Evans High School in Orange County used to be known as a dropout factory. But since 2007, it’s gone from a two-time F-rated school to a B-rated school – in one of Orlando’s most troubled neighborhoods. Now, the “community school” concept is spreading to other Florida cities.
Evans is in a neighborhood called Pine Hills, where homes and businesses have bars at the windows. One student, found carrying a Taser, said it was due to her dangerous route home. The neighborhood has exceptionally high rates of juvenile crime and referrals to the Florida Department of Children and Families.
“We have long said at the Department of Children and Families that if we’re ever going to get our arms around neglect and abuse, it has to be a community-wide effort.”
DCF Secretary Mike Carroll. He says Evans has succeeded by becoming what’s called a “community school” — addressing the barriers to student success in a high-risk neighborhood.
“Everything from getting a child to school when they need to be there to making sure they’re fed when they arrive at school to making sure it’s safe going back and forth to school. If there are issues at home that may impact the child’s ability to learn when they get to school, that there’s assistance to do that…”
William Haft with the association says it’s surprisingly difficult to track down who runs a charter school.
“We want to help the authorizers, help districts make good decisions,” Haft said. “You want to know how well they’ve been doing, how they’ve been performing… where they’re been doing it.”
Nearly one in three Florida charter schools have closed since the state first allowed the publicly funded but privately run schools. And Florida charter schools were three times as likely to close during their first year than they were nationally during the 2013-2014 school year.
A "lean and green" meal from the Miami-Dade schools test kitchen. This one has spinach lasagna, salad and a mozerella-stuffed bread stick.
Miami-Dade school meals are going lean and green this school year.
The district is adding smoothies made with Naked brand juices, greek yogurt and vegetarian lasagna.
But at an event Monday unveiling the new dishes, the district was most proud of their version of a Miami classic. The “guavalito” is a whole grain, lower sugar version of a guava and cheese pastry made by a local baker.
“This was developed right here by the staff,” said Penny Parham, the district’s director of food and nutrition, slicing open one of the pastries. “This is 100 calories; no trans fat. The added sugar is below 35 percent – it meets our district wellness policy.”
Students who are considered homeless by Florida schools can be living in hotels, trailer parks, in campgrounds or doubled up with friends or relatives. And with as many as 71,000 or more homeless students in the state the challenges can extend beyond the kids and families to include the schools.
For most kids school is a place of achievement and learning, or just a place to socialize with friends. But for kids without stable living arrangements it can mean much more than that.
Tampa Bay 2-1-1
It's difficult to estimate how many students are homeless.
School districts want to help their homeless students, but first they have to know who they are.
Estimates vary greatly on how many homeless students there are in Florida. Some say the number is as high as one in every 18.
Ken Gaughan supervises social work for Hillsborough County Public Schools. They asked experts how many homeless students they may have.
“And the input we get is – you need to look at your free lunch count in the district and our free lunch count is pretty high,” Gaughan said. “It’s around 55 percent. They say about 10 percent of your free lunch population is also homeless. And that’s a pretty big number.”
He chatted with StateImpact Florida about school discipline, testing requirements and how Congress is rewriting the federal No Child Left Behind education law.
Q: We are currently in the midst of a national conversation about race and policing following the deaths of several black men and women either in police custody or at the hands of police. Is this conversation extending to education and how is it?
A: It absolutely is and lots of different ways.
So I’ve spent time in Ferguson after the issues there. Spent time in Baltimore; recently been back there a couple times.
And our schools operate in the real world. And our kids have questions. They are sometimes scared; they’re sometimes angry; they’re sometimes confused; they’re sometimes frightened. And we have to have very open and honest conversations about a whole host of issues — race being a difficult one, but I think hugely important.
And it’s interesting. I think you know we have a lot of work to do ourselves.
We’ve been very, very public about the school to prison pipeline. Sometimes folks don’t like when I talk about that, but that is real.
Former Attorney General Eric Holder and I put out data from our civil rights data collection process that showed that across the country the school prison pipeline starts in pre-K, with three- and four-year-olds, with disproportionate numbers of young boys of color are being suspended and expelled.
Posters advertise new Miami-Dade County school choice programs.
Miami-Dade County Public Schools plan to eliminate out-of-school suspensions this year, preferring to keep kids in class and address behavior problems.
Miami-Dade schools have included $3.2 million dollars in the district budget to eliminate out-of-school suspension.
“Traditional outdoor suspensions and disciplinary actions don’t work,” said Miami-Dade schools superintendent Alberto Carvalho. “We ought to understand the root causes of student misbehavior…to actually address the human being behind the behavior, rather than simply condemning it and applying a consequence to it.”
The district is setting up “success centers” so suspended students don’t disrupt classrooms. The centers are staffed by teachers, social workers and other service providers to work with the students – and keep them on their classwork.
“This is not going to be a vacation” for suspended students, said Carvalho.
At one point, the Schultz Center had state funding and a big, multi-million dollar contract with Duval County schools to help teachers improve their craft.
The Schultz Center has trained thousands of teachers since it was founded in Jacksonville in 1997. But when state revenues declined, the Schultz Center funding was cut.
So the Schultz Center had to change. The non-profit is expanding beyond Northeast Florida to offer training to teachers statewide, both in person and online. And they’re building an incubator for education entrepreneurs.
They’re also helping teachers adjust to big changes in the classroom.
State law requires that teachers are evaluated each year. That evaluation must include how well that teacher’s students performed on standardized exams — and whether they did better or worse than expected, based on a complex statistical formula.
That formula is known as VAM, or value-added model. The VAM score counts for at least one-third of a teacher’s total evaluation score.
Thursday’s decision sets a statewide standard for 4th through 10th grade language arts teachers, 4th through 8th grade math teachers and Algebra I teachers — teachers in subjects with a statewide exam. State officials said the rule change will apply to about one-third of all Florida teachers.
State Board of Education member Rebecca Fishman Lipsey is questioning the accuracy of forcible sexual assaults reported on state college campuses.
A State Board of Education member is questioning the number of sexual assaults reported on state college campuses.
Rebecca Fishman Lipsey believes it is unlikely that there were only seven forcible sexual assaults reported by the 28-college sytem with more than 400,000 students. Those figures do not include crime data for the dozen schools in the state’s university system.
Fishman Lipsey began Wednesday’s board meeting by handing out pages of state college system crime data. Notice anything unusual she asked?
“It’s just a string of zeroes,” she said of the column tallying forcible sexual assaults. “Initially, for maybe half a second, my brain could go ‘Wow, how wonderful there’s not a single rape at any of our campuses. That’s an incredible thing.’
But Fishman Lipsey said she doubts the news is that good. She asked the Florida Department of Education to look into the accuracy of the figures.
Broward County schools superintendent Robert Runcie shared lessons learned at a White House summit on student discipline.
South Florida school leaders traveled to Washington Wednesday to share ideas on how to reduce on-campus arrests and suspensions.
Superintendents from Broward County and Miami-Dade County shared how their districts dealt with the problem at a summit hosted by the White House.
Research shows that students who are suspended before 9th grade are less likely to graduate. And on-campus arrests can stick with a student for life, hindering chances at a college education or finding a job.
Broward County schools superintendent Robert Runcie said his district led the state in the rate of arrests and suspensions when he took control in 2011. Minority students were arrested and suspended at disproportionate rates.
“Our goal can’t be to have students go into the courtroom,” Runcie said. “Our focus has got to be keep them in the classroom and out of the courtroom.”
The district started a new program to try to change student behavior and avoid arrests and suspensions. More than 2,000 students went through the program its first year and more than 90 percent did not commit a second offense.
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