Results tagged “thedoe”

After a parents of a rejected student filed a class action lawsuit, the Department of Education asked a federal judge to overturn a 1974 ruling that set in place quotas to keep the school 40% minority and 60% white. The DOE wants the court to overturn the ruling immediately so the 2008-2009 will be quota-free.

Gross! A former assistant principal at I.S. 72 in Staten Island is accused of asking a 12-year-old student for massages - and then trying to buy her and her mother's silence with promises of private school payment! Lawrence Siegel was put in a district office job - not his usual gig at Rocco Laurie Intermediate School - while the Department of Education investigated him after a DOE parent support coordinator, per the Staten Island Advance,...

Oh, Catholic League - it isn't even Halloween and you're getting ready for Christmas already! The Sun reports that the Catholic League sent a letter to Schools Chancellor Joel Klein questioning why nativity scenes cannot be displayed in schools.

Back in March of 2003, Mayor Bloomberg opened up the City Hall Academy at the Tweed Courthouse. The school offered two-weeks "residencies" for students, giving them an "inter-disciplinary approach" to learn about NYC and its history. Mayor Bloomberg, who made education reform one of the cornerstone of his mayoral platform (it's a big part of his "national" persona, too!), had said, "The opening of City Hall Academy demonstrates our commitment to excellence, achievement, and innovation in the public school system. City Hall Academy will provide New York City children and their teachers a unique opportunity to study and participate in the cultural and historical fabric of the City.”

Well, this is disturbing: The City Comptroller's office audited ten high schools in the city and found that they did not report 41% of the violent/disruptive incidents that occurred. Schools are supposed to file information about incidents, which range from vandalism to assaults, through a computer system so the state has the information, part of the No Child Left Behind law. The state then uses that information to determine which schools are dangerous, persistently dangerous, etc.

Ah, the legislative process at its best. The City Council approved a bill to allow students to bring cellphones to school in July. Of course, this flew in the face of Department of Education policy, which has had a ban on cellphones for years (and the ban has been found to be constitutional), because city and school officials believe that phones are disruptive in class.

It is near impossible for the Department of Education to fire a teacher easily, but when it comes to a principal allegedly using chicken blood in a Santeria ritual to cleanse her high school, that's another story. The DOE says it will reassign and later fire Matritz Tamayo, the principal of the Unity Center for Urban Technologies, a Manhattan high school in Soho, for coercing staff members to participate and help pay for a number of Santeria rituals.

The City Council voted, 46-2, to allow NYC public school students to bring cell phones to and from school - though not to use them during the day. The bill was meant to address concerns of parents and students who believe cell phones are critical to students' safety (see these tales of cell phone-less horror). City Councilman Lew Fidler who sponsored the bill said his 17-year-old son walks eight blocks for a bus and "We wouldn't dream of sending him to school without a cellphone. If he's going to be late, we want to know why."

A fourth grader was hit by a commuter bus in the Bronx yesterday as he tried to cross a four-lane street on his way to school. The Daily News reports that Eliseo Oler, 10, suffered head injuries, a broken right shoulder and broken ribs and is in critical condition at NY-Presbyterian Columbia. And his mother blames the Department of Education, saying, "If they hadn't taken him off the bus, none of this would've happened. I told the principal, how could you make a 10-year-old child take the [city] bus to school?"

Last night, parents of students who attend public schools at 345 Dean Street in Brooklyn convened for an emergency meeting with the Department of Education. The emergency was the fact that the DOE wants to move an Arabic-themed specialized school, named after the poet Khalil Gibran, into the building.

The Department of Education officials are smiling and parents are seething: Manhattan state Supreme Court Justice Lewis Bart Stone ruled that the DOE could continue to ban cell phones.

In the Mayor's Mid-Year Management Report, data shows that public school crime is up 21% between July and October2006. Three hundred forty eight major crimes were counted, vs. the same period in 287. The biggest increase has come from grand larceny - there were 197 more in the July-October 2006 period vs. 119 in J-O 2005. The Mayor's criminal justice coordinator John Feinblatt said, "There are more laptops, there are more Blackberries, there are more cell phones, and the smaller they are, the more mobile they are, the more they're vulnerable to theft." Another target: Purses. He also added that there were five more days of school in the 2006 period, and said the increase, per the Sun, "amounted to neither a rash, an outbreak, or an epidemic."

Yikes! The Department of Education claims that a teacher charged the city for tutoring a child who was dead. According to the DOE, Cheryl Edwards said she spent 154.5 hours tutoring a sick 15-year-old student between January 23 and June 12 and received $5,864.82. The catch: In mid-January, the boy's mother took him to Vietnam (their native country), where he died on January 29 after 6 days in a hospital.

We can't get enough of hearing how the Department of Education's school bus route changes are totally insane. Here are some more examples:

The Department of Education ended up cutting less school bus routes than expected, but the changes are still causing some big problems with only one week of notice. For instance, what if you were the kid who had previously been picked up at 7:05AM, but now have to get a bus at 5:28AM? That's what's happening to a child who lives in East New York, if he want to take his school bus to PS 29 in Cobble Hill. And teachers wonders why students are tired in class?

Wait a second, the Department of Education is trying to find a compromise in the neverending fight over whether students can bring cellphones to school? Apparently the DOE was approached by Celstor, who said that they could build a prototype that, as the Post reported, "could be built and maintained at no cost to the city." Hello, magic words! And Celstor is very clever, following the heated debate between school officials on one side and students and their parents on the other.

The Department of Education will start to close five struggling high schools beginning next September. The schools are Urban Peace Academy and School for the Physical City in Manhattan and Samuel J. Tilden, South Shore, and the embattled Lafayette in Brooklyn. The DOE attributed the closings to, as the Daily News put it, "dismal graduation rates, consistently low test scores and lackluster demand."

Who would residents say is the worse neighbor - Columbia or NYU? For today, at least, the controversy surrounds Columbia, plus the Department of Education. Columbia and the DOE will be opening a secondary magnet public school this fall for sixth through twelfth grade. The school will eventually be located on the university's planned Manhattanville campus, but until the building is completed, the DOE has decided to put the school in PS 36, a pre-K to second grade school on Morning Side Drive and West 121st. Enter the angry parents.

Parents and critics are railing against various research projects at schools, studies which were approved by the Department of Education. While children are included in the studies with parental consent, the Post reports that there are "'modest cash payments' to parents and teachers and gift certificates for kids," leading one parent to say, "We have a laboratory of guinea pigs. The Department of Education markets our kids like they're a piece of meat."

City public schools allow students at high-poverty schools to take advantage of online tutoring, which the Department of Education contracts out to a number of firms. But now it turns out that one of the firms may be off the list of tutoring firms because it used tutors in India.

Last week, a Brooklyn teenager died after being electrocuted while climbing a fence at PS 217 in Ditmas Park. Luis Rivera and friends were leaving the school's basketball courts (which had been closed) around 8PM, and when Rivera climbed the fence, he brushed up against a light fixture which was not properly "grounded" and was shocked. Now his family has filed a notice of claim to sue the Department of Education for $10 million. The DOE isn't commenting now that there's a lawsuit, but it had initially said that Rivera was trespassing and that he wasn't even a student at PS 217. NY1 reports Rivera's brother as saying, "My brother really was a very special, special person who was trying to make a change for better in his life. And the opportunity was taken from him drastically, and I just want to make sure that someone takes [responsibility] for what happened that day."

Well, we suppose the Department of Education would have to crack down on the Internets after holding the line on not letting kids bring in cellphones. The DoE wants to prevent students from posting "libelous or defamatory material or literature" online, and if they do, they are in big trouble. The Post reports:

Kindergartners to fifth-graders who disparage their teachers, principals or fellow students on the Web could face a finger-wagging parent conference or be suspended for up to 90 days, according to the proposed discipline code.

Continue reading "Students Can't Start Flame Wars"

It sounds bad enough that a teacher is lying to get out of teaching, but it sounds worse when the teacher uses "helping out Hurricane Katrina victims" as the excuse. James R. Thomas, who was a special education teacher at a Bronx public high school, admitted he falsely claimed the Air National Guard needed him, when in fact Thomas was going to Brazil. Thomas forged Air National Guard military orders saying he needed to help out with Hurricane Katrina relief. Thomas, who is also a pastor, had been able to secure leave for ANG purposes easily, but this past fall, the school asked for paperwork. We wonder if it's because of a Department of Education crackdown on teacher leave - remember the teacher who was a wrestler by night and claimed he was sick in order to work the wrestling circuit? The DoE must really vet sick leave!

The Department of Education is going to install satellite tracking in school buses next year. According the NY Post, the DoE thinks that installing GPS tracking will "reduce delays, calm anxious parents and manage fleets more effectively." Because current tracking is done via Ma Bell. The DoE will have to work with about 50 different bus vendors to set up the system over its 6,300 buses. Our question is whether or not the tracking devices will also have heat sensors, to make sure no more kids are left in the school bus by accident (there are about three stories like that each year!).