- St. Coletta Shops feature accessories, home goods made by adults with disabilities [St. Coletta PCS mentioned]
- Early education should be integral part of elementary schools, foundation says
- Amid Common Core debate, North Carolina opts to tweak, not abandon, standards
St. Coletta Shops feature accessories, home goods made by adults with disabilities [St. Coletta PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Mark Jenkins
July 16, 2014
The jewelry, tote bags and tableware sold by St. Coletta of Greater Washington are colorful and stylish. But for many of the charity’s customers, the most attractive thing about the items is that they were made by Washington-area people with intellectual disabilities.
“They gave a gift, and they gave a gift,” said Chief Development Officer Rebecca Hill of St. Coletta’s customers. “They gave us something, and they gave the person something. And the person receiving it feels good about that.”
St. Coletta is a recognizable presence in Southeast Washington, where its idiosyncratic building near RFK Stadium holds a charter school that serves almost 300 students from ages 2 to 22. (Although most are District residents, some are from the suburbs.) Yet the group began in Clarendon in 1959 and has programs for adults in Arlington, Alexandria and Rockville.
The older participants are the ones who make the gift items, working with textiles, beads and fused glass. “We’re always looking for new things for our people to do,” St. Coletta Chief Executive Officer Sharon Brady Raimo said. “Because they’re talented, and everybody needs something meaningful to do with their day.”
Raimo arrived at St. Coletta in 1993, at a time when the organization was struggling. Begun as a single class for developmentally challenged children, the school had subsequently moved from a Catholic church to a Presbyterian one. Virginia state restrictions on funding for religious groups and limited support from Catholic authorities led Raimo to make the charity nonsectarian. In 1996, she relocated it to Old Town Alexandria.
A decade later, St. Coletta moved most of its operation to the District, which donated the land for a new school. Its $32 million building was designed by noted postmodernist architect Michael Graves as a series of linked, multicolored pavilions.
The same year, the charity took over a program for disabled workers, Woodmont Weavers, located in Ballston Common mall. “The women who ran the program were going to retire, and they didn’t have anybody who could weave,” Raimo recalled. “But we did. We happened to have a staff member who could weave.”
Then Raimo heard about fused glass. “I knew this person who was an art teacher in the D.C. public schools, and she said she was teaching 5-year-olds to do fused glass. And I said, ‘5-year-olds? Can we do this?’ And she said, ‘Oh, I bet you can.’
“We set it up, and sure enough, our people can do it just fine.”
St. Coletta’s adult participants use the brightly hued glass to make dishes, earrings and bracelets, among other things. On display in the workshop in the organization’s D.C. location is a fused-glass Christmas tree.
Beading was added last summer. “Sharon’s very entrepreneurial,” Hill noted. “She’s always thinking of new things for us to do.”
The crafts provide activities for adults with autism, Down syndrome and other disorders, but that’s not their only purpose. “We’ve got to sustain these programs,” Raimo explained. “With kids, you get maybe $180 to $210 a day to serve them. They become an adult and you get $91 a day. It’s the same person!”
Staff costs are high because about 20 percent of the students use wheelchairs and about 50 percent are nonverbal. The ratio of staff to participants is generally 1 to 4 in adult programs, but at the school, Raimo said, “it can be 1 to 1, depending on the level of disability of the person.”
Although today the crafts roughly break even, Hill noted, “we hope eventually it will bring in enough revenue that not only can we fill the funding gap between what it actually costs us to serve them well and what we get paid from the jurisdictions, but also so we can pay them.”
“We pay the weavers now,” she added. “Everyone who weaves gets paid.”
The three adult locations all have shops, but they don’t attract many customers because they’re not open on evenings and weekends, Hill said. Most of the sales come from the organization’s Web site, www.stcolettashops.com. “We’re not real retailers,” she said. “But we’re learning how to be retailers.”
The next project is a fashion truck that would repurpose an unused bus. “We could trick out the bus, and put all our stuff in it, and make a movable work site,” Raimo said.
When it starts rolling, it will surely be as vivid as St. Coletta’s pink, orange and salmon interiors, or its red-and-blue fused-glass jewelry. “Everything we do is good,” Hill said. “We don’t do ugly.”
Early education should be integral part of elementary schools, foundation says
The Washington Post
By Michael Alison Chandler
July 16, 2014
Preschool programs should be integral parts of elementary schools with comparable funding levels and school hours; child-care professionals should be trained as teachers, not babysitters; and state data systems should include information about early education, according to a blueprint for speeding up improvements in early education.
The report published Wednesday by the non-partisan New America Foundation includes wide-ranging policy recommendations for the future of early learning, spanning academic standards, teacher training, assessments, funding and evaluations that emphasize how well teachers interact with children.
“A strong start requires much more than just a year of pre-K, especially for children with multiple risk factors,” said the report.
It builds on an earlier study that found mixed results for early education, despite an infusion of enthusiasm in recent years, including President Obama’s proposal for universal preschool and a new wave of philanthropy, advocacy and research.
The recommendations include some familiar ideas and some surprising ones.
Here are a few:
*Strive for a new model of primary school that starts earlier. For example, some school districts have pre-K-to-3 schools, or link schools to child-care programs for infants and toddlers so they can provide more thoughtful transitions.
*Replace state K-5 teacher licenses with two licences, one that starts at birth or preschool and goes to third grade and another that starts at third grade and extends through middle school, to better reflect the developmental needs of children in these age groups.
*Expand the National Assessment for Educational Progress, a nationally administered test, so that it’s first administered in first grade, not fourth. “Students’ long-term struggles with reading start early — poor readers at the end of first grade have a one in 10 chance of ever catching up,” the report said.
Amid Common Core debate, North Carolina opts to tweak, not abandon, standards
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton
July 16, 2014
Lawmakers in North Carolina agreed Wednesday to come up with an alternative to the Common Core State Standards in math and reading.
Sort of.
The House and Senate agreed to a compromise that creates a commission to reexamine the Common Core standards and find ways to improve on them.
North Carolina adopted the standards in 2010 and has been rolling them out in classrooms across the state.
But growing political pressure from critics — particularly among conservatives — fueled an effort in the North Carolina House to try to ditch the standards entirely. In the end, agreement was reached on a plan to reconsider them.
Gov. Pat McCrory (R) said in a statement he will sign the bill “because it does not change any of North Carolina’s education standards. It does initiate a much-needed, comprehensive and thorough review of standards. No standards will change without the approval of the State Board of Education. I especially look forward to the recommendations that will address testing issues so we can measure what matters most for our teachers, parents and students.”
Public schools in North Carolina will keep using the Common Core until new standards are written.
“This is not a repeal of the Common Core State Standards,” said Gary Salamido, vice president of government affairs for the North Carolina Chamber of Commerce, a major backer of the standards. “While the standards are looked at through an open process, they’ll be revised, and we’ll have an opportunity to put in place even higher standards.”
In all likelihood, the commission — whose members will be appointed by the governor, legislature and state board of education — will keep some elements of the Common Core, Salamido said.
The Common Core State Standards, which were created by a bipartisan group of governors and state education officials, lay out the skills and knowledge that students should possess by the end of each grade from K-12. The standards were written with financial backing from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The Common Core is not a curriculum; states and school districts decide how to teach the standards and which curricular materials to use.
The state leaders who devised the standards argued that the United States needs more consistency across state borders so that a third-grader in Maine learns the same skills as a third-grader in Hawaii, and that a high school diploma has the same value across the country.
By 2010, 45 states and the District of Columbia had adopted the standards, which Republican and Democratic governors supported. The Obama administration also backed the standards, offering financial incentives through its Race to the Top competition to states that adopted “college and career ready” standards.
As states were implementing the standards, critics — including progressives on the left and conservatives on the right — began decrying the Common Core.
In Republican circles, the Common Core has become a wedge issue dividing the establishment wing from those who identify as tea party members.
Three of the original group of 45 states and the District — Oklahoma, South Carolina and Indiana — have pulled out of the Common Core in recent months.
On Tuesday, Oklahoma’s Supreme Court reaffirmed the legislature’s decision to repeal the Common Core. A group of parents, teachers and members of the state board of education had petitioned the court, claiming that the legislature had overstepped its authority in repealing the Common Core. But in an 8-to-1 decision, the court sided with the legislature.
Meanwhile, in Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), is feuding with his state’s board of education and the superintendent of education over his intent to drop the Common Core standards. Jindal, a possible 2016 presidential contender, went from supporter to opponent of the Common Core as the anti-Common Core rhetoric among conservatives heated up. But Louisiana’s board of education insists that Jindal does not have the legal authority to unilaterally withdraw the state from the standards.