Thanks for reading! Our most popular blog posts of 2013
We’re well into 2014, but we wanted to thank all of our readers, supporters and funders for an important year of parent activism in 2013 and our first full year with our Parents United blog. Here’s a look back at our top five most-read blog posts of 2013. Thanks for reading and commenting!
Retired teacher Barbara Dowdall and friend at the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. They had attended the original march as teenagers.
Schools opened in September but just barely. Of greater concern, the District sent very little communication to parents about what we should actually expect – serious and widespread overcrowding, 100 split grade classrooms, an absence of counselors, support personnel and administrators. Parents United, in partnership with the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia and other groups, launched an effort to file hundreds of formal complaints against the state Dept. of Education for their failure to properly fund schools and highlight the consequences of this shameful deprivation of basic educational resources and staffing. This post which ran just before the opening of school was the most widely read blog post on our site and was sadly prescient about a grim start to a school year that is still continuing.
In late September just three weeks after the start of school, sixth grader LaPorshia Massey experienced an asthma attack at her school. With no nurse on duty, school staff did what they could and drove her home after school. The 12 -year-old died of asthma later that day at the emergency room. This tragedy struck home for every single parent and staff person in the
