Education

Education, News

City wants to relocate two high schools

/

City wants to relocate two high schools Seeks to create more seats By James Vaznis Globe Staff / July 19, 2011 Less than a month after Boston closed the former Hyde Park High School, the city is seeking to reopen the building in fall 2012 as the new home of Boston Latin Academy, under an ambitious proposal being announced today to increase capacity at several popular schools. The Latin Academy building near the Roxbury-Dorchester line would undergo considerable renovations and eventually house the Boston Arts Academy, which has been sharing a building across from Fenway Park with Fenway High School. Splitting those two popular schools would allow both to serve more students. The proposal also calls for expanding the Eliot K-8 School in the North End, which has a long waiting list of students, and creating two new in-district charter elementary schools. FULL STORY HERE: http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/articles/2011/07/19/boston_wants_to_relocate_two_high_schools/  

Education, Justice, Police, Crime, Law and Public Safety, News

WGBH puts clips of history a click away

/

Clips of history, a click away Digital library project will place 40 hours of Hub TV newscasts from 1959-2000 at your fingertips MLK in Boston 1965 By Johnny Diaz Globe Staff / July 9, 2011 Poring through the tapes and films stored in the archives vault at WGBH is like taking a tour of Boston history as it was captured on TV news broadcasts: Fidel Castro visits Boston in 1959; Martin Luther King Jr. marches in Roxbury in 1965; Barack Obama protests outside Harvard University in 1990. This sealed room, kept at a constant, chilly 62 degrees, houses 750,000 recorded items from WGBH alone, from vintage film canisters to bulky videotapes from the Boston media outlet’s former “Ten O’Clock News’’ program. Films and tapes deteriorate over time, so WGBH officials have begun ambitiously digitizing not only former newscasts from their Channel 2, but historical news footage from other local TV stations. The result will be the Boston TV News Digital Library, the first online repository of Boston television news from 1959 to 2000. The idea is to build a video catalog of Boston history, as captured in daily newscasts, that will be available over the Internet. FULL STORY HERE http://www.boston.com/ae/tv/articles/2011/07/09/wgbh_builds_boston_tv_news_archive/  

Education, News, Youth

Bus driver strike threatens city schools

/

Bus driver strike threatens city schools By Marie Szaniszlo  |   Monday, June 27, 2011  |  http://www.bostonherald.com |  Local Coverage The bus drivers’ union serving Boston Public Schools has threatened to strike as soon as the school year ends, a move that would affect more than 2,000 students with disabilities, according to a letter Superintendent Carol R. Johnson is sending to all BPS staff this morning: Over the weekend, the union made good on its threat to prevent First Student drivers from bidding on summer routes that are to begin on Wednesday, Johnson said. A work stoppage would impact more than 2,000 students in wheelchairs, with medically fragile conditions, seizure disorders, autism and other significant disabilities who receive extended-year services to maintain the progress they made during the regular school year and to prevent regression, she said. “It is simply unacceptable that a union that frequently asserts its stand for social justice would choose to harm the very children who need our help the most,” Johnson said. “We cannot stand idly by and allow the drivers’ union to cheat our students from their opportunity to learn.” Union representatives could not immediately be reached for comment. Not only would a disruption harm the most vulnerable students, Johnson said, but it would also harm the drivers. Any driver who does not want a summer route would normally be eligible for unemployment compensation, she said, but a union-driven work stoppage would cut off these benefits. Today, the district launched a recorded telephone hotline — (617) 635-7738 — for families to get updated information. Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1348266

Education, Health & Wellness, News

Expired food given to prisons Sent by state’s Education Dept.; follows outcry over student fare

/

Expired food given to prisonsSent by state’s Education Dept.; follows outcry over student fare By Andrew RyanGlobe Staff / April 12, 2011 The state Department of Education recently donated thousands of cases of out-of-date food from the school lunch program to state prisons and a county jail, documents show. Tweet 2 people Tweeted thisYahoo! BuzzShareThisThe food — more than 11,000 cases of cheese, blueberries, frozen chicken, and other goods — was offered free of charge to kitchens that serve inmates, as education officials removed old products from warehouses that serve schools across Massachusetts. The state had been reviewing its inventory after controversy erupted last month when expired food was discovered in Boston school cafeterias. The donations to prison facilities, shown in documents obtained by the Globe under the state’s public records law, underscore the breadth of the problem with out-of-date food in the federal school lunch program. FULL STORY HEREhttp://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2011/04/12/expired_food_given_to_mass_prisons/?p1=News_links

Education, News, Youth

Hub MCAS exams may have been tampered with

/

Hub MCAS exams may have been tampered with By Colneth Smiley Jr.  |   Saturday, April 9, 2011  |  http://www.bostonherald.com  |  Local Coverage An investigation into the MCAS exams of a Hub “turnaround school” uncovered testing irregularities including “erasing marks from incorrect answers to correct answers on tests that led to higher scores,” according to a schools spokesman. MCAS exams from the Blackstone Elementary School in 2010 were scrutinized in an eight-month investigation by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and showed tests taken by third-, fourth- and fifth-grade students may have been tampered with to gain higher ratio scores. “It is troubling that someone might think they are helping students by attempting to falsely inflate test scores. It’s also unacceptable,” Superintendent Carol R. Johnson said in a release. “Thankfully, we have put strong systems in place to detect these anomalies, so we were able to act quickly to review the irregularities in these scores,” said Johnson. Questions were raised about the exams last fall by the newly appointed principal Stephen Zrike after he noticed scores seemed higher than anticipated. Zrike left the Blackstone in December for a job in Chicago’s public school system. Although the investigation by DESE was inconclusive in determining whether the tests were tampered with and could not pinpoint the source of irregularities, the exams were voided because of their unusually high scores. “Students involved won’t retest, and it won’t effect their grades or progress through Boston Public Schools,” said schools spokesman Matthew Wilder. Blackstone Elementary receives benefits from the Education Reform legislation after it was identified by the state as one of Boston’s 12 turnaround schools in January of 2010. Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1329440

Education, News, Youth

President Obama pushes education revival

/

President Obama pushes education revivalBy Hillary Chabot  |   Tuesday, March 8, 2011  |  http://www.bostonherald.com  |  Local Coverage Photo by Angela Rowlings President Obama told a rambunctious crowd in Dorchester this afternoon that he would push to make America’s education system tops in the world — and told the crowd at TechBoston Academy to honor their teachers. Obama’s urging comes as Wisconsin teachers continue to protest a controversial push to eliminate collective bargaining. “You know, in South Korea teachers are known as nation builders,” Obama told a crowd of roughly 400 people crammed into the pilot school’s auditorium. “It’s time we treated the people who educate our children with the same level of respect. We have to reward good teachers.” Obama made no mention of the continuing struggle in Wisconsin, but he has expressed support of the teachers in the past. The president, who is also in town for a fundraiser, said he visited TechBoston “so that the rest of America can see how it’s done. You guys are a model.” The pilot school, created partly by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has a higher attendance rate and graduation rate than other schools in the community, said Obama. He vowed to continue to spend on education during his roughly 20 minute speech despite tipping his hat to Republican cries of overspending. “We need to come up with a budget that forces government to live within its means,” said Obama. “A budget that sacrifices our commitment to education is a budget that sacrifices our children’s future and I will not let it happen.” Obama will be speaking at a fundraiser dinner at the Museum of Fine Arts later tonight. Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1321929

Scroll to Top