Sammy Mack is the Miami-based education reporter for StateImpact Florida. Sammy previously was a digital editor and health care policy reporter for WLRN - Miami Herald News. She is a St. Petersburg native and a product of Florida public schools. She even took the first FCAT.
The Broward County Public School district has been honored for its anti-bullying policies.
anankkml / freedigitalphotos.net
Broward County Public Schools are being honored for their anti-bullying policies.
Equality Florida recognized the school district at its annual gala this weekend. Broward was specifically being recognized for its policies protecting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students.
“The tough reality is that even today, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students face relentless bullying and harassment in our schools across the state and across the country,” said Stratton Pollitzer, deputy director of Equality Florida. “Broward Schools have really stepped up to make sure those students are protected”
Broward County Public Schools were the first in the state to write an anti-bullying policy that specifically addressed sexual orientation and gender identity.
Pollitzer said that beyond what they’ve done on paper, his organization has been impressed at the resources Broward Schools put toward protecting LGBT students.
“They have a tremendous resource in their safe schools department that reaches out to schools all across the county to make sure they have resources and training for supporting and protecting LGBT students,” says Pollitzer.
Also important, he says, is that the policies Broward developed don’t just protect children in South Florida: “Broward’s anti-bullying policy has become a model that has now been implemented and protects more than half of the students all across Florida.”
Professor David Sobel has spent much of his academic career examining how to engage children around issues of changing environments.
Earlier this week, we looked at how kids who live in coastal Florida learn about sea-level rise. They witness it all around them: on television, in school, sometimes in their front yards.
Even so, big, landscape-changing events in nature can be tough for children to understand.
So we spoke with Professor David Sobel, who has spent much of his academic career at Antioch University in New England examining how to teach kids about the environment. He’s developed the Environmental Ladder of Responsibility (seen below)—a developmentally appropriate framework for the when and how of talking to children about environmental issues.
Q: How do you talk to kids about sea-level rise?
Sobel: Sea-level rise is just one aspect of talking to kids about climate change. I think we’d consider them wed together.
Trying to engage kids in understanding the issues and figuring out what they can do about it without inordinately scaring them is a great approach to sea-level rise.
It’s important that kids progressively understand the issues. Before you dump a lot of responsibility on them, you’ve got to make sure they feel connected to the natural world, and at one with it, and understand its beauty. And have a sense of why they want to protect it before you recruit them to be conservationists. Continue Reading →
Standing at the water’s edge on Florida International University’s Biscayne Bay campus, Nicholas Ogle shows a crowd of teenagers what looks like a giant, rotten green bean.
Credit Daniel Rivera, Student / Nicholas Ogle
Nicholas Ogle will replant the mangrove propagules collected by MAST students.
“We don’t want any mushiness anywhere, especially at the top,” he says, then chucks the specimen to the side.
Ogle, an environmental coordinator with FIU, is showing this marine-science class from the new MAST magnet school at FIU how to pick out a healthy mangrove seedling. The students will then be sent to duck in and out of the mangrove roots at the coastline, collecting seedlings — “propagules,” the scientist calls them — to eventually be replanted in a mangrove restoration project.
Mangroves are often cited as a first line of defense against the impact of sea-level rise. And in many ways, so is this interaction between the students and Ogle.Â
Florida doesn’t require students to learn about the effects of climate change — such as sea-level rise — until high school.But in South Florida, kids observe rising oceans all around them. They see them on television, online and in-person.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the sea level in Miami has risen more than nine inches in the past 100 years — and scientists expect a big increase in the next century.
So South Florida schools and outside organizations are forming partnerships to build an educational bridge connecting what students learn in school to what they see in their changing environments.
National trends: The Opportunity Index measures factors that contribute to quality of life, like graduation rates and access to early learning.
Florida doesn’t offer as much opportunity to its young people as other states do.
That’s according to new research from Opportunity Nation. The bipartisan organization compiles an index of community characteristics to measure how people’s zip codes affect their quality of life.
The index includes things like access to early learning, violent crime rates and graduation rates.
“As a nation we’re fixated on unemployment, and of course it’s important. But the real core issues of opportunity have been going on for much more than simply this recession,” said Mark Edwards, executive director of Opportunity Nation.
“One of the measures of opportunity is the percentage of young adults in your community that graduate from high school—we know when that number is low, communities don’t do well,” he said.
Edwards was in Florida for a Grad Nation summit on the national dropout crisis. Ultimately, Edwards told the crowd of educators, he wants to see people vote on issues of opportunity—not unemployment.
New York Public Library / images.nypl.org/?id=813546&t=W
Nathan Bedford Forrest was the Confederate general who oversaw the Fort Pillow Massacre.
A petition to change the name of Jacksonville’s Nathan B. Forrest High School—whose namesake was the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan—has reached more than 160,000 names.
Earlier this week, there was murmuring that Forrest’s School Advisory Council would address the name change at its November meeting. It would be the first step towards an official renaming.
The item did not actually make it on the SAC agenda this week. But according to the Florida Times Union, that did not stop opponents of the name change from speaking in favor of Forrest:
Joan Cooper, a Forrest alumna, told the SAC that the Ku Klux Klan started as a gentlemen’s club in Tennessee. Once the organization began to grow into what it is today, Forrest ordered it disbanded and separated himself from it.
“Changing the name of Forrest High is wrong,” said Jacksonville resident Harry Wagner. “Changing the name of the school will not improve teaching or the GPAs.”
Before joining the Klan, Forrest was a Confederate general in the Civil War. He was the officer in charge during the Fort Pillow Massacre: Continue Reading →
Every morning, children at Education Station begin the day with a hug and a book.
Florida’s legislative session is months away, but educators and politicians are already talking about making early childhood education a priority.
“Early childhood is viewed as childcare, and not early childhood education, which it really is,” says Dr. Susan Neimand, director of the School of Education at Miami Dade College, which runs a nationally recognized early learning center called Education Station.
“We know that the brain starts developing from the time the child is in the womb—and the proper attention for that is not given,” says Neimand.
LISTEN: Why Early Learning Matters To Florida Educators
From the infant room to the pre-K class, children at Education Station start their day with a hug and a book. It’s part of an evidence-based approach to cultivate learners. The center is staffed by professionals trained in child development and students from the school of education.
Research has shown that children who get high-quality early learning—where instructors are trained in child development and reading and learning are encouraged through play—are more likely graduate high school and go on to college. They’re less likely to end up in jail. As a result, the federal government estimates that every dollar invested in early learning can save about seven dollars in the future. Continue Reading →
Even as an increasing number of districts and states abolish the practice, corporal punishment remains a legal form of discipline in 19 states, most of them in the South, according to the Center for Effective Discipline, a nonprofit based in Columbus, Ohio, that provides educational information on corporal punishment and alternatives to its use. That’s a decrease from 2004, when 22 states permitted the practice.
… Numbers collected by the U.S. Department of Education’s office for civil rights and released in March 2008 showed that 223,190 students were physically punished in American schools in 2006, the most recent year available.
Speakers lingered hours past when the hearings were supposed to end so that they could share their thoughts on the Common Core with Pam Stewart.
The conversation about Common Core standards hit a fever pitch in Florida last week.
Florida’s education commissioner, Pam Stewart, moderated three hearings about the Common Core in Tampa, Davie and Tallahassee. The listening sessions came out of an executive order issued by Gov. Rick Scott. Along with the request for public input, the governor has been distancing Florida from its position as a leader in a consortium to create a Common Core-aligned test.
More than 750 people showed up to the listening sessions. Parents, teachers and activists all took their four minutes at the microphone to tell Florida’s education leaders what they think of the Common Core.
Wednesday marks the second of three Common Core hearings Florida is holding in an effort to get feedback from parents and communities about the state’s new education standards.
Whether or not you can make it to Davie tonight, we want you to be part of the conversation.
StateImpact Florida is teaming up with our partners at WLRN-Miami Herald news and Florida International University’s journalism program to cover the event. A group of student journalists in our WLRN/FIU Radio Storytelling class will be live tweeting the hearings with updates, context and on-the-ground observations.
Got questions about who’s in the room? What the terms being used mean? How it’s being received? Let us know!
You can join the conversation in the live chat box below or reach us on Twitter with @WLRN and #CommonCore. The Florida Channel will be streaming the proceedings on web channel 7. Continue Reading →
The Florida State Board of Education meeting took a turn for the theatrical on Tuesday.
In all the attention surrounding the Common Core hearings Florida is holding this week, it would have been easy to miss a curious exchange at Tuesday’s State Board of Education meeting.
Going into the meeting, some of the most-watched items included a vote on whether or not Florida should extend a safety-net that prevents schools from dropping more than one letter grade at a time (it should, the board voted) and a decision on whether or not to include reading samples in the appendix of the Common Core standards (Florida won’t, said the board).
But it was during a discussion of a communications strategy around the new standards that things took a turn. At one point, the board members and presenters got into a long debate about how to even use the phrase “Common Core.”
The tussle over language was reminiscent of a scene from Waiting for Godot—ambiguous, circular, full of heady themes. (Alternately, depending on your sense of humor, it had a whiff of Abbot and Costello’s Who’s on First sketches.)
With that in mind, we scripted a few of the more theatrical moments from the meeting. Feel free to give it a dramatic reading of your own: Continue Reading →
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