Flash! Former House Speaker in Tennessee Arrested!

By dianeravitch
August 23, 2022 //
24

Former Speaker of the House in the Tennessee legislature, Glen Casada, was arrested on multiple charges of corruption. Casada was one of the leaders of the state Republican Party. His singular achievement as leader was pushing through a hotly-contested voucher bill by one vote.

FormerTennessee House Speaker Glen Casada and his one-time top aide Cade Cothren have been indicted on federal charges following a months-long corruption investigation.

Both face charges ranging from money laundering to bribery and were arrested Tuesday morning, according to a Department of Justice spokesperson.

Casada and Cothren were brought into federal court in handcuffs for their initial appearance on Tuesday. They pleaded not guilty during the hearing shortly before noon….

The charges mark a new low in a stunning fall for Casada, once one of the General Assembly’s most powerful Republicans. He resigned the short-lived speakership in 2019 amid a texting scandal over sexually explicit and racist conversations with his former chief of staff, Cothren.

A grand jury officially indicted the pair on Monday, the Department of Justice said, on charges that could carry up to 20 years in prison.

Both men are charged with:

  • theft from programs receiving federal funds;
  • bribery and kickbacks concerning programs receiving federal funds;
  • honest services wire fraud;
  • conspiracy to commit money laundering
  • using a fictitious name to carry out a fraud;
  • eight counts of money laundering.

During his time as speaker, Casada’s most notable achievement was pushing through Gov. Bill Lee’s school voucher plan.

More:GOP chairman regrets voting for voucher bill, says program won’t be implemented in 2020

The bill only passed after Casada made a deal with a House member to remove his county from the legislation. The move broke a deadlock, which would have seen the bill fail.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Fraud, Tennessee

DeSantis Meddles in Local School Board Elections

By dianeravitch
August 23, 2022 //
25

Remember when Republicans believed in local control of schools? Those days are over, at least in Florida (and in other states where billionaires and Wall Street titans pour money into school board races to advance privatization).

In Florida, Governor DeSantis has endorsed candidates in more than two dozen local school board elections who are as irresponsible as he is. He can’t bear the possibility that anyone disagrees with him.

He is endorsing candidates who opposed any mask mandates, defying the advice of doctors, scientists, and the CDC.

DORAL, Florida — Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is working to line up a slew of loyalists on school boards across Florida as he seeks a second term in the nation’s third-largest state.

“We need help at the local level,” DeSantis said at a firefighters building before 430 enthusiastic supporters during a campaign event on Sunday. “You guys with your power going out and voting is going to make a huge difference.”

The governor has endorsed 29 conservative candidates ahead of Tuesday’s election for school board races, which typically don’t receive much attention and are technically nonpartisan.

School board members make decisions about spending, schedules, supplies, curriculum, and other matters. But in more than a dozen counties where DeSantis endorsed candidates, school boards defied the governor last fall by obligating students to wear masks.

What we know about DeSantis. He is shrewd. He plays to basic racism, homophobia, and the most extreme rightwing tendencies of voters. He is a bully.

Categories Bigotry, DeSantis, Elections, Health, Lies, Science

Florida: Federal Judge Blocks Part of DeSantis’ WOKE Act That Affects Employers

By dianeravitch
August 23, 2022 //
29

Federal Judge David Walker in Florida blocked the part of Governor DeSantis’s WOKE Act that prevents private employers from teaching their employees about equity, diversity and inclusion, saying it violates First Amendment protections. The ACLU is also suing to protect the rights of educators.

The Hill reports:

U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida Chief Judge Mark Walker issued a preliminary injunction blocking the private employer provisions in the law, known as the “Stop WOKE Act,” saying it violates free speech protections under the First Amendment and that it violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause for being impermissibly vague.

“Recently, Florida has seemed like a First Amendment upside down,” Walker wrote in the ruling, comparing the law to the fictional “upside down” in the Netflix series “Stranger Things.”

“Normally, the First Amendment bars the state from burdening speech, while private actors may burden speech freely,” the Obama-appointed judge continued. “But in Florida, the First Amendment apparently bars private actors from burdening speech, while the state may burden speech freely.”

DeSantis’s office said it will appeal the decision.

“Judge Walker has effectively ruled that companies have a First Amendment right to instruct their employees in white supremacy,” said Taryn Feske, DeSantis’s communications director. “We disagree and will be appealing his decision.”

The law prevents workplaces from requiring employees to attend any activity that violates any of eight concepts, like instilling that someone bears “personal responsibility” for historic wrongdoings because of their race, color, sex or national origin.

DeSantis believes that teaching against racism means teaching white supremacy, which makes no sense at all.

The Deseret News has addditional details.

Using the acronym WOKE for Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees, the law was designed to combat “woke indoctrination” in Florida businesses and schools by prohibiting instruction that could make some people feel they bear “personal responsibility” for historic wrongdoings because of their race, sex or national origin, according to The New York Times.

The law, championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, prohibits employers in Florida from forcing workers to attend diversity training that would make them feel uncomfortable or guilty about their race because of historical events. It also bans any talk of advantages or disadvantages based on race….

What a constitutional scholar says:“Constitutional scholars like myself warned Florida that this had so many constitutional problems, even in drafting,” Stetson University law professor Ciara Torres-Spelliscy told ABC Action News in Florida. “Under the First Amendment, the government doesn’t get to tell us what to think and this was couched in language that sounds as if it was about individual choice but it actually stops people from saying and learning certain concepts.

Torres-Spelliscy said she hopes the ruling discourages the governor and future governors from enacting “thought-control laws” the way DeSantis has.

Categories Florida, Freedom of Speech, Racism

Stunning News from Conservative Journal: U.S. Public Schools Are Better Than Ever!

By dianeravitch
August 23, 2022 //
77

Now here is a surprise: Paul Petersen, editor of the conservative journal Education Next and leader of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, published an article with his postdoctoral student M. Danish Shakeel demonstrating the steady and impressive progress of American public schools over the past half century.

They write:

Contrary to what you may have heard, average student achievement has been increasing for half a century. Across 7 million tests taken by U.S. students born between 1954 and 2007, math scores have grown by 95 percent of a standard deviation, or nearly four years’ worth of learning. Reading scores have grown by 20 percent of a standard deviation per decade during that time, nearly one year’s worth of learning.

When we examine differences by student race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, longstanding assumptions about educational inequality start to falter. Black, Hispanic, and Asian students are improving far more quickly than their white classmates in elementary, middle, and high school. In elementary school, for example, reading scores for white students have grown by 9 percent of a standard deviation each decade, compared to 28 percent for Asian students, 19 percent for Black students, and 13 percent for Hispanic students. Students from low socioeconomic backgrounds also are progressing more quickly than their more advantaged peers in elementary and middle school. And for the most part, growth rates have remained steady throughout the past five decades.

Conventional wisdom downplays student progress and laments increasing achievement gaps between the have and have-nots. But as of 2017, steady growth was evident in reading and especially in math. While the seismic disruptions to young people’s development and education due to the Covid-19 pandemic have placed schools and communities in distress, the successes of the past may give educators confidence that today’s challenges can be overcome.

This article contradicts the foundation of the rightwing-conservative narrative that “our schools are failing,” which is the rationale for school choice and harsh treatment of teachers.

As Petersen and Shakeel show, the conventional wisdom among the “blow up public education” sect is wrong. Public schools are not failing. They are succeeding.

I made the same argument in my book Reign of Error. I showed that test scores and graduation rates for all groups are at an all-time high.

But more importantly, Paul Petersen made the same assertions in 1983, when he was the staff director for a Twentieth Century Fund commission on education. I was a member of the commission, as was Albert Shanker of the AFT, Dean Patricia A. Graham of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and other luminaries.

The commission issued a report called “Making the Grade,” which lamented the woeful state of the schools. But our staff director Paul Petersen insisted that the commission was wrong in its dire conclusion and wrote a separate statement, expressing his dissent, in which he defended the schools.

I have served on many commissions and task forces but that was the only time that the staff director dissented from the group for whom he worked.

Paul Petersen was right in 1983.

He is right now.

Our public schools are not failing.

They have been a great success.

The attacks on them by Christian nationalists, billionaires, Catholic champions of vouchers, racists, extremists, and zealots for school choice is completely unjustified.

Their attack on the schools is an attack on our democracy.

It should end now.

Categories Data, Education Reform, History, Support for public schools, U.S. education

Ohio: Columbus Teachers Will Strike

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2022 //
12

For the first time in nearly half a century, teachers in Columbus, Ohio, have voted to go on strike.

The Columbus Education Association announced Sunday night that more than 94% of it members had voted to reject the Columbus City school board’s last final offer and go on strike for the first time since 1975….

The nearly 4,500-member union — which represents teachers, librarians, nurses, counselors, psychologists and other education professionals — met for more than three hours at the convention center to vote.

A spokesperson for the CEA said:

“…The school board has tried desperately to make this strike about teacher salary, teacher professional development, and teacher leaves,” she said. “Let me be clear. This strike is about our students who deserve a commitment to modern schools with heating and air conditioning, smaller class sizes, and a well-rounded curriculum that includes art, music and (physical education).”

Categories Accountability, Class size, Education Reform, Ohio, Teachers and Teaching, Unions

Virginia: Youngkin Hires Fordham Institute to Review History Standards

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2022 //
67

Virginia is about to release its history standards but the state board of education has held them up for further review—by the Fordham Institute.

From the Virginia Mercury:

The Virginia Board of Education is delaying its public hearings on the state’s new history and social science standards by a month to address concerns with timing and a number of errors and content issues Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration said were in the proposal.

The board’s schedule called for the mandated public hearings to occur in August. The board agreed to give the staff time to make certain corrections in the document and begin the public hearing process starting in September, between the September and October meetings.

At a Wednesday board meeting in Richmond, Superintendent of Public Instruction Jillian Balow recommended against the board moving the draft standards forward for review, instead urging members to allow the proposal to undergo further development by Virginians and national experts prior to its acceptance.

The standards outline Virginia’s expectations for student learning in K-12 history and social science education and are assessed through the Standards of Learning tests. Virginia code requires the board to review the standards every seven years to update content and reflect current academic research.

“We’re on our way to having the best standards in the nation, and I don’t want any of us to settle for anything less,” said Balow.

Among Balow’s criticisms of the draft standards was their use of the word “succession” instead of “secession.” She also referenced the removal of the “Father of our Country” title for George Washington and “Father of the Constitution” title for James Madison, which the Department of Education has said was done in error.

Suparna Dutta and William Hansen, two of the newest board members, said they would not feel comfortable moving forward with the current proposal.

“I think we owe it to ourselves to take a pause for the five new members here, to be able to get our sea legs under us a little bit, and to have a better understanding,” Hansen said.

However, Board President Daniel Gecker said the department has had the document for seven months and that content and correction issues are the responsibility not of the board, but of department staff. He also said the entire board received the draft proposal simultaneously.

Sarah Johnson, a Chesterfield resident who spoke during the Wednesday meeting, said delaying the review process for the new standards is “unfair” to students and costly for taxpayers. She noted that the process has included input from a number of students and industry experts in education and history, and over 5,000 comments have been submitted.

“This begs the question, Who was the superintendent attempting to please?” Johnson said.

Zowee Aquino, policy and communications team lead at the nonprofit Hamkae Center, was one of several people who urged the board to move the draft standards forward.

“The proposed SOLs should proceed,” Aquino said. “Experts have weighed in and so many residents are ready to engage.”

In a surprise visit to the board meeting, the first to be held since the governor’s appointees assumed a majority on the body, Youngkin stressed the importance of the Board of Education in developing policies and improving student achievement, including through the revision of the standards for history and social science.

“I want us to teach all of our history in Virginia, the good and the bad,” Youngkin said.

The revisions are “an opportunity for us to set a standard for what it means to educate our children in all of the lessons — again, I’ll repeat, the good and the bad — but also the amazing progress that we’ve made in this country and yet the times we failed,” he said. “This is the moment for us to take a really, really serious look at how we are teaching this most important topic.”

Youngkin campaigned heavily on education issues, including critical race theory, a graduate-level framework that focuses on racial inequity and has not been found in Virginia curricula. His first executive order, issued on Inauguration Day,prohibited the use of “inherently divisive concepts,” including CRT, in K-12 education and ordered the state to raise academic standards.

On Wednesday, Mary Ann Burke, who described herself as a mother to three public school graduates, took aim at the governor’s executive order and urged the board to continue its review as scheduled.

“We maintain that all evidence-based history is not ‘divisive’ if it is true,” Burke said. “It is essential that Virginia students learn the complete and honest history, including the history of our African American citizens.”

The Board of Education launched the review process of the history and social science standards nearly two years ago. The board, along with a committee of curriculum leaders and higher education faculty members, met repeatedly to discuss the revision of the standards between October 2020 and June 2021.

Public input was collected simultaneously in the spring of 2021, followed by a number of virtual meetings with VDOE staff to reconcile the standards in February 2022. Over 5,000 comments and input from 200 committee members were included in the draft that came before the board Wednesday.

Prior to Wednesday’s meeting, public hearings and the final approval were expected in September and on Nov. 17, respectively.

The department said the standards could go into effect as early as 2024.

Chad Stewart, a policy analyst with the Virginia Education Association, said the group is “generally” pleased with the revisions and sees a “significant improvement” compared to previous standards.

Edward Ayers, a historian and former president of the University of Richmond, said the revised standards could move Virginia students beyond memorizing names and dates “to lead the nation in a sort of inquiry-based learning in social studies that we’ve long used in science and in business education.”

“There is, in fact, no more useful subject than understanding your own country,” Ayers said. “We have an obligation to teach that history with what we know, and fortunately, you folks are on the right track.”

Categories Education Reform, History, Virginia

Byron James Henry: Trying to Understand the Christian Nationalist Agenda

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2022 //
14

In the previous post, educator Byron James Henry described the election of three Christian nationalists to the board of the Ct-Fair District in Texas. He hoped for the best and hoped they would put the needs of students before their religious agenda. In this post, he describes what they did after their election.

“Something is rotten” in Cy-Fair ISD. Christian Nationalism first reared its ignorant and intolerant head in Cy-Fair ISD at school board meetings during the summer of 2021 when a loud minority of extremists began denouncing the fake threat of Critical Race Theory (CRT). For example, one resident stated that “true Christ followers are horrified to learn how the CRT ideology and BLM have infiltrated many of our schools” and insisted that “things won’t improve until we are more concerned about God’s approval than the approval of the cult of CRT.” Many of the attendees, duped into believing that young white children are being taught to see themselves as “oppressors” and feel ashamed of their race, gave her a standing ovation. It is almost impossible to reason with misinformed, self-righteous people who believe they are engaged in a battle of good vs. evil. In their quest to “save” Cy-Fair ISD students from the “threat” of CRT, these residents helped fuel an extremist movement that threatens the foundational values of the public school system: diversity, toleration, pluralism, equal treatment, and equal opportunity. Note: If you or someone you care about has succumbed to Christian Nationalism, then Christians Against Christian Nationalism can help.

Contrary to the extremist argument that public schools have a liberal bias or indoctrinate children with “woke” ideas, the public school system prepares all children for participation in our diverse, pluralistic society. Christian Nationalists oppose the civic mission of public schools if it means promoting toleration and equality for marginalized groups or affirming religious pluralism and cultural diversity. They want the public schools to promote a conservative Christian worldview that reinforces their own political and religious agenda and ignores the historical legacy of racism and discrimination. In Cy-Fair ISD, three extremist candidates harnessed this Christian Nationalist energy in the November 2021 school board election: Scott Henry, Natalie Blasingame, and Lucas Scanlon.

These board members oppose anything the schools do to promote equity, diversity, and inclusion.

Natalie Blasingame stated on the campaign trail that teachers in Cy-Fair ISD “shouldn’t have to check their faith at the door” and pushing a conservative, Christian agenda in Texas public schools has been her motivation for seeking public office for years. We’ve known since 2015 that Blasingame doesn’t support the separation of church and state, believes that God called her to run for school board to promote Christianity in public schools, and by her own admission stated, “I have no politics but obedience.” Obedience? To what, exactly? The U.S. Constitution? To her interpretation of the Bible? Is Natalie Blasingame, like her donor Steven Hotze, a supporter of Dominion Theology that insists Christians must take over all elements of society, government, and culture to impose a Biblical worldview on everyone? Christian Nationalists are opposed to the idea of a pluralistic, multicultural republic if it means a conservative Christian worldview cannot be imposed on all of society. Should someone with such an extremist agenda be making policy for our public schools?

Alarmed by the rise of political and religious extremism in my community, I founded the Cy-Fair Civic Alliance in November 2021. We started out as a Facebook group and quickly grew to approximately 400 followers in a few weeks. Residents responded to the notion that Cy-Fair ISD needed a non-partisan group that would promote strong, inclusive public schools that serve everyone. The values of diversity, toleration, pluralism, equal treatment, and equal opportunity resonated with the community, and we started organizing on behalf of Cy-Fair ISD students, teachers, and families.

We spoke at school board meetings, wrote emails to the district about important education issues, raised money to award a scholarship to a Cy-Fair ISD graduate who planned to become a teacher, and delivered gifts to all librarians in the district when their professionalism and integrity was being attacked by everyone from Governor Abbott to members of the Texas legislature to the Texas Education Agency. The supporters of the new extremist board members called us, in public at school board meetings, “groomers” for rejecting their calls to pull books off library shelves. They said that we were supporting the “sexualization” of young children and wanted to have “pornography” available in the school libraries. They even created a hateful, anonymous sewer of a blog that somehow manages to combine the stupidity of Marjorie Taylor Greene and the misogyny of Matt Gaetz.

Our non-partisan, grassroots organization always took the high road and remained focused on our mission. Then, to our surprise, a bizarre turn of events took place. Bethany Scanlon, the wife of Cy-Fair ISD trustee Lucas Scanlon, helped create an LLC using our organization’s name and even filed federal trademark paperwork to prevent us from using it. We first learned of the creation of the faux Cy-Fair Civic Alliance when it was announced during the “Citizen Participation” portion of the June 2022 school board meeting. We were, to say the least, a little perplexed that the same crowd of people who had called us “groomers” and constantly denounced our group decided to take our organization’s name! What could possibly be their motivation? Was this supposed to prevent us from doing our activism? And, why of all people, was a school board trustee’s spouse involved in this? What was Christian Nationalist Lady Macbeth up to? A quick glance at the internet revealed that her new organization was a self-described “Conservative Christian group that believes the Bible is the Word of God, Jesus Christ is Lord, and free volunteer service to others is a constructive way to help the community.”

Read on. The takeover of school boards by those who want to destroy public schools is a frightening development.

Categories Bias, Bigotry, Democracy, Disruption, Propaganda, Racism, Religion, Texas

Byron James Henry: Slate of Christian Nationalists Win Seats on District Board in Texas

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2022 //
20

Byron James Henry is an educator in Texas. He writes here about a bitter school board election in the Cy-Fair District in Texas, the third largest in the state, where three Christian Nationalists ran a campaign based on fear, lies, and exaggeration and won.

He writes:

What began as a relatively predictable conservative opposition to mask mandates and vaccines morphed into an often-incomprehensible obsession with the “threat” of Critical Race Theory. The parents who initially disrupted school board meetings to question the recommendations of public health experts became consumed by the prospect, always ridiculous and unfounded, that their children were being indoctrinated by progressive and “woke” ideas that all White people are “oppressors” and that they should feel shame and guilt for being White. This notion, that children were being made to feel bad about the color of their skin, became the genesis of a groundswell of opposition to “CRT,” which became the term for anything that discussed concepts of white privilege, systemic racism, or the legacy of white supremacy.

In truth, the analytical framework known as “Critical Race Theory” is not being taught in any K-12 schools, but discussions about privilege and systemic racism had begun to show up, appropriately, in some high school settings within the context of the nation’s collective reckoning with racial injustice after George Floyd’s murder. The propagandists of the GOP saw an opportunity to stoke White insecurity and inflame White resentment toward society’s attempt to wrestle with deep questions about race. They funneled money into a faux grassroots or “AstroTurf” movement against CRT in the hopes that it would inspire higher turnout of conservative voters at the polls. Their campaign of lies, as with previous warnings about the threat of “socialism” or “illegal immigrants” or “Ebola” or “health care death panels,” succeeded. What is somewhat different, and more troubling, about the anti-CRT movement’s success is that it is laced with Christian Nationalism and poses a direct threat to our local schools as the site where the principles and practices of pluralistic, democratic self-government are taught….

Christian Nationalists are opposed to the idea of a pluralistic, multicultural republic if it means a conservative Christian worldview is on par with other world-views in the public sphere. Christian Nationalists want their worldview to be dominant. Christian Nationalists want their religious beliefs to override secular laws. They believe their religious liberty should permit them to discriminate against people and receive exemptions from mandates others are expected to follow. They claim to believe deeply in “choice” when they don’t want to do something, but they believe just as firmly in forced compliance to promote their beliefs. For example, they believe that schools should be forced to teach a mythical version of American history that presents conservative Christians as the nation’s founders, sustainers, and heirs. They believe that a woman should be forced to carry a pregnancy to term against her will.

Not satisfied, as in the past, to retreat from the public schools to private Christian schools, they are now engaged in a total war with the public-school system. The Texas legislature has passed legislation, HB 3979, preventing teachers from discussing the truth about the role of white supremacy, and how Christians used the Bible to justify it, in the nation’s founding and early history….

Their campaign literature, sent to me by the “Conservative Republicans of Harris County,” declares that, “We must take back the school boards that are controlled by the radical pro-Communist, anti-American leftists who are indoctrinating our children in Critical Race Theory and sexual perversion.” The piece then says, “We can change the direction of public education by electing conservative American Patriots to the school boards.”

The campaign literature then encourages the reader to “sign the Christian Patriot Declaration” at www.crtpac.com, which states, “Stouthearted Christian Patriots must rise up to boldly oppose and defeat the domestic enemy forces of evil, the atheistic pro-Communist Democrats, the despicable baby killers, pornographers, pedophiles, sodomites, transgenders, Antifa, and the BLM that have infiltrated our civil government and threaten to destroy all vestiges of Biblical morality and U.S. Constitutional principles. These domestic enemies are traitors to God and country.” The statement concludes: “Patriots, let’s press this battle to restore our nation to its Christian heritage to its successful conclusion!”

Can American public schools teach honest and truthful history when faced with this onslaught?

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Democracy, Elections, Lies, Propaganda, Racism, Religion, Texas

Librarian Amanda Jones Is a Hero of This Blog!

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2022 //
8

I wrote recently about Amanda Jones, the librarian in Louisiana who is fighting back against censorship and harassment in court.

One of our regular readers said she belongs on the honor roll of this blog. He’s right.

Amanda Jones joins the honor roll for her courage and integrity in fighting censorship!

Her GoFundMe page is raising money for her legal defense. Consider helping her fight for free thought!

Categories Academic Freedom, Censorship, Courage, Democracy, Freedom of Speech, Honor Roll, Librarians, Libraries

Jeff Bryant: Community Schools Are a Great Reform!

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2022 //
16

Jeff Bryant, a veteran education journalist, writes here about the exciting promise of community schools as a meaningful reform.

Jeff writes about a parent who was reluctant to send her child to a Title 1 school. But she gave it a try and was delighted when she discovered it was a community school.

He writes:

As the 2022-2023 school year approaches, both her daughters are enrolled in Wheaton Woods, and Allen has had a change of heart about the school.

“I’m grateful now that we gave Wheaton Woods a try. I now feel we have our kids in the best school for them, and I always advocate for the school,” she said.

What helped turn around Allen’s attitude toward Wheaton Woods had much to do with a recent state-mandated Blueprint in Montgomery County and across Maryland to implement an education approach called community schools.

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The Blueprint calls for designating schools that serve highly concentrated populations of impoverished families as “community schools” and providing these schools with extra funding and support.

The extra funding is supposed to be used to hire a health practitioner and a school-based staff person who conducts a needs assessment of the school, and based on that assessment, coordinates and manages a wide range of services—including academic, health, mental, and other services—to help address the negative impact that concentrated poverty often has on children and families.

Nineteen schools in Montgomery County, including Wheaton Woods, have been designated as community schools, according to the district’s website.

Now in its third year of implementing the approach, Wheaton Woods has poured new energy and resources to engage families more deeply in the operations of the school and respond to their needs by providing them with access to new programs and services….

After-school activities are important to Allen’s family because both she and her husband work full time. “Our daily schedules are tight,” she said.

A great deal of the school’s outreach effort is due to the work of Daysi Castro, who serves as the school’s community school coordinator called “liaisons” in Montgomery County.

“We haven’t had the opportunity to offer the services we can now give our families because we are a community school,” Castro told Our Schools.

Many of the services offered by Wheaton Woods are the result of Castro and the school forming partnerships with local nonprofits and county agencies. The Excel Beyond the Bell after-school program Allen mentioned is the result of a partnershipwith a local community organization Action in Montgomery. The school also collaborates with a local charity, the Children’s Opportunity Fund, to bring soccer, art, and Spanish language classes to students, along with the opportunity to participate in school clubs for homework and cooking classes. Other partnerships offer parents driving classes, English language classes, and food safety classes. The Montgomery County Recreation collaborates with Wheaton Woods to offer after-school activities as well

Categories Community Schools, Creativity, Education Reform
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