Soon parents will be asked if they would like for Johnston County elementary schools to have a modified school year. This means that students would head back to school in July. They would have a one week break after each 9 week quarter. Unlike previous the previous vote for Smithfield (75% yes staff/50% parent yes), if 50% of the staff and parents vote for the change all elementary schools will be modified. I'm assuming the board feels pretty confident that at least 50% of parents and staff will vote for the change. This tells me that the previous percentages were way to close to call. Currently, middle schools are excluded which would put most families in a predicament. Say your middle schooler has summers off and your elementary aged child does not. There will be no consistency in schedules. Keep in mind, no high schools will be put on a modified schedule. So if your eldest child happens to watch a younger sibling, that may no longer be an option for you! As well, parents will have "NO" option to opt out of the modified year. You heard it right, unlike Wake parents won't even have the opportunity to decline the decision. Everyone will be forced into the new school schedule.
Due to the nature of the situation, I can't divulge my source. Matter of fact, they would most assuredly be in trouble for telling me. Rest assured, what I'm saying is accurate. I hope you understand. If you're a parent you should be receiving notification sometime this month or early next month. The change would go into effect for the 2011-2012 school year.
I like the idea of giving parents a $2500 tax credit for private school. It was a story in the N&O this past Sunday. Giving parents such an opportunity would probably be very beneficial to the state's budget and help improve the quality of education in public schools with smaller class sizes.
I personally would happen to agree with this idea and have liked it for a while - lol. I live on the Wake County side & my daughter attends Private School.... Did not want to be involved with all the Wake County drama from the start. However I would love to claim a few pennies on my taxes. :-( 2nd grade, pay the tuition but can not claim it at all. However, I know that was my decision to begin with but, being able to at least claim $2,500 of that would be nice!
My husband just said, can we vote per child we have? LOL. We'll have 10 kids, 7 of which are elementary. I say we vote 7 times. This really puts us in a predicament for those that work from home too. I have elementary, middle schoolers, & high schoolers. Going to get interesting for sure. Keep us all posted. Can I ask what the stupid benefit of this is supposed to be? Stephanie-- mom to 7 (soon to be 10!)
I support the idea of year round schools here, as long as they ensure that all kids living in the same house, regardless of age, are on the same track.
I heard tonight that it might be $3500/kid and only for those making under $100K with a kid who had attended public school for one year (WRAL-HB41). http://www.wral.com/news/state/nccapitol/story/9087455/
I don't EVER see high schools going year round. I think the semester block schedule is here to stay, but I have been out of the loop for a while. However, I would like to see the schools return to an early August start so the semesters could end before the holiday break and end the school year around Memorial Day.
The benefit is supposedly to increase retained knowledge (i.e. EOG scores). Kids that are behind will be "asked" to attend school while their peers get a break. From my perspective, seems like that would burn a kid out more than anything. Keep in mind, middle schoolers will still get the 2 full months off. So will high school kids. There is no way to opt out. SO, if we are talking about tracks, elementary kids will all be on the same schedule. Their older counterparts will not.
Thanks for posting that, because I had not heard of this. I personally do not like that idea (for me) because we decided to not put our child in public school at all. Which actually then saved the State? We of course still pay the same taxes as the people up the road from us and go to school (and my neaighbros with no children pay too) but my daughter is not there to use any of the resources and I know we had a choice though. It would be nice to have a credit because we live pay check to pay check so that she can have a stable learning environment & it being a Christian school was important to us personally. We truly saved the state money! It cost the state about $10,000 per year/per child to go to school so honestly I am saving them $10,000 a year? So I would love to claim something on my taxes. lol :banghead:
Enhanced Academic Calendar aka Year Round School The Johnston County Schools 2010-2011 calendar for the "Enhanced Academic Calendar" is available on the JCS website: http://www.johnston.k12.nc.us/education/components/docmgr/default.php?sectiondetailid=114053& Students would attend school the same number of days as on the traditional calendar and teachers would work the same number of days. As an educator, I worked on a similar calendar to this one for 3 years in another NC county. It was great for the first 2 years. I loved being off in October! However, by the end of my 3rd year on this calendar, I was totally exhausted. Here is what happened. Work 9-11 weeks, scheduled to be off for 3 weeks. First week out is remediation week, similar to summer school, and not required to teach that week unless your administrator strongly suggests that you should consider it. Second week out was "acceleration" week. Again, not required to teach. Third week out was really only 3 days because we had teacher work days on the other two. Repeat twice. Then comes summer break. Kids are out of school for 5 weeks. Teachers are out for 3 weeks. Okay, so people who are not teachers are thinking "WOW! What I'd give to have that much time off!" WRONG AGAIN! Dedicated teachers spend their "intersession" weeks planning for the next 9-11 week teaching period. Why? Because there's not time during the school quarter to do long term planning. Summer and 3 weeks off. That is barely enough time to catch my breath from one school year before the next one begins. Again, dedicated teachers are using their "summer vacation" to plan for the new school year. Well, you may be thinking, you are choosing to plan and work on your time off and not get paid for it. That is true, I am. But if I didn't, the planning wouldn't get done; then the instruction wouldn't be wonderful and the learning wouldn't take place. Now on to another issue. My middle school child will be on a traditional calendar while I am working on a completely different calendar. There will be weeks that my child will be out of school and I'm not. She is too old for day care, but in my opinion, not ready to spend weeks alone at home by herself. Then there are those other non-teacher parents who have to figure out daycare for their kids at odd times of the year that they wouldn't normally have to pay for. How are daycare slots guaranteed? Parents pay to reserve their slots! Who's going to want to do that? Parents who take their kids out of school for vacation are not necessarily going to change their vacation schedule to match the school calendar. They don't do it now. Why would we think that they will change? They will take their vacations when the rates are lowest; or when it's their timeshare week; or when the grandparents can go because they are the ones paying for it. So I don't see a benefit in that regard. At the beginning of the school year, teachers have to establish routines with their students and get discipline in order. On the enhanced calendar, the teacher has to do it 4 times a year instead of once! Why? Because kids have been out of school for 2-3 weeks and haven't had to maintain a routine and follow rules and structure, that's why.
Folks, The discussion as to tax credits isn't the same as year round schools. Year round is bad. If you have kids in different levels, your family vacation is shot, unless you can all go in the shortened summer break, along with every other family. Kids forget between sessions. 3 weeks or 8. What's gonna happen when you hire new teachers every three years because of burnout? If there is no institutional memory and no qualified mentors, how does the system expect to make good teachers better and better teachers great? You won't. This will not improve academics for those families who are invested in their child's education already. The families who are engaged with kids who are high performing won't receive any benefits for their kids. The schools being touted as the successes are Title one schools, receiving additional resources already. Comparing them to the elementary schools in the Cleveland area is comparing apples to oranges. Both are fruit, but hardly interchangeable. Seems like the elementary principals are in a rush to show which is the quickest to jump on the newest thing going. They're all trying to impress Dr Croom and show they're on fire, and engaged. Just do a good job with what you've got is all they need to do. Show me researched, 3rd party peer reviewed facts that demonstrate the 'claims' being made that year round is better. Look out for the snake oil salespeople.
Just the facts, folks. Source: http://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/year-round-schooling/ From our own NC Dept of Public Instruction... Bradley McMillan, from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, examined achievement differences between year-round and traditional-calendar students using data for more than 345,000 North Carolina public school students. He found that achievement in year-round schools was no higher than in traditional schools (2001). A much smaller study compared the mathematics performance of 44 students in 5th and 6th grades on a year-round track with that of 40 students on a traditional track in the same school. Again, there were no significant achievement differences between the groups (Ferguson, 1999). Some research contends that year-round schools can have more positive effects on students who are deemed at risk for academic problems, such as children from low-income families or other students who might typically be low performers in school (Cooper, et al., 2003). A 1994 study of three year-round California elementary schools showed that each of the three schools demonstrated significant achievement gains for its highly targeted at-risk students, including low-performing students and English-language learners (Gandara & Fish, 1994). The results should be interpreted with caution, though, because the schools added instructional days to the calendar, and the year-round initiatives also resulted in lower class sizes. Even less research has been done on why year-round schools appear to be beneficial for some students. The common belief is that a three-month summer break contributes to students’ forgetting what they have learned the previous year. The result is that teachers need to review material at the start of the next school year, wasting valuable instructional time. A review of 39 studies confirmed that summertime learning loss, specifically indicating that student test scores drop over summer vacation and that mathematics performance deteriorates more than reading performance (Cooper, et al., 1996).
If we're looking at budget concerns for the schools, how is keeping them open with full utilities (AC in July and August) going to save money? How about the TA bus drivers, unless there is a move afoot to contract out the bus driving (and I'm sure the low bidder contract winner is going to hire the very best drivers they can find for little pay and no benefits-NOT!) and remove the TAs. Removing TAs , if at all pennywise, is POUND FOOLISH. and when kids start falling through the cracks because teachers have no help in differentiating instruction to different educational levels within one classroom, well just remember folks, you allowed it to happen. And putting the kids of one level in a class and other levels in another isn't gonna happen.
I think I would like year-round school in Johnston County. It seems like summer break gets too long for my kids! Or maybe they just drive me crazy by the end of the summer!:lol:
How about "Hell No". How does the staff feel confident that this is what most parents want, when the previous Super would not even consider putting it to a vote in the past and most JoCo parents cheered him on in that respect? The survey in 2005 (when growth was a concern) received a resounding NO from parents... http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/110071/
They're counting on the vocal few who do support it to allow themselves to believe that most of us do. This is following the maxim of allowing the camel's nose inside the tent. As a wise old philosopher once said, "YOU GOTTA NIP IT! NIP IT IN THE BUD!" I, for one, will not be among those as cited as supporting this.
