- PR Gets Half a Million in School Bond Money
Sweetwater schools spent more than half a million dollars out of its school construction bond last year on one project: Telling people how they were spending money from their school construction bond.
The money comes out of Proposition O, a $644 million bond that South Bay voters passed almost five years ago to pay for repairs and upgrades in the Sweetwater Union High School District, including removing asbestos, improving accessibility for the disabled, and upgrading science labs and technology.
More than $520,000 last year alone bought Sweetwater a website with photos and webcams of buildings under construction. It paid for outreach to everyone from the National City Rotary Club to the Chula Vista Chamber of Commerce, city councils, construction companies, parents, teachers and principals.
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- Thinking About Preschools
More than 25,000 out of 240,000 spots in California's public preschools and other child care programs are expected to disappear this year, according to an Oakland-area organization Emily Alpert quoted this week. That will mean a lot of young children will not get the advantages some research says preschools provide.
Her story explains that, according to one study, for every dollar spent on preschool programs, 16 dollars are saved later in welfare, court costs and taxes.
As Kelly Donivan puts it in the comments, "Preschool can be equated with preventative medicine!" She continues,
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- Rise in Alternative Tests Could Inflate Schools' Gains
Test scores have been rising across California. But one testing expert believes that the gains have been inflated because more students with disabilities are taking an alternative test.
If fewer students who score poorly take the test, that could increase the percentage of kids doing well, notes John Fensterwald, a blogger and former San Jose Mercury News editorial writer.
The alternative test is permitted by the U.S. Department of Education as a different way to assess special education students, Fensterwald writes. It is only given to students who do very poorly on the ordinary state test. He reports that the alternative test has gradually been introduced for more grades, expanding the number of kids who take it from 39,000 to 184,000 statewide in four years.
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- How Teachers End Up in Your School or Laid Off: Editor's Note
It's back-to-school time.
And this year, the roster of teachers that greet students at your neighborhood school could look notably different when the doors fly open on that first day.
San Diego Unified has laid off hundreds of teachers. Now it's rehiring a bunch more. As Emily Alpert's reporting has detailed over the years, the process for picking who stays, who goes and who ends up at which school can seem more Rube Goldberg than Albert Einstein.
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