Category: School

CARY, NC — The Wake County Public School System is taking another step exploring later high school start times and end times and earlier elementary school start times and end times.

The district will host town halls and focus groups later this fall and will soon send out a survey soliciting feedback. No changes would be made until the 2024-25 school year, at the earliest.

The switch is grounded in research on natural sleep rhythms and potential academic implications. But the likely wide-reaching impact has kept the school system from moving quickly toward making a change.

A change could affect parents’ schedules, students’ after-school

Over the last several years, it seems like there has been an increase in the amount of high school games that are getting canceled due to everything from teams not getting their helmets back from reconditioning at the beginning of this fall, to a lack of available players .

This weekend, Wewoka HS (OK) was facing a week four game against Mounds HS (OK) that they were going to have to forfeit being down eight players for a variety of reasons, they shared on social media.

To keep that from happening, two unlikely participants stepped forward.

Senior ladies Natalie Davis and Callie Ramsey stepped way out of their comfort zones to put on shoulder pads and a helmet to make sure Wewoka would have a game.

Davis stepped in and punted and kicked, corralling a bad snap to boot a 42 yard punt on her first attempt, while Ramsey played

A school district in Pennsylvania temporarily banned the Girls Who Code book series for young readers, according to an index of banned books compiled by the free expression non-profit, Pen America.

The books are four of more than 1,500 unique book titles that have been banned by various schools across the country after conservative pushes to censor books. According to a report released by Pen America in April, 138 school districts across 32 states have banned books from their classrooms and school libraries, sometimes temporarily, even if only for a day, sometimes on an ongoing basis.

A recent update to Pen America’s banned book index included the Central York school district in Pennsylvania as banning the books The Friendship Code, Team BFF: Race to the Finish!, Lights, Music, Code! and Spotlight on Coding Club! They were among a suggested new list of more diverse teaching resources that ended up being

“The suspension rate was high. MLK lamentably had the highest rate of disciplinary referrals in the entire district,” said Leslie Hu, MLK’s community school coordinator who added that standardized test scores were really low. The principal wanted to incorporate PBL, but knew students were distracted by a lack of basic needs that could not be met at home. Shifting to a community school model helped students with needs like food and medical care, and teachers like Founds were able to invest more time in developing their teaching practice.

Schools aren’t typically designed to offer more than instruction, but by addressing basic needsthey’re finding that students can learn better. Cincinnati Public School Learning Centers, Oakland Unified School District and even Lebron James’ I Promise School in Akron, Ohio, are community schools that lend a helpful framework for closing achievement gaps and improving student outcomes.

“The community school approach is where

Meet Anthony Triplett Jr. He’s 31, he lives near Lacey and he’s a nine-year Army veteran with two children enrolled in North Thurston Public Schools’ Evergreen Forest Elementary and Nisqually Middle School.

He has worked in federal security, he says, and he followed that by forming a nonprofit called All in a Days Work to address veteran suicides.

And then on May 24, a mass school shooting unfolded in Uvalde, Texas, killing 21 people, including 19 students.

Triplett’s children asked him if they had to return to school the next day.

“It was heartbreaking,” said Triplett. Galvanized by the moment, Triplett asked himself, “What can I do?”

Around the time of the Texas shooting, there were elevated concerns about school safety, said North Thurston Public Schools spokesman Aaron Wyatt. Some in the community offered to patrol school hallways and some asked if bullet-proof glass could be installed, he recalls.

Triplett

The city Department of Education has axed another 850 teachers and classroom aids — bringing the total to nearly 2,000 school employees fired for failure to comply with a vaccine mandate struck down in court.

About 1,300 DOE employees who took a year’s unpaid leave — with benefits — agreed to show proof of COVID vaccination by Sept. 5 or be “deemed to have voluntarily resigned.”

Of those staffers, 450 got a shot by the deadline and “are returning to their prior schools or work locations,” DOE officials told The Post. They include some 225 teachers and 135 paraprofessionals.

The 850 let go makes roughly 1,950 DOE staffers terminated since the vaccine mandate took effect on Oct. 29, 2021.

Rachelle Garcia, an elementary school teacher in Brooklyn for 15 years and mother of two, worked fully in person during the pandemic and never got sick, she said.

But she refused

Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz was heckled on a flight Thursday over gun control and school safety policies, prompting the senator to call the heckler “a partisan.”

The senator, along with his fellow passengers, was preparing to exit the plane landing in Texas when a passenger filmed Cruz and began pressing him with questions.

“We’re in Houston? I thought we were going to Cancun,” the male voice said in a video posted to Twitter. It was an apparent reference to a family vacation Cruz took last year amid statewide power outages.

TED CRUZ’S 2022 MISSION TO NEW HAMPSHIRE FOR LEAVITT THAT COULD ALSO PAY DIVIDENDS IN 2024

The man then got the senator’s attention by saying, “Senator, thank you for everything you’ve done since Uvalde. All those podcast episodes must have raised a lot of money for you.”

Texas Mon. Ted

ISLAMABAD — The United Nations on Sunday called for Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers to reopen schools to girls in grades 7-12, calling the anniversary of their exclusion from high school “shameful.”

The UN said it is concerned that the policy, together with other restrictions on basic freedoms, will contribute to a deepening of the country’s economic crisis in the form of greater insecurity, poverty and isolation.

“This is a tragic, shameful, and entirely avoidable anniversary,” said Markus Potzel, acting head of the UN mission in Afghanistan.

A year after the Taliban took power in Afghanistan, hard-liners appear to hold sway in the Taliban-led government. Teenage girls are still barred from school and women are required to cover themselves from head to toe in public, with only their eyes showing. The religious group has failed to deliver on various promises to enable girls’ return to the classroom. The ban targets grades 7-12,

CNN
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It was a peaceful Friday morning for Murrisha Leon, who was asleep when she received a call from a fellow parent warning her of an active shooter at their children’s high school in Arkansas.

Immediately, Leon’s heart sank as images of worst-case scenarios flooded her mind. She might lose one of her kids today, she told herself.

“I jumped up in a panic and instantly threw up,” Leon told CNN. “I believed it and feared for my children’s lives. I called them, and when they didn’t answer the first time, I started crying.”

Leon’s son, 14, and daughter, 16, both attend Watson Chapel High School, which was put on lockdown immediately after the school received news of a possible active shooter on campus – another in a series of reported threats at US schools this week.

Leon soon received a text from her son, saying, “Mama please come