- Substitute teacher at D.C. charter school charged with having sex with student [Options PCS and Perry Street Prep PCS mentioned]
- DC can learn from Michigan charter school transparency legislation [Options PCS and Dorothy I. Height Community Academy PCS mentioned]
- How One District School Is Tackling English Language Learning
- The Building Blocks of a Good Pre-K
Substitute teacher at D.C. charter school charged with having sex with student [Options PCS and Perry Street Prep PCS mentioned]
The Washington Post
By Peter Hermann
October 22, 2014
A 22-year-old substitute teacher at a D.C. charter school for at-risk youth was arrested Tuesday and charged with having oral sex with a student football player behind the teacher’s classroom desk, according to police and court documents.
The 17-year-old 11th-grader at Options Public Charter School secretly recorded part of the encounter Friday afternoon, which police said happened at the end of an English class in Room 266 while other students and faculty members were at a pep rally to cheer on the Options Panthers before a game against Perry Street Prep. Police said the student showed the video to five of his football teammates and a childhood friend.
The student and teacher then texted each other throughout the weekend, and the teacher sent him a clothed picture of herself while urging the student to “chill” because she could get in trouble for the relationship, police said.
Options leaders believe the video went viral within the school community. A faculty member saw the video and reported it to senior staff members, who notified city officials.
Symone Greene of Fort Washington is charged with first-degree sexual abuse of a minor, a felony. A Superior Court judge ruled that Greene could be released until a preliminary hearing Nov. 18, but put her on a high-intensity supervision program, meaning she must wear an electronic monitoring bracelet.
Court documents say that after police called to question Greene about the classroom encounter, she texted the victim’s phone and urged him to tell authorities that she “only helped him with his résumé and nothing else happened while they were in the classroom together.”
A detective had the student’s phone at that point, and the officer, pretending to be the student, engaged in a chat. Greene blamed the student for talking, according to a transcript of the discussion.
“Omg . . . don’t talk to me ever again,” Greene texted. “I’m bout to be put in jail.” At the end, Greene texted: “This can ruin my whole life. . . . why couldn’t u just keep it to urself.”
Shannon Hodge, executive director of Options Public Charter School, said Greene had been hired through a private company, SOS Personnel, to cover a one-day scheduled teacher absence. SOS did not respond to messages left with its answering service. Hodge said her school is no longer using the company.
“We are deeply concerned about what happened to one of our scholars,” Hodge said in a statement. “Our goal is to keep our scholars safe and secure.”
A police affidavit says the student was assisting Greene in a classroom Friday on the school’s campus in the 1300 block of E Street NE in Capitol Hill. He had been passing out papers in two of Greene’s English classes and retrieving supplies. Authorities said the two met for the first time that day but flirted throughout the first class. Near the end of the final class, the student gave the teacher his cellphone number.
A few minutes later, police said, Greene sent the student a text. The two proceeded to chat, although the student deleted the messages and could recall only parts of the conversation, according to the affidavit. At one point, the student said he texted the word “kinky,” the court document says, and the teacher allegedly responded, “I don’t tell I show.”
The student told police that he returned to the classroom at 3:26 p.m. and that Greene let him in; he said that because of the pep rally, he had to leave by 3:40 p.m. According to the affidavit, the student asked for a number of sex acts to match the number on his jersey. Police said that the encounter happened behind Greene’s desk and that the student used his cellphone to secretly record it.
That weekend, before police became involved, Greene texted the student “not to tell anyone because it is not right for a student and teacher to have a relationship.”
The incident at Options comes at a turbulent time for one of the city’s oldest charter schools, which was founded to serve troubled teenagers and students with disabilities, focusing on the city’s at-risk youth. Options has been under heavy scrutiny since city officials alleged in a lawsuit last fall that its former leaders diverted more than $3 million from the school through contracts to companies they founded.
The future for Options was thrown into uncertainty. The city’s charter board considered closing it but instead allowed it to stay open for the current school year under court receivership. Two charter operators — including the current leaders of Options — have applied to take it over long-term.
Options was made over “almost from scratch” before it reopened in August under new leadership and with new staff members, according to the school’s court-appointed receiver, who submitted a report about the school to the city’s charter school board. More than 40 of the school’s 116 teachers and staff members are new employees, and many of those who returned were assigned to new positions.
Hodge, the school’s director, said a faculty member saw the video Monday and immediately notified a senior staff member, who called D.C. Child and Family Services and D.C. police. Hodge said she assumes the video, shared with five of the student’s teammates, “has gone viral” within the school community. She said administrators had not identified the players who originally saw the video. She said she would like to use the incident to instruct students on the inappropriateness of not only the alleged sex act but also the sharing of the video.
“Kids of this age just don’t understand the consequences of this type of behavior,” Hodge said.
After the alleged encounter Friday, the student and teacher continued to exchange texts, although Greene was becoming more cautious.
“When u trying to see me again?” the student asked, according to the affidavit. Police said the teacher responded: “Oo. U gona get me in trouble. Chill. We gotta be slick with it.”
At another point, police said, Greene told the student: “Tru but u don’t just be having sex with just anybody but I cant doe my body is taken for my boyfriend.”
DC can learn from Michigan charter school transparency legislation [Options PCS and Dorothy I. Height Community Academy PCS mentioned]
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
October 23, 2014
In reaction to news reports from the Detroit Free Press demonstrating a lack of transparency regarding Michigan's charter school finances a group of Democratic state house members have introduced legislation that could help fix recent problems D.C. has seen regarding management organizations. The bill includes the following requirements:
"Management companies would be required to provide their schools with audited financial statements that disclose how they spend money they receive from their schools. The schools would be required to post this information on their websites."
"Management companies would be required to provide their schools with a list of company employees, officers and board members whose compensation packages exceed $100,000. They would also be required to describe all fringe benefits, including the cost of the benefits, for these employees and officers. Schools would be required to post the information on their websites."
As I've pointed out here in the past, the D.C. Public Charter School Board has not had the ability to review finances associated with charter management organizations. This is a fundamental problem because these institutions receive public funds which the Washington Post's Emma Brown has revealed represent anywhere from 2 percent to 100 percent of charters' operating dollars. The above requirements may have uncovered the money issues identified at Options PCS and Dorothy I. Height Community Academy PCS. Before running into serious trouble both of these schools received clean bills of heath on the CHARM report which reviews the financial state of charter schools.
For the sake of fairness there is one other section of the Michigan proposed law that we should adopt locally:
"Authorizers would be required to provide their schools with a detailed, itemized accounting of the fees they collect from the schools and how the money is spent, so that the information could be posted on a school's website."
How One District School Is Tackling English Language Learning
WAMU
By Kavitha Cardoza
October 23, 2014
Students who don't speak English are at higher risk of dropping out of school. In the District, a new academy within Cardozo Education Campus is trying to change those outcomes.
Kalkidan Mangstu is 18. She came to the U.S. a little over a year ago from Ethiopia, and spoke no English.
"I’m confused. Pronunciation is very difficult. I’m very confused," Mangstu says.
She sat silently during the school day because she didn't understand what was going on and didn't know how to ask for help.
This year, Kalkidan is one of more than 150 teenagers just like her who are enrolled in a specialized program at Cardozo. Teachers here are certified in both their content area and in teaching English as a Second Language. The students work in small groups and their lessons include how to go through the lunch line and why they need to turn in their homework on time.
Kalkidan says things now are completely different: "Teacher is helping, very helping student. I'm excited this year!"
"The vast majority of my students are from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala" says Megan Sands, associate principal. "But then I also have a couple from students from Ethiopia, Eritrea, Samoa and Vietnam. We have a Cameroonian as well."
She says they have different educational backgrounds.
"We have a number of students who have nearly finished their high school career. Then I have students who have a fifth grade education in their home country and are 16 years old," Sands says.
Rosanna De Mammos is with D.C.’s traditional public schools. There are almost 5,000 students who don't speak English fluently in DCPS. And she says Cardozo in particular has seen a dramatic increase.
"So in the last 10 years, Cardozo has always had an English language learner population. In the past their years the numbers have doubled," she says.
Kalkidan says her grades have improved considerably since attending the academy: "Last year my grades are C. All C. This year A."
When asked why she wants to learn English she says, “This is USA, English will give me a more, better life.”
The Building Blocks of a Good Pre-K
The New York Times
By Shael Polakow-Suansky and Nancy Nagerot
October 21, 2014
WITH the introduction of universal pre-K in New York City, we have created a new entry point into our public school system. This raises a key question: What do we want our children’s first experiences in school to be? What does a good education look like for 4-year-olds?
This summer, Bank Street College of Education led training for 4,000 of New York’s pre-K teachers, including both veterans and hundreds of people who started teaching pre-K for the first time last month. Worried teachers talked about how the pressure to achieve good outcomes on the third-grade state exams has been trickling down to early childhood classrooms in the form of work sheets, skill drills and other developmentally inappropriate methods.
The problem is real, and it is not unique to New York City. Earlier this year, Daphna Bassok and Anna Rorem, educational policy researchers at the University of Virginia, found strong evidence that current kindergarten classrooms rely too heavily on teacher-directed instruction. Their study, “Is Kindergarten the New First Grade?” revealed that the focus on narrow academic skills crowded out time for play, exploration and social interaction. In a 2009 report for the Alliance for Childhood, “Crisis in the Kindergarten,” Edward Miller and Joan Almon reported that kindergarten teachers felt that prescriptive curricular demands and pressure from principals led them to prioritize academic skill-building over play.
This is a false choice. We do not need to pick between play and academic rigor.
While grown-ups recognize that pretending helps children find their way into the world, many adults think of play as separate from formal learning. The reality is quite different. As they play, children develop vital cognitive, linguistic, social and emotional skills. They make discoveries, build knowledge, experiment with literacy and math and learn to self-regulate and interact with others in socially appropriate ways. Play is also fun and interesting, which makes school a place where children look forward to spending their time. It is so deeply formative for children that it must be at the core of our early childhood curriculum.
What does purposeful play look like? When you step into an exemplary pre-K classroom, you see a room organized by a caring, responsive teacher who understands child development. Activity centers are stocked with materials that invite exploration, fire the imagination, require initiative and prompt collaboration. The room hums.
In the block area, two girls build a bridge, talking to each other about how to make sure it doesn’t collapse and taking care not to bump into the buildings of children next to them. In an area with materials for make-believe, children enact an elaborate family scenario after resolving who will be the mommy, who will be the grandpa and who will be the puppy. Another group peers through a magnifying glass to examine a collection of pine cones and acorns. On the rug, children lie on their stomachs turning the pages of books they have selected, while at the easel a boy dips his brush into red paint and swoops the paint mostly onto his paper.
The teacher observes and comments. She shifts from group to group, talking with children about their work (“I see that you made a big red circle.”); helping children resolve a conflict (“You both want to be the mommy. What should we do?”); posing an open-ended question to stimulate exploration and problem-solving (“What do you notice when you use the magnifying glass that is different from when you use your eyes?”); and guiding children to manage themselves (“When you finish your snack, what activity would you like to choose?”).
Barbara Biber, one of Bank Street’s early theorists, argued that play develops precisely the skills — and, just as important, the disposition — children need to be successful throughout their lives. The child “projects his own pattern of the world into the play,” she wrote, “and in so doing brings the real world closer to himself. He is building the feeling that the world is his to understand, to interpret, to puzzle about, to make over. For the future we need citizens in whom these attitudes are deeply ingrained.”
Earlier in the 20th century, the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky made the related argument that children’s thinking develops through activity-based learning and social interactions with adults and peers. When teachers base their curriculums on Dr. Vygotsky’s ideas, there are significant benefits for children’s capacity to think, to plan and to sustain their attention on difficult tasks.
Play has long-lasting benefits. What is referred to as self-regulation in preschool becomes resiliency in high school. The University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth has found that this trait, which she famously calls grit, can make or break students, especially low-income students. Over the past three years, the New York City Department of Education developed a framework to support the core behavioral elements that drive college and career readiness. Many of them — persistence, planning, the ability to communicate and the capacity to collaborate — have their roots in early childhood.
Next fall, there will be more students in pre-K in New York City than there are in the entire school system of Atlanta or Seattle. To his credit, Mayor Bill de Blasio has not only pushed for expanding access but has also insisted on improving quality and put real money into training and materials. This is a strong start. But we still need to help parents, administrators and policy makers see what the children themselves know intuitively: Classrooms that pulse with meaningful play are our smartest investment.