In many schools, zero tolerance discipline policies dictate harsh punishment—expulsion, suspension and arrest—for breaking rules.
But, as StateImpact Florida has been reporting, some districts are reconsidering zero tolerance over concerns about a rise in the number of children arrested on campus.
One of those districts walking away from zero tolerance is in Broward County, where the schools formed a unique coalition with law enforcement, local and state courts, and the NAACP to re-write the school codes.
StateImpact Florida spoke with one of the members of that partnership—Gordon Weekes, chief assistant public defender with Broward County’s juvenile justice division—who has been a critic of zero tolerance in the past.
Felecia Hatcher is on a mission. She wants to bridge the tech education gap in Florida’s schools and give underserved students the chance to become web-based entrepreneurs.
Hillary Lindwall / WLRN
Felecia Hatcher helps a student write HTML code.
She started the program Code Fever last year to reach that goal.
“Technology will allow [the students] to build their businesses and catapult their ideas much faster and definitely much cheaper,” Hatcher says.
An entrepreneur herself — she founded the ice-pop store Feverish Pops — Hatcher says the kids she works with benefit from seeing someone from a similar background succeed in business.
“What they see is what they’ll be,” Hatcher said. “I want to show kids that no matter where you come from … there is huge potential for you. You can  literally do anything that you want to do right now in this world.”
Florida’s A through F system for school grades has been fraught with controversy.
Supporters say it’s a way of holding schools and districts accountable. Critics worry that the formula to calculate the grades doesn’t reflect how well schools really prepare children.
Now, in Miami-Dade County, one school has been told it probably won’t get the A it says it earned. Continue Reading →
It is college-application season, which means high-school seniors across the country are scrambling to write personal statements, list all their extracurricular activities and take the SATs.
Wilson Sayre / WLRN
Sierra DuBose outside of Lotus House, the shelter where she lives.
Sierra DuBose is one of those seniors, enrolled at Miami Edison Senior High, but she is also one of almost 7,000 kids in the Miami-Dade public-school system who are homeless. That’s about 2 percent of the student population.
Sierra currently lives in a shelter for women called Lotus House, on the edge of Overtown.
The walls of her shared bedroom are painted bright pink, her favorite color. Her backpack lies on her bed, stuffed to the gills with homework and articles from all the clubs she’s in: yearbook, J-ROTC, and the school newsletter to name a few. The apartment has a full kitchen, which she hardly uses, and a special perk: a computer.
Brothers Rodney Jones and Tremain McCreary attend the school that will no longer be named Nathan B. Forrest High School
When Rodney Jones and Tremain McCreary walked to school on Tuesday morning, the brothers were headed to the same classrooms, to sit next to the same students, in a building with the same façade it had on Monday.
But it was not the same school they had gone to the day before.
“It’s a relief to me to know the school name had changed—I was thinking about it: how do we have a KKK leader’s name for our school?” says Jones.
“Things are changing around this school,” says McCreary.
On Monday night, the Duval County Public School Board voted unanimously to rename Nathan B. Forrest High School.
Forrest High was originally named for Nathan Bedford Forrest—the Civil War general and first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
After more than a half century of controversy, Nathan B. Forrest High School in Jacksonville is looking for a new name.
In 1959, Forrest High was named for Nathan Bedford Forrest—the Civil War general and early leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
But Monday night, on the recommendation of Superintendent Nikolai Vitti, the Duval County School Board voted unanimously to rename the high school.
“There are deep divides on some levels between communities—that goes back to slavery, it goes back to Jim Crow,” Vitti told StateImpact Florida in June. “At some point we have to go beyond talking about it to doing things differently.”
LISTEN: Nikolai Vitti’s First Conversation With StateImpact Florida/audio]
He says the new name will be chosen by students and other community stakeholders.
StateImpact Florida reporter Sammy Mack sat down again with Duval Superintendent Nikolai Vitti to talk about what’s in a name: Continue Reading →
Allison Rojas is a student at Design and Architecture Senior High in Miami.
When Allison Rojas looks at a painting by Alice Neel, the high school junior sees more than a seated woman in a purple sari.
“She uses very bold lines as you can see,” says Rojas. “Very fleshy paintings.”
Rojas has an eye that’s been trained in fine arts classes at Miami’s Design and Architecture Senior High. DASH is an arts magnet—consistently ranked among the country’s top public schools—and every year, Rojas and her classmates have taken a fieldtrip with the school to Art Basel, where she gets to see works like Neel’s Woman.
It’s a unique opportunity for these students—especially as so many of their peers don’t get this kind of exposure.
Her unemployment payments have been hung up for six weeks because of the state’s new online system.
And the mother to two lost her Tampa housing and has to move out next month.
John O'Connor / StateImpact Florida
Uzelea Evans, right, and Cynthia Williams, left, talk with GED teacher Travis McGinnis at Metropolitan Ministries. The GED is changing in January, and McGinnis said his students have been planning since September whether to take the old test or the new GED.
But she’s working hard toward some good news in a classroom at Metropolitan Ministries – passing the GED exam.
“My life has been a struggle ever since my mom died,” Evans said. “But I’m just trying to stay focused and keep going. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ve got a lot on my plate but I’ve got to keep going. I’ve just got to keep going – that’s why I need this so bad. So I got to get this.”
Evans works as a cook. Dropping out of high school has hindered her in finding a higher-paying job.
She’s one of about 40 people taking GED classes at Metropolitan Ministries.
Immokalee Community School offers classes to help parents encourage bilingual children.
To get into Florida colleges and universities, you have to have studied—or be able to speak—a second language. But Florida students don’t have to take foreign language classes to graduate from high school.
So in a part of the state where most families already speak a second language, Immokalee Community School is leaning on parents to make sure their children stay bilingual. As a condition of their children attending the school, every parent has signed a contract to speak Spanish with their kids for at least 30 minutes a day, most days of the week.
It’s an unusual effort to keep the students of Immokalee Community School from losing their Spanish—something that often happens between generations of immigrants.
Students and judges listen to one of the presentations.
By Wilson Sayre, WLRN
In observation of Homeless Awareness Week, students at Design and Architecture Senior High (DASH) have created models of possible living solutions for the homeless.
Each student in Eric Hankin’s architecture class designed a small apartment plan that had to include all the necessities of a regular apartment.
The students presented their models to professional architects for judging and feedback. The students were judged based on the creativity, feasibility and presentation of their design.
The idea for the project came from the non-profit housing developer Carrfour. It offers housing and services to homeless people. Continue Reading →
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