the National Center for Child Traumatic Stress, based at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Duke University. "There's a lot of talk on Facebook and Twitter, and it's important to clarify what's rumor and what's not."

Dr. Andrew J. Gerber, a child psychiatrist at Columbia, said that parents should come to terms with their own feelings about the massacre before talking to a child. They should "essentially metabolize the awfulness of the event so that what they pass on when they have a discussion with their children conveys a certain amount of thoughtfulness and understanding, rather than raw trauma," he said in an e-mail.

If a child is frightened, determine the precise source of the fear. It may be a worry that their classroom isn't safe; or about how to escape school when under threat. "If you say, 'This bad man can't hurt you,' you've introduced another fear," said Dr. Robert H. Abramovitz, a child psychiatrist at Hunter College. "Ask what their worst fear is, and address that."

Dr. Abramovitz said that parents can be so eager to reassure that they make unrealistic promises, like "this will never happen to you." "Better to validate the child's fear, to say that it's natural to feel that way, and tell them, 'I'm going to do everything I can to keep you safe,'" he said.

And reinforce coping skills the child may have already used. Dr. Abramovitz suggested asking, "Remember the last time you were afraid? Remember what you did to calm down?" He said, "This gives the child a feeling of having some agency, some control."

If possible, other therapists said, parents should use family or holiday routines as a comforting structure. Spend extra time with children at bedtime. Read them a book. Engage traditions that remind them what they are thankful for.

Practical questions will soon arise, if not today then soon. Does a child know his or her school's emergency procedures? What is the family's communication plan, should something happen?

"For example, texting is a better strategy then calling," Dr. Brymer said. "The phone lines clog up fast. It may be a matter of children knowing to text, 'I'm OK.'"

And they should be, especially if their parents check in with them and listen.

And remind them of something important: that the world is a good place, even if some people do very bad things.

~~~~~~~~~~~

New York NY/ Having a Life Before Creating One

By Ginia Bellafante

New York Times

December 15, 2012

Among the codas we might be most grateful for this year is the release of "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2" last month, which brought us to the welcome end of a cultural franchise that managed the feat of romanticizing abstinence as it coddled fantasies of teenage parenthood. By the end of Stephenie Meyer's fourth and final book in the "Twilight" series, we have a heroine who has lost her virginity in a rapturously violent act of marital congress, given up her ideas about Dartmouth and endured a pregnancy so debilitating it nearly kills her.

For her sacrifices - for enduring what in any other context would be tagged as domestic abuse, and for avoiding abortion - she is rewarded with a prodigy baby who is absorbing Tennyson at an age at which most children are not yet ready for "Goodnight Moon." Rivaling the books' depiction of vampires and shape shifters is the supernaturalism embedded in the belief that a young woman could dismiss every directive of sound social policy and still be assured a child destined to excel in the realm of standardized testing.

Anyone involved in social work with teenagers, especially teenagers living in poor communities, is in so many cases conducting the business of counterprogramming - promoting alternative value systems to the ones a child's immediate environment can too easily inculcate and fantasies different from those the popular culture is selling.

The extent to which this is enormously difficult work was clear this past week during a series of classes at the Kips Bay Boys and Girls Club near the Castle Hill section of the Bronx, where, in one exercise, for instance, children were read a series of statements and then asked to disperse into various corners of the room according to the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with what was being said.

The subject was relationships, and at one point the facilitator, an appealing man in his 30s named Bernard Skelton, raised the following question: "When someone you're dating hits you, should you give them another chance?" Two girls, one 12 and the other 14, walked over to a long wall affiliating themselves with the position "Somewhat agree," the younger one explaining that if someone is hit by an intimate she has probably done something she shouldn't have to make him angry. Mr. Skelton listened sensitively and then made a forceful case for "Strongly disagree."

The classes are conducted as part of a broad-scope curriculum in maturing and responsibility called Smart Girls/Passport to Manhood, created by the Boys and Girls Club of America and tweaked at Kips Bay to great success despite the steep learning curve many students, who come to the center largely because working parents need a place to deposit them after school, face.

• In the 10 years the classes have been offered at the facility, Yolanda Brisbane-Baird, also its unit director, told me, only one of the 500 girls who have participated has become a teenage mother.
• This figure, remarkable in itself, has added resonance in the Bronx, which has the highest teenage birthrate of any borough, according to city statistics: 42 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 19.
• Ms. Brisbane-Baird follows the progress of the girls one year after they have been out of the program, usually until the age of 19 or 20.
• Approximately 85 percent of the graduates of these classes have gone on to higher education.

The lesson of a program like this one would seem self-evident but is often lost in political debates that rigidly pit abstinence education against contraceptive schooling: holistic approaches to helping teenagers navigate their love lives would seem to best position them for a productive adult experience.

The classes at Kips Bay hardly avoid discussions of birth control, but they are steeped in larger conversations about civility, about learning how to treat people respectfully, about upending gender-role assumptions that 15-year-olds might have.

• Girls learn that when they ask someone out they should expect to pay.
• Boys learn that if they don't have any money they should extend themselves to young women in other ways, by helping them clean their family apartments or cook.

One class I attended recently, a centerpiece of the curriculum, was devoted entirely to the subject of etiquette during which children were given a true-false test with questions like: "The correct way to butter a roll or bread is to slice it with a knife and butter the entire roll/piece of bread and then bite into it." And: "When briefly leaving the table it is O.K. to ask your date to hold your napkin for you."

The point of all this, Ms. Brisbane-Baird explained as the children sat around a set dinner table and learned what flatware to use for what courses, was not only to teach them how to conduct themselves on the proper dates they should expect to have, but also to show them what to do when they were out in the world looking for a job.

Someday, Ms. Brisbane-Baird told them, they would be going on interviews with employers. Those prospective employers might take them to dinner - in nice restaurants, with tablecloths. The future, the implication stood, would not be behind the cash register at Babies "R" Us. Or, too soon, in front of it.

~~~~~~~~~~~

New York NY/ For Mothers at Risk, Someone to Lean On

By John Leland

New York Times

December 15, 2012

The tattoo below Joanne Schmidt's right ear says "Jesus" in Hebrew. On the back of her neck, under a short crop of dyed red hair, is a second tattoo that says "Bad Girl" in Chinese.

"That was from my earlier period," she said.

On a drizzly December afternoon, Ms. Schmidt was in the Throgs Neck section of the Bronx to visit Elizabeth De la Rosa, who is 19 years old, single and was about as pregnant as a person can be. On this day, which happened to be the date her baby was due, Ms. De la Rosa was living in her mother's apartment, a surprise to Ms. Schmidt, 37, who had been visiting her since early in the pregnancy - sometimes at a homeless shelter, sometimes at Ms. De la Rosa's aunt's. Ms. De la Rosa and her mother had a history of bitter arguments, which had landed the daughter in counseling at age 14.

"I must say," Ms. Schmidt said mildly, "I'm glad that you and your mom are getting along."

"We don't fight when I'm at my aunt's," Ms. De la Rosa said.

"Did your mother ask you to move back?" Ms. Schmidt asked.

"My sister did."

As the two talked, Ms. De la Rosa's mother watched television in her bedroom. There were many things to discuss:

How was Ms. De la Rosa feeling? (Impatient.) Did she have headaches or blurry vision? (Headaches.) Did she tell her doctor? (Yes.) Was she still planning to get a job and find her own place? (First she wanted to get her high school equivalency diploma.) Did she need a referral? Did she have a day care plan? Was she considering any schooling beyond the G.E.D.? How long did she plan to breast-feed?

Discussion circled back to her relationship with her mother. Ms. Schmidt, who did not get along with her own mother, nodded sympathetically and recorded Ms. De la Rosa's answers on printed sheets that she kept in a thick folder.

Afterward, in her government-owned Prius, Ms. Schmidt confided that she was worried. "What happens when this baby's born and her mom tells her she's doing something wrong? Elizabeth says she doesn't want it to get physical, but that it can get physical. She's very strong-willed. I'm going to ride it out."

Her face showed her further concern: In a home with physical violence, little money or resources, with a nonsupportive father, what sort of life prospects would Ms. De la Rosa's baby have?

• "I know these girls because I come from the same background as they do," Ms. Schmidt said, adding that of the young women she visited, Ms. De la Rosa had one of the more stable home situations. "There were a few times when I found myself on the streets," Ms. Schmidt said - "no apartment, I was cut off of welfare, living from place to place. I lived out of my car for a while. With my son.
• "So my story is very much these girls' story. And it just takes one person, one person, to just say, 'You are worth it. You're not a terrible person for the mistakes and the things you've done in the past. You may have gone through whatever, but there's a way out.' "

She did not need to say that for her clients, 15 at any time, she intended to be that one person.

Joanne Schmidt is a nurse for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, in a program called the Nurse-Family Partnership, which matches specially trained nurses with low-income first-time mothers, starting during pregnancy; they meet at the mother's home every week or two until the child's second birthday.

She is also a daughter of the soul singer Sam Moore, of Sam and Dave - a quick-eyed woman with freckles and a Rochester accent that adds a Midwestern flavor to mild oaths like "jeez Louise" or "shut the front door."

Raised mostly by her maternal grandmother and aunt, she was not told until age 8 who her father was, or why she looked different from her German relatives.

After high school, she said, "that's kind of when my life went - " she made a screeching sound like a rocket veering out of control. "I didn't realize I was following my mother." For years she was by her description a "groupie" on the hip-hop scene; now she is a Christian, a PTA president, a mother to a 16-year-old and a partner with his father. And a nurse.

Her unit takes the hard cases: mothers in foster care, homeless shelters or Rikers Island.

The program, which was started in upstate New York in the 1970s and has been adopted in 42 states, is one of the rare public initiatives that have shown consistent and rigorously tested benefits for the mothers and children, as well as significant savings for taxpayers.

In different studies on different demographic groups, women in the program:

• have had fewer premature deliveries,
• smoked less during pregnancy,
• spent less time on public assistance,
• waited longer to have subsequent children,
• had fewer arrests and convictions, and
• maintained longer contact with their baby's fathers.

Their children:

• have had fewer language delays and
•  reported less abuse and neglect,
• slightly higher I.Q. scores,
• fewer arrests and convictions by age 19, and
•  less depression and anxiety.

A 2011 study of New York City's Nurse-Family Partnership program, which currently has 91 nurses serving 1,940 families, projected that by the time a child in the program turns 12, the city, state and federal governments will have saved a combined $27,895, with additional savings thereafter - more than twice the program's cost per child. The study was conducted by the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation using data from the Nurse-Family Partnership's research at three locations, then extrapolated to New York.

This fall, I attended a dozen home visits, all in the Bronx, with five nurses - three from the Visiting Nurse Service of New York, which contracts with the city to provide service in the Bronx, and two, including Ms. Schmidt, with the health department's Targeted Citywide Initiative, which tackles the most at-risk cases. The nurses' styles and backgrounds varied; the families' needs and challenges even more so. Each mother participated voluntarily and at no cost.

The problems were many: violence on the street, abuse in the women's past, illness, anger, obesity, insecure housing or financial circumstances. Most of the women had the poor luck to have been born in poverty. Like their middle-class counterparts, none came into the world knowing how to raise a baby.

At the Andrew Jackson Houses in the South Bronx, Rose Mendoza and her nurse, Susan Spadafora, were discussing Ms. Mendoza's plans for the next week. She had a doctor's appointment for her son, Mason, who is about 17 months old, and an appointment to get an assessment from her psychiatrist, so she could receive counseling for her longstanding temper problems. Previous attempts to get this assessment had failed, often ending with Ms. Mendoza in a tantrum.

"If she's not there," Ms. Mendoza said of the psychiatrist, "I'm going to be mean."

"You don't have to be mean," Ms. Spadafora said. She commended Ms. Mendoza, 26, for her progress in controlling her temper since the baby's birth.

"She's always late," Ms. Mendoza said. "And I get frustrated to have to wait."

Patiently, Ms. Spadafora, 52, who works for the Visiting Nurse Service of New York, walked her client through steps they had discussed for dealing with unresponsive clinic staff members without blowing up. Several times, the nurse has gone along on appointments to demonstrate ways to ask questions and elicit better treatment. Part of her work, she said, lies in modeling good habits.

"Susan's changed a lot for me," said Ms. Mendoza, who dyes her hair flaming red and has a gold stud by the corner of her mouth. "A lot. Like how to deal with things, how to think before you speak. Don't just blurt it out."

Most of Ms. Mendoza's friends had children as teenagers, but she did not become pregnant until she was 24, with her long-term boyfriend, David. They both left high school in their senior years.

Hers was not an easy pregnancy. Ms. Mendoza weighed as much as 380 pounds and had diabetes and dangerously high blood pressure. Early tests showed that she was pregnant with triplets. One died in the womb, then a second. The third fetus and Ms. Mendoza were both in danger of not surviving.

On a late-November morning, Mason stared alertly at the action around him and babbled. He ambled from one part of the apartment to another.

Ms. Mendoza's goal is to move out. Two people have been killed in the building since Ms. Spadafora started visiting, including one man who was shot in the daytime; Ms. Mendoza heard him screaming on the sidewalk at the pain, waiting for an ambulance that arrived too late.

During two visits I attended, Ms. Mendoza was adamant that she was going to get her G.E.D., study to become a pastry chef, apply for housing, get an apartment with David - "he's a great father," she said - and begin a new life with her new family. But she has been making such plans since pregnancy, Ms. Spadafora said.

"She seems to put roadblocks in front of herself," the nurse said. "She's registered for six or seven G.E.D. review courses. Always the obstacles seem real, but she can exaggerate them. Success can be as scary as failure. There'll be more expectations if she gets a degree."

Like other nurses I talked to, Ms. Spadafora finds herself trying to counteract certain practices of the babies' grandmothers - like putting cereal in a baby bottle, which can lead to overfeeding. "Everybody wants a fat baby," Debra Rivera-Oquendo, who works for the Visiting Nurse Service of New York, told me.

Though childhood obesity is not high on the national Nurse-Family Partnership agenda, it is a major concern in New York and especially in the Mendoza household, where obesity and diabetes are rampant. At 295 pounds, Ms. Mendoza was greatly slimmed down but still no waif. Her mother, who is also obese and diabetic, pushed back against the nurse.

"We're trying to make tiny breakthroughs with the baby," Ms. Spadafora said. "I'll ask, 'What things did your mother do that might have contributed to your obesity?' She knows what her mother did wrong, and doesn't want to do that with the baby. Rose is doing better with the baby than with herself."

The visiting nurse program, though, is not for everyone. It makes demands on both nurses and clients, not least the demand for data, which means constant reporting and paperwork.

More than half of the mothers drop out before their child turns 2 - some because they successfully move into work or school, but others because they lose interest. In the original trials, 60 percent of mothers finished the program, but the rate fell to 42 percent as the program expanded - another impetus for more data-gathering.

For Joanne Schmidt, whose team has a far lower graduation rate because of the mothers' challenges going in, each patient who drops out becomes an unsolved mystery.

"I wonder what happens to some of them," she said. "I wonder if they went to school. I wonder if they're out of jail. I try hard not to take it personal. They have their own life to live, and I made it through on my own with no help. A lot of these girls are tough. They know how to use their resources.

"It sounds cold, but I have to remember that this is my role. I can't save the world. If someone drops, you wrestle with that for a second, then it's, 'all right, got to pick up the next client.' That's part of being a nurse, knowing you're going to have clients that die on you. You have babies that die, you have clients that die. It's sad to see, but it's part of why you do what you do, and part of the reason everyone can't be a nurse."

The Monday after Ms. Schmidt's visit to Ms. De la Rosa, the baby had still not arrived. The nurse was hoping the birth would fall on her own birthday, Dec. 12. She needed some good news. One of her patients, a 5-month-old boy born a month early, was in the hospital with respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, an illness that can be fatal to premature infants. Another patient, who was born two months prematurely, was sick and not receiving treatment.

The two families were lined up back-to-back on her Monday morning schedule, along with a mother and her 3-month-old son who were living at Inwood House, transitional housing for homeless youths who are pregnant or have children. The mother, Nicola Brown, 19, said she had been physically and emotionally abused as a child, and verbally abused by the baby's father.

Ms. Brown was the day's first appointment, and she had good news: in part thanks to Ms. Schmidt, she had finished her training to become a home health aide. This after getting her G.E.D. in August.

Ms. Schmidt beamed at her. "Do you feel proud of yourself?" she said. "You should."

Ms. Brown said she wanted to work for a while, then go to nursing school. She was seeing a mental health clinician because of lingering effects of her past abuse, she said.

Ms. Schmidt was her second nurse in the program. She had not gotten along with the first, whom she described as loud and obnoxious. "Joanne has an upbeat personality, and it's easy to trust her," she said, adding that she did not easily trust people.

The meeting was the easiest part of Ms. Schmidt's day. At the next appointment, in the Eastchester neighborhood, Natasha Pennant and her boyfriend, Aaron Pelzer, had a sick child, a new apartment, problems with Medicaid and stress from Ms. Pennant's mother, who recently had shoulder surgery, and who relied on her daughter for help raising four foster children. Their daughter, Azalea, was born at 30 weeks, weighing one pound, 14 ounces.

"I feel everything is on me," Ms. Pennant said. "With my mom and Azalea, and trying to find a steady job." She was too busy with her mother to reapply for Medicaid, she said. Without the coverage, she did not have money to take her daughter to the pediatrician.

Ms. Schmidt asked how she was coping with the stress.

"Honestly, I'm going back to smoking," Ms. Pennant said. Mr. Pelzer, who is trying to start a mobile app business, sat nervously by her side.

"When you smoke, where do you smoke?" Ms. Schmidt asked.

Ms. Pennant told a story about Ms. Schmidt's visiting her in the hospital just after Azalea was born. For two days, Ms. Pennant was unable to go to her daughter in the neonatal intensive care unit because of a pounding headache, which the floor doctors were not treating. Ms. Schmidt pushed the nurses on the floor to have a doctor look into it. Finally, a doctor said that the pain was a side effect of spinal anesthesia and prescribed treatment. Ms. Pennant was able to see and hold her child.

"It was all because of Joanne," she said.

Now Ms. Schmidt urged the couple to take Azalea to the pediatrician or the emergency room ASAP. "They cannot refuse to see you based on your inability to pay." Because Azalea had been premature, Ms. Schmidt feared RSV, and was especially worried about delaying treatment. "I just went through this with someone, and the outcome is not going well," she said.

The last visit of the day was the hardest: At Montefiore Medical Center's Wakefield campus, a weary Stephanie Velez-Rivera, 23, lay with her son, Elisha, on her chest, trying to ease his weak cough. After eight days in the hospital and a week of illness before, he had lost half a pound and wasn't eating or sleeping. The night before, he had rolled off his mother while she slept and onto the floor; in the morning, she said, the medical staff had interrogated her as if she had dropped her baby.

Now she worried that when her husband learned of the baby's fall, he would be upset with her. During Ms. Schmidt's last visit, Ms. Velez-Rivera's husband had rejected a suggestion of couples counseling.

Ms. Schmidt did not criticize the husband. "His personality isn't able to handle some of the things you can," she said.

"He gets stressed out," Ms. Velez-Rivera said.

Ms. Velez-Rivera, who has sickle-cell anemia, said that she had been raised in an abusive home, "physically, emotionally, verbally," and that she was determined to make a better home for Elisha; the boy's needs, she said, came before hers or her husband's.

Ms. Schmidt had no easy answers. The child was very sick, the marriage was fraught, the mother was pushed beyond exhaustion - and still it was not too early to discuss birth control, so Ms. Velez-Rivera would not become pregnant again right away. The nurse promised to bring information at their next visit, and to check back in a few days.

Ms. Schmidt's birthday came and went without Ms. De la Rosa delivering her baby. Instead of celebrating, the nurse went to a holiday party for the mothers and babies in the program. She asked her clients not to mention her birthday, saying the party was for them, not her.

By week's end everything was still up in the air. Ms. De la Rosa's doctor said he would wait until Dec. 18 before inducing labor. Ms. Velez-Rivera was fighting to keep Elisha in the hospital, saying he was still not eating well enough to be safely discharged.

Ms. Schmidt put away her work cellphone for the weekend, then picked up a message anyway.

"All my girls have a lot going on," she said. "That's their everyday life. I know that they'll be O.K., and that the decisions they make will become the road they have to take."

She took a deep breath. "I have to hang up my cape at some point," she said. "You let it go, then you pick it back up."

~~~~~~~~~~~

Washington DC/ NAEP Seeks to Test New Measure of Student Poverty

Proposed indicators go broader, deeper

By Sarah D. Sparks

Education Week,  [Edweek.org]

December 12, 2012 [posted online 12/17/12]

Aiming to get a clearer picture of how students' home and community resources affect their academic achievement, America's best-known K-12 education barometer, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, is building a comprehensive new way to gauge socioeconomic status.

The new measure, being developed by the National Assessment Governing Board and the National Center for Education Statistics, is intended to look beyond a traditional measure of family income to a child's family, community, and school supports for learning.

• "This issue has just been on the burner for so, so long," said Maria V. Ferguson, the executive director of the Washington-based Center on Education Policy.
• "When NAGB starts talking about it, that does elevate it to a place where it could be part of a bigger policy debate," she said. "I wonder if the folks at NAGB are hoping this could be an opening salvo into a bigger conversation about how [different SES measures] might affect other programs."

The governing board commissioned eight researchers in education, economics, statistics, human development, and sociology that have been working on the new indicators since 2010. The panel released its initial proposal at a NAGB meeting here Nov. 29.

• "We rapidly learned that socioeconomic status contains multiple dimensions and categories that don't neatly collapse back to 'low' versus 'high,' " said Charles D. Cowan, the chief executive officer of the San Antonio-based research group Analytic Focus and a member of the governing board's expert panel.
• "Over the last 10 to 15 years, there's been an explosion in the data available" on student characteristics, Mr. Cowan said. "Perhaps now is the time to think about alternative measures of SES simply because now we are able to think about it."

Beyond Free Lunch

For decades, the universal proxy for students' socioeconomic status-for NAEP and nearly every federal education and child-health program-has been just such a high-low indicator: eligibility for subsidized meals under the National School Lunch Program.

Federal food aid does capture a huge swath of students in poverty:

• The school lunch program alone provides meals for more than 31 million children, at reduced cost to those living at or below 185 percent of the federal poverty line, and free to those who are at or below 130 percent of the poverty line or who are homeless, in foster care, or in certain other programs.
• In 2012 in the lower 48 states and the District of Columbia, children living in a family of four on $40,000 or less a year would be eligible for reduced price meals; the free-lunch cut-off for the same family would be $30,000.

From a research and policy perspective, however, experts say food-aid eligibility gives an incomplete picture of the resources of students in poverty, and no information about students who don't qualify. Moreover, those poverty counts notoriously under-represent students as they get older and more self-conscious about applying for free or reduced-price lunch.

• "There are many problems regarding the use of free and reduced-cost lunch," said Henry M. Levin, a research panelist and an economics and education professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, who is now on sabbatical at Peking University in Beijing.
• "It does not distinguish in a sensitive way differences along the entire spectrum of SES," he noted in an email to Education Week. "Even for the poor or relatively poor, there are large differences" within the range of free-lunch eligibility.

The governing board has tried in the past to fill in the gaps using the background questionnaire students complete along with NAEP, according to William Ward, a senior research scientist for assessment at NCES, which administers NAEP. But some of those questions have become outdated or have not been found to be relevant to a child's real socioeconomic status.

"We used to ask, 'Do you have a washer-dryer?' but now everyone has a washer-dryer," Mr. Cowan said. "We used to ask, 'Do you have a cellphone?' Now, do any of your students not have a cellphone?"

More Than Income

The updated measure of socioeconomic status will look at broader resources and learning supports, Mr. Cowan said.

It will start with the "big three": the family's income, parents' level of educational attainment, and whether and where they are employed.

This year's administration of NAEP has also tried out new background questions, including:

• how long the child has lived in the United States,
• how many family members live with the child, and
• how many adults in the home have a job.

Because elementary students in particular may have difficulty identifying these, the governing board is considering supplementing the data with information from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey, an annual study of a representative sample of 3.5 million households nationwide that asks about family structure, employment and income, transportation, and other details.

The NAEP student survey would still include questions about home possessions that research has shown to be related to student achievement, such as access to the Internet and the number of books in the home, Mr. Ward said. But the board is considering supplementing the "core" SES measures with other indicators of resources in the child's neighborhood and school that could highlight differences between students living at the same income level in different areas.

• For example, an 8th grader in New York's Spanish Harlem neighborhood could still have access to libraries and museums, while a peer in rural southern Utah may have no local library but live a bike ride away from national parks.
• Indicators of school and neighborhood supports also may be pulled from administrative data and from the Census Bureau, such as the degree of concentration of poverty or linguistic isolation, the average educational degree earned, and the employment levels in the neighborhood.

The governing board panel plans to present its proposed socioeconomic indicators at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in April before piloting their use in 2014 and reporting the results in 2015.

Socioeconomic Status Reconsidered

The National Assessment Governing Board is considering a new method of identifying a student's socioeconomic status when disaggregating the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. NAEP researchers now rely primarily on a student's eligibility for the National School Lunch Program-which as of 2011 provided free or low-cost meals to more than 31 million students in poverty each day-as a proxy for socioeconomic status. This traditional indicator is bolstered by background questions on home possessions, such as washing machines, encyclopedias, and mobile phones.

Proposed New "Core" SES Indicators:

• Family income and indicators of home possessions and that have been shown to be linked to educational access, such as Internet availability and number of books in the home
• Parents' educational attainment
• Parents' occupational status

Potential "Expanded" SES Indicators:

• Family: For example, family structure, stability, and the presence of extended family and other supportive adults
• Neighborhood: Including the concentration of poverty or linguistic isolation, the percentage of unemployed adults, and the availability of museums, parks, or safe walking routes
• School: The aggregate SES composition of students at the school the child attends, as distinct from the neighborhood SES level

Potential Additional Context Indicators:

• Physical stressors: Local rates of illness or environmental problems
• Psychological stressors: Levels of crime in the school and community
• Psychological protectors: Student perception of parent involvement and expectations

-SOURCE: National Assessment Governing Board

~~~~~~~~~~~

New York NY/ Apps Give Preschoolers a First Look at TV Shows

By Elizabeth Jensen

New York Times

December 16, 2012

In 2014, the preschool cable network Nick Jr. plans to introduce a television show featuring a little boy, his miniature pet dragon and a magic stick.

But the show, "Wallykazam," will not be new to users of smartphones and tablets.

Educational applications built around it will start appearing in app stores late next year, making "Wallykazam" Nickelodeon's first major show to be introduced as a mobile product first, said Steve Youngwood, Nickelodeon's executive vice president and general manager for digital media.

Driving the change, at Nickelodeon and other preschool television brands, are parents who are increasingly putting mobile devices into preschoolers' hands and laps.

According to new research commissioned by Sesame Workshop, producer of PBS's "Sesame Street," mobile device ownership is booming as TV set ownership declines.

• 88 percent of the parents surveyed said they owned a television, down from 95 percent in 2010.
• 21 percent said their children first interacted with "Sesame Street" someplace other than television, with YouTube and PBS.org the top alternative sources.

PBS said separately that its free PBS Kids Video app, which has been downloaded 2.4 million times, reached 120 million streams of PBS Kids shows in November, surpassing 100 million for the first time.

"On-air does still drive digital," said Diana Polvere, Sesame Workshop's vice president for market research, citing the 79 percent of viewers who still come to television first. But given the rapid changes, she said, Sesame's research will now be conducted every 6 months instead of every 2 years.

Nickelodeon's research, done in April and updated in October, shows striking growth in educational app use.

• In October, 27 percent of United States households with children ages 3 to 5 had an iPad, up from 22 percent in April.
• In those households, 40 percent of preschoolers used the iPad for educational apps, up from 27 percent in April.
• The study also found that Apple device users were willing to pay 15 to 23 percent more for educational apps than for general apps.

"Parents want to feel good about what they are purchasing and downloading for their kids," said Scott Chambers, Sesame Workshop's senior vice president for digital worldwide distribution. Adding an educational element to an entertaining app, he said, "makes everybody feel better."

Parents' feelings aside, apps are strong educational tools, said Lesli Rotenberg, who oversees PBS's children's programming, including its more than two dozen apps.

While television "is somewhat of a passive experience" for children, she said, interactive apps give them immediate feedback and tailored experiences that become more difficult as they gain skills.

Though numerous producers are entering the app business, three of the top 10 paid educational apps in the iTunes store last week were Nickelodeon's. They included the $1.99 Bubble Guppies: Animal School Day, already profitable six weeks after its introduction, Nickelodeon said. A Team Umizoomi math app was still in the top 10 after a year on the market.

• Originally scheduled for August release, the Bubble Guppies app, filled with the same silly jokes as the show, was revised after focus group testing with preschoolers showed, among other things, that their small fingers had a hard time maneuvering a virtual latch and that the children wanted more control over their exploration.

"We were hearing kids say in testing: 'I want to play with the dolphin. I want to play with the penguin,' " said Jordana Drell, Nickelodeon's senior director of preschool games.

Nickelodeon's educational apps normally take six to eight months to create and, even with lush graphics like the shimmery underwater background in Bubble Guppies, cost about half as much as a single episode of one of the company's preschool shows, officials said.

The Bubble Guppies creators, Jonny Belt and Robert Scull, said they approached the app as they would a television episode, reading the 90-page game document aloud, technical material and all. "That really brings it to life, and you know what you're getting," Mr. Scull said.

A Nickelodeon rival, Disney Junior, has taken a less integrated approach to apps, developing television shows first and apps later to expand on the content, said Albert Cheng, executive vice president for digital media at the Disney/ABC Television Group.

• The free Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Road Rally Appisode, released in May, is a repurposed version of an episode of the "Mickey Mouse Clubhouse" television program, reconfigured to be highly interactive.

It proved so popular that "we definitely feel there's something here we want to invest in," Mr. Cheng said.

• Although the app had educational elements, it was not intended as such. The sprawling Walt Disney Company has published educational apps through other units, however.

Since releasing its first app three years ago, Sesame Workshop has added more than three dozen, including Elmo Loves 123s, which was introduced Dec. 10 and draws on new research for developers and parents that Sesame plans to release this week. App users, Mr. Chambers said, tend to come back regularly, a loyalty that executives have noted as they consider future expansion in the category.

The rush to apps is changing the development process for PBS, which will no longer develop television-only shows, Ms. Rotenberg said. PBS's newest property, "Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood," came out as an app - already the company's third best-selling - the day of the television premiere in September.

Ms. Rotenberg said her team had "sent away" a number of producers who came to PBS with ideas for television shows with no thought-out mobile component, telling them, " 'Come back when you have a plan.' "

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New York NY/ COLUMN: How Not to Talk With Children About the Sandy Hook Shooting

By KJ Dell'Antonia

New York Times [Mother Lode column]

December 15, 2012

"First, find out what they have heard." That's the first line of Benedict Carey's article on how to talk to your children about the mass shooting that took place Friday at an elementary school in Connecticut. I received a similar e-mail from my own children's school, encouraging parents consider our individual children and their needs as we try to find words. How to talk to our kids is paramount, but I found myself focused on a different side of the question: how not to.

Part of me wants to talk to my children. I want to tell them what happened, and then drill them wildly on how to protect themselves. I want to promise them that it could never happen here, and at the same time reassure myself.

"First, find out what they have heard" is advice that puts the focus where it needs to be: on the child, not on the parent. Many of us think our children will be thinking and worrying about what happened in Newtown because we can't avoid thinking about it ourselves.

• But what if the answer is that they know very little?
• What if the child in front of you doesn't appear worried at all?
• Do we have to "talk to our children" about every tragedy?

As awash in information as adults are, many children, especially younger ones, simply aren't in that position. It may be difficult, but also unnecessary, to protect them from hearing about a news event at all. And a child whose television comes from Disney and whose primary use of a mobile device involves throwing birds at pigs may not be inundated with information in the ways we fear.

• "Most kids are pretty self-centered," Nancy Rappaport, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of school-based programs for the Cambridge Health Alliance, said. "Some may be more vulnerable to these kinds of fears, but many may just say, 'Oh, that's too bad,' and move on." This is a reaction that's hard to understand for an adult, but fine, Dr. Rappaport said, for children whose focus is still naturally on themselves.

So as a parent, you're left with the question not just of how to talk to your child about tragedy, but of whether you're talking to your child for your child - or for yourself. There's the question of what to say, but also when, and if, you should say it.

• "If you're feeling panicked, and like there's no place safe in the world, then that's a good time to step back and get those thoughts in order," Dr. Rappaport suggested. "But if we try to wait until we've fully come to terms with something like this, then we'll never be able to talk. In fact, we'd never be able to get out of bed in the morning."

She brought up a strategy that's commonly used for anxiety in children: "worried thought, brave thought." "We teach kids to counter a worried thought with a brave thought," she said, and to "know that although the worried thought may come back, the brave thoughts are always there as well." A worried thought might be "A shooter will come to my children's school and there is nothing I can do about it," with the brave counter "School shootings are still rare, and countless people are working to make them rarer still."

• If you're going to talk to your children, start with a brave thought, she said.
• If the worried thoughts return while you're talking, acknowledge them - out loud, with your child.
• It's all right to show that you, too, worry. But then bring a brave thought back again.

If you sense anxiety in your child, you could even share the same strategy. And remember that you don't have to get it right in one single talk. In fact, perhaps the most important thing to remember is that "talking to" your children isn't the goal. It's talking with your children that will matter in the long run.

More immediately, though, I keep coming back to the question of whether this a conversation that you have to have at all. Do you have to tell a small child what's happened, on the theory that her equally small classmates may be chattering about it on Monday, or might you just be creating an anxiety that never existed to begin with - making yours the child who begins the chattering? I don't know. My own children had a half day on Friday, and came home just as this news began to appear. Judicious management of the car radio and any newspapers means it really was up to me to decide whether and what to tell them before Monday. (They're 11, 8, 7 and 6, only watch children's networks on television and are completely uninterested in social media.)

Ultimately, I told them, fairly simply. We did talk about what you'd do, a little bit, if you wanted to get away from "someone bad." And then we left it. (I had a slightly more nuanced discussion with my oldest later, but because he seemed truly unconcerned, I let it go for now.) I suspect they won't be thinking about it at all when they go to school on Monday morning, and I hope that if their classmates bring it up, my kids will know enough to manage any fears.

But I'll be thinking about it, and so, if you're a parent, will you. I don't know how sending all of our children back to school this week can be done without those "worried thoughts" rushing in hard and fast. If one of my children asks, I'll admit it. I'll try to find a "brave thought" to back it up. And if (when) words fail me, I'll remember that a hug sometimes says the only reassuring thing there is to say.

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Chicago IL/ COLUMN: Ethnic Stereotypes Don't Aid Literacy

By Esther J. Cepeda [Syndicated Columnist]

ABQ Journal

December 17, 2012  

It's "Too Many Tamales" season in selected classrooms across the country.

The book, a contemporary classic written by Gary Soto and illustrated by Ed Martinez, tells the story of Maria, a young girl who loses her mother's diamond ring as she and her family prepare tamales for their big holiday feast.

I discovered it with my class of first-graders when I taught English-language learners in a local elementary school.

Unfortunately, though every grade level in our school reads many of the same books to create a shared culture, only my class experienced "Too Many Tamales." As the holidays approached, the rest of the school read more "traditional" holiday books.

Those students lost out.

Sort of like how my students would have missed out on most of the themes the rest of their grade was involved in had I not insisted that the bilingual students be included in the general curriculum.

The "mainstream" teachers thought this was bizarre. "Why are you teaching your class about Flat Stanley, Junie B. Jones, Hanukkah and Chinese New Year?" they'd ask incredulously. As if Hispanic students couldn't possibly be expected to learn about the same topics as the other first-graders without a mountain of "culturally correct" learning materials.

And that's my beef with the handwringing and op-eds inspired by a recent Page One story in The New York Times, "For Young Latino Readers, an Image Is Missing."

The premise was that Hispanic students, who make up about a quarter of the public school population in America, are being short-changed because they don't "see" themselves in books written for young readers.

Well-meaning as this article was - who could possibly argue that all children shouldn't feel included in their school materials? - it rang alarms about some misguided yet prevailing attitudes in education when it comes to reading, diversity and inclusion, and minority students.

First, why aren't we equally worried that non-Hispanic students get little exposure to books written by Hispanic - or Asian, black and Native American - authors or including such characters? Aren't they as harmed by not reading the types of books the Times' article suggests Latino students need?

And why, exactly, is this notion that "cultural relevance" is the key to reading progress so prevalent, especially when the conversation centers on Hispanics, when there's really no evidence to support it?

As Brice Particelli, director of the Student Press Initiative at Teachers College, Columbia University, told me, "This problem is real - there is not a great enough diversity of texts in schools, and ethnicity is one of those pieces that's absolutely lacking.

"But it's misstated: The problem is not a lack of Latino texts in Latino classrooms, it's a lack of diversity - of culture, gender, ethnicity, economy, geography, genre, perspective and challenge to familiarity - in all books in all classrooms."

I contacted Particelli after reading his letter to the editor of the Times making the same point I feel so strongly about. "Suggesting the pairing of Latino characters to Latino students is deeply problematic," he said. "Further, posing the issue as one solely about ethnicity suggests that Latino readers need Latino writers more than white or Asian readers do. We all need a diversity of texts."

Amen!

Other reactions have been just as strong.

Some have been from Latino authors of children's books such as Maya Christina Smith-Gonzalez, who warns educators not to fall prey to the stereotyping that leads to an overabundance of "fiesta and tamale books."

I thought of this when I read a teeth-grinding quote from a teacher in the Times' article: "It would be more helpful as a teacher," she said, "to have these go-to books where I can say, 'I think you are going to like this book. This book reminds me of you.'"

If a teacher gave me a tamale book and said that to me, I'd be crushed.

You see, as much as my parents enjoyed them (bought from a store on special occasions), I don't eat tamales and I've never even come close to making them.

Frankly, I don't want anyone to look at me and think of ethnic food. We are all far more than pierogies, tacos or fried rice.

Losing valuables such as a ring, though - who hasn't done that?

If a teacher tried to relate to me with a book about such a universal experience, it would be downright human.

And isn't this how all children want to be treated?