Scroggs Elementary brings back "Writer's Cafe" for student authors
A local elementary school is giving its students a less formal way to show off their writing talents in front of their classmates, teachers and family.
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A local elementary school is giving its students a less formal way to show off their writing talents in front of their classmates, teachers and family.
When voters defeated the county’s proposed sales tax increase, they did more than save themselves a quarter for every $100 purchase.
Middle school students came together Friday for the culmination of a local effort to stop the harmful effects of rain runoff.
As most residents began their weekends, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools Board of Education began its search for a new superintendent.
Superintendent Neil Pedersen was named Administrator of the Year by the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Association of Educational Office Professionals.
Pink is Shelly Smith’s favorite color.
Local principal Jesse Dingle didn’t expect to gain “lifelong friends” when three Brazilian principals visited Chapel Hill.
A partnership with a school in Mexico will soon broaden the horizons of local students.
One year after her term ended as a Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools Board of Education member, Jean Hamilton is back.
Two Chapel Hill-Carrboro City schools are currently competing for national awards.
Six CHCCS district administrators participated in the Response to Instruction Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, last week.
Emil Usinger and his little sister Marley walked to school alongside their mother and two dogs early Wednesday morning.
Students at McDougle Middle School are taking a break from their normal work to focus on human rights.During “Learning Without Borders” Week, which kicks off with a faculty talent show this evening, students and faculty will study the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nation’s list of 30 rights all nations should strive to provide for their citizens.“Learning Without Borders" is an attempt to bring the world into our studies,” gifted education specialist Jami Burns said. “We try to integrate what the kids are learning into real-world issues.”Each class will have a roundtable discussion about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and raise money for Hope for Haiti, an organization that works with locals to help the impoverished nation.The school is raising money for Haiti relief to make the subject more relevant for students, Burns said.“It gets them to begin thinking about themselves as global citizens and as people who can make an impact not only in their own community but in the world community,” she said.Students’ artwork will be displayed in the school’s Human Rights Gallery open house on March 26. They will decorate human rights trees with leaves saying what they have learned about human rights.Two other displays will feature posters raising awareness about lesser-known human rights heroes and illustrations of the 30 rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.Burns and other teachers from the school started Learning Without Borders two years ago after attending a UNC conference about global education.The school had a week devoted to climate change in 2008 and poverty in 2009. Last year, the school raised $2,000 for Heifer International, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending world hunger.The week also offers students a chance to look deeper into other historical events that have highlighted the struggle for human rights.Rachel van Aalst, a 13-year-old eighth grader, said she enjoyed studying the civil rights movement and the Holocaust.“My favorite part has been the assembly, because there’s been a lot of good presentations about Learning Without Borders,” she said.In addition to Learning Without Borders, McDougle also hosts the district’s Chinese-English and Spanish-English dual language programs for middle school students.Stephanie Knott, spokeswoman for the district, said it is important for students to understand that local decisions they make now have a much wider impact.“Ours is a very diverse community to begin with, so it provides students with experiences and opportunities that help them better relate to people who are their neighbors,” she said.
Seventeen years after local educators first studied the achievement gap between white and minority students in local schools, very little has been done to close the gap, local NAACP representatives said at a press conference Thursday.The conference, held in front of the Lincoln Center, was the group’s protest to the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools Board of Education’s recent vote to add more honors courses.The school board responded with its own conference immediately following that of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The board said it will keep trying to close the achievement gap, but the honors classes would increase academic rigor for all students.The addition of honors courses in six subjects proves the school board’s priorities are with privileged students, representatives for the NAACP said.“We are not against raising standards and challenging all youth to succeed at all levels,” NAACP branch president Michelle Cotton Laws said. “But we are against policies that expand opportunities for those persons at the top with little or no genuine attention given to how to bring those children at the bottom along with them.”Mike Kelley, chairman of the school board, said the board recognized the achievement gap as its number one priority but did not believe that adding honors courses would widen the gap.“Closing the gap involves adding honors classes,” he said.The school board was split 4-3 along racial lines when it approved adding the classes last week.Greg McElveen, a black member of the board who voted against the honors classes, said it was time to focus on the implementation of plans that have been discussed for years to close the gap.“My first focus was to boost the success of those students who aren’t currently being successful,” he said. “Once we did that, everyone would see improvement and then we’d be in a better position to offer honors courses.”The school system will add high school honors classes in world history, civics and economics, U.S. history, biology, chemistry and physics next school year.Data from the school system showed black students in grades three through eight fared significantly worse on end-of-grade tests than the district average, with only 52.3 percent passing reading compared to the 84.8 percent average. Math results were slightly better, with 71.3 percent of black students passing compared to the 91.8 percent average.Graphs released by the school board showed the gap in both reading and math tests scores steadily narrowed from 1994 to 2005.But when the state restructured the tests about five years ago, making them more rigorous and raising the passing grade, passing rates for blacks and Latinos plummeted about 40 percentage points, while the rates for whites and Asians dipped by about 10 percentage points. Since then, scores have climbed, but a significant gap remains.Earlier this month, the board considered a hybrid option for offering honors classes that would combine standard and advanced instruction in the same classroom, but it was received poorly by students, parents and educators, Superintendent Neil Pedersen said.Laws said the school system was not preparing minority children to be world citizens.“This is not a black or white issue,” she said. “This is a human and what’s right issue.”Contact the City Editor at citydesk@unc.edu.
Eleven students labeled brightly colored body outlines with the German words for different body parts last week.Later, their teacher, Marilyn Metzler, joked in German with one student who told her she had a “bad face.”Smith Middle School’s class is the last remaining middle school German class in Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools — and it won’t continue next year.German, along with middle school electives in debate and African-American studies, was eliminated from the district curriculum in an effort to streamline course offerings in the 2010-11 school year.The Board of Education’s Jan. 21 vote to do away with the low-enrollment classes has left teachers making plans for revised courses.The board suggested integrating African-American studies across the curriculum. Latin, Spanish and French offerings were revised to avoid splitting level-one classes across two years.Different visual arts classes were also consolidated to create a single class for each grade.“We’ve been fighting this decision for over a year and have now lost,” Metzler said. “We’ve accepted the decision because it has been made clear that it is essentially irreversible.”Her campaign against the decision involved speaking to the school board and requesting letters of support from UNC’s Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and a German Consulate General in Atlanta. Other teachers mounted similar efforts.“It’s going to be hard not having the feeders going into the high school,” said Metzler, who also teaches German at Chapel Hill High School.Students who start with the first level of a language in high school will also have difficulties reaching Advanced Placement language courses.“It will take longer to get to the same level of knowledge of the language,” said Nolan Winters, an eighth-grader at Smith Middle School.When Winters goes to East Chapel Hill High School, he will have to face a German program that has struggled with low enrollment.Without students continuing German from middle school, the program is likely to shrink even further.Language teachers at Phillips Middle School are taking a similar attitude, teacher Jennifer de Lima said. De Lima said she thinks some students would be best served by a two-year level-one option, which has been eliminated. But teachers are coping with the decision.“A planning day is in the works for us to work together to make this … as beneficial as possible,” de Lima said in an e-mail. Phillips Middle School art teacher Angela Greene said she thinks the decision to combine visual arts electives represents a compromise.“All of the visual arts teachers in our district are satisfied with this decision,” she said.Contact the City Editor at citydesk@unc.edu.
Community members can voice opinions today about a proposal to add more honors classes to the local school curriculum — either online or in a hybrid form with regular classes.
Another round of layoffs is expected at Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools due to the second significant cut to the district’s budget in two years.