I’ve recently had the pleasure of reading entries for the Write Away Contest sponsored by the District Parent Council.  Students in grades K through 12 have submitted writing for the annual event.  I’ve read about dinosaurs, aliens, grandparents, siblings, pets, school assignments and many other subjects.  Some very wonderful pieces of writing have surfaced from the hundreds of entries but there are some things I hope our writing teachers can spend a few extra minutes on!

There, their and they’re… three different words with three very different meanings.  I play the homophone game with my children often in the hope that they learn the proper use of each homophone and because I think word games are fun.

Commas can be your friend and are a very important piece of punctuation – but only when placed correctly.

Always read your writing aloud or have a friend read it to you.  When you hear yourself stumble or hear your friend pause in their reading – that’s a clue to go rework that section of your paper.

Whenever possible please type.

When typing please use a professional font.  You want to make your piece easily readable by your audience – funky fonts will make your piece stand out but in a negative way if they are difficult to decipher.

Keep tense consistent throughout your work.

Write about what you love.

Write as often as possible.

Read even more often.

Read a wide variety of subjects, styles and genres.  You never know when you might discover something wonderful that you never thought you would enjoy.

Above all, keep writing and learn to enjoy the nuances of the English language.  The more you write the better your writing will become and the easier you will find it to express yourself through writing.

I was very surprised, as was the Eagle Tribune, that nothing was directly discussed regarding the letter that surfaced yesterday making very serious allegations about Haverhill High School.

I was dismayed at Mr Toohey’s comment about the burden of subcommittee work.  The last time I checked the position of School Committee Member was a compensated part time job with great responsibility to the students and City of Haverhill.  This job was not thrust upon these people like a draft notice – each of them very purposefully spent time and in some cases money to convince the voters in Haverhill they were willing and able to do this job.  Don’t tell me its a burden.

To that end, I wonder how successful the Superintendent will be in getting the School Committee to attend the special one day seminar he wants to hold to educate them on the new standards before the Race to the Top team comes in to evaluate the district.  Everyone was very nice about saying they would attend but when the day comes I wonder how many will actually show up.

I’m also endlessly disappointed in the things our School Committee members don’t know.  Mr Magliocchetti’s endless quest to “learn about education in Haverhill” really should have begun before he started campaigning and should be at a much more comprehensive level than it is currently at.  I seriously think these are just exercises in seeing who he can get to perform for him each week at the meetings.  If he truly wanted understanding he could go into the schools and meet with a wider audience of administrators and teachers and bring his findings back to the School Committee.

I wholeheartedly endorse the small “trial” audit with Futures Education.  I can’t believe it took until this meeting for someone on the School Committee to ask if references had been checked!  Couldn’t they have asked that in a phone call or email much earlier in the week?  These people were supposed to be vaguely prepared to vote on this issue at this meeting and yet I always feel like they are seeing each issue for the very first time each week – this does not inspire confidence in their ability to oversee the education of our students.

We received an update from the folks at Whitson’s regarding the food service program.  I have suggested to the District Parent Council that they do a Parent Academy on food service and nutrition a few times this year – now that Ms Danehy has also made the suggestion at this meeting maybe it will happen!  My daughter has their lunches every day and repeatedly when I ask her what the best part of school was as we’re walking home from the bus she tells me “lunch – it was so yummy I ate it all up!”  So either I am the world’s worst cook and she can’t wait to get a decent meal or the lunch program is pretty good.  I am dismayed when I sometimes sub lunch duty at Crowell Elementary at the volume of food thrown away by the students.  For this I blame the parents – since the kids toss homemade lunches as well as school lunches.  Teach your kids to be good eaters!  Stop sanitizing their food completely and teach them to try new things.  No one can subsist their whole life on Chicken and Fries or bland crust less sandwiches with apple slices.  We live in a country with an immense variety of fresh foods available all year and yet we don’t appreciate or take advantage of this fact.  Instead we turn to overly processed prepackaged conveniences with little to no health benefits and then wonder why we’re faced with an obesity epidemic.  Sending home the paper with the kids’ BMIs on them won’t change anything at all – although I am curious to see these papers go home and the firestorm that will erupt around them.

Mr Sierpina brought up the obvious elephant in the room which is closing the Crowell Elementary School.  Apparently he hasn’t visited there in a while to understand that the 85 kids listed on the class totals aren’t the only kids being serviced in that school.  At Crowell one “empty” classroom does speech therapy, another does preschool testing and yet another is filled with mats and trampolines and other obstacles to do another kind of special ed testing.  He also doesn’t realize that until the 5th grade left Golden Hill Elementary overcrowding in that school was so high that students were receiving instruction in the hallways and in closets converted to teaching areas.  Adding three classrooms full of students and three classrooms of testing/therapy to Golden Hill will return us to that level of overcrowding.

When discussing what we’re currently doing as a district to provide safety nets to our at risk kids in the middle school and high school Mr Magliocchetti cited the wonderful program of foreign language tutoring done by Aaron Pinet and his classmates.  Mr Magliocchetti wants to see more of these programs as they are a no cost solution to some serious problems facing the district.  While I agree that mentoring and tutoring by older students is beneficial to both parties I do not want to see these programs used to the exclusion of all other forms of safety nets.  It is unfair to place the burden of keeping at risk kids in school and performing well solely on the backs of our high school students.  Every single successful safety net program has parental involvement and support – what are we doing to involve and motivate parents to keep their children involved and motivated?  What too are we doing as a society to encourage students to be proud of their interest in learning?  Lastly what are we doing to educate everyone that should a child’s aptitude and interest take them on a path outside of college and onto a trade – that this too is ok?  College isn’t inherently better than trade school and in our current economy with the horribly inflated costs and time involved in getting a college education the students selecting trades are coming out ahead economically on a scale not before seen!

Have a wonderful weekend and I will be enjoying the Comedy Night at Michaels this evening.

As you may recall, National Honor Society member and Haverhill High school student Aaron Pinet has created a program to bring foreign language lessons to Haverhill’s middle school students.

Apparently the program is a giant success. At the most recent School Committee meeting Sue Danehy updated the committee regarding his program and gave everyone the URL to visit him online.  Aaron has recruited fellow Haverhill High School students to be language tutors and currently his team is giving our middle school students exposure to French, German, Italian, Spanish and Latin on Monday afternoons from 2:35 to 3:30.

Aaron has also submitted his Language Learning project to “Do Something.”  The “Do Something” organization is committed to helping today’s young people become active participants in society by “Using the power of online to get teens to do good stuff offline…”

Thanks again to Aaron Pinet for taking the initiative to do something about the lack of language learning happening in Haverhill’s middle schools!

The February 11^th meeting of the School Committee was a turning point for the newly elected members.  The gloves came off this night leaving no doubt in my mind that we’re in for two years of the same bickering only with new faces.

The first item of contention was Mr. Magliocchetti’s placement of agenda items requiring a report from the Superintendent.  Apparently he is in violation of School Committee Policy since items requiring a report from the Superintendent need to be the will of the Committee as a whole and not just one member.  This policy is for a good reason, as the Mayor did mention that if all seven of them posted an item requiring a half hour report the meetings would be out of control with regard to the length of the meetings.

Personally, I wish Mr. Magliocchetti would take it upon himself to attend some of the meetings that Dr Buchanan has with the Administrators to get this information and then pass it along to his fellow committee members in the spirit of communication instead of forcing the administrators to come to the meetings to essentially cover the same information twice.  Then when Mr. Magliocchetti requests a list of wants and needs for the future and alternatives to the current system I would also appreciate it if he would not dismiss those wants, needs and alternatives with comments about how we need to address the current situation.

The second item of contention was the transportation policy.  This item will be discussed at length in my next post.  The true colors of our current committee showed brightly here!

Lastly, we spent almost half an hour on meeting minute approval and the appropriateness of executive session.  What a fiasco that was.  In making a motion to make certain executive session minutes public Mr. Sierpina gave confidential information at the public meeting.  Even if the School Committee had voted to keep those minutes confidential there is no way to un-ring that bell.  Now that the issue is public knowledge the Eagle Tribune has reported on it here.

Mr. Magliocchetti also stressed during the discussion about executive session minutes that the “rat” on the School Committee who leaks executive session materials to the newspaper needed to be uncovered and censured.  No one commented on this at all!  Is Mr. Magliocchetti channeling 1950′s gangster movies?  Certainly his vocabulary contains more eloquent ways to make his point about the leaking of information.

I’m also disappointed in the newspaper coverage of the meeting by the Eagle Tribune.  With the variety of subjects discussed only the possibility of Andover renting space in the Bartlett School Building made it to press.  No mention was made of the public comment from Fred Simmons regarding the unions banding together against privatization of the night custodians at HHS and the turnout of union employees.  The room was full!  Not even a picture of the kids from Hunking Middle School giving their presentation from the special two day leadership skills conference sponsored by Delta Dental made it to our paper!

On a positive note, I would like to commend the committee’s eagerness on supporting a fee for the return of confiscated cell phones.  I know Mr. Nangle balked at the $20 fee as being a tough amount in a grim economy but that’s one fee I bet few parents would pay twice.  Besides, the fee is not much compared to the cost of cell phones and cell phone plans.  Texting is not a cheap add-on!  There’s also a very simple way to avoid ever encountering this fee – put your phone away when in school.

When last in Chunky’s I came home with a notice about their Scholar Program.  I couldn’t find a link on their website but I will post the pertinent pieces of the flier here:

Students in grades K-8 can bring in their report cards during the two weeks after report cards are issued Monday – Thursday to any of the three Chunky’s locations.

Students receive Free Admission and special scholar Ice Cream Sundaes.  They also receive chances in Chunky’s end of the school year “A-B” Raffle Drawing.

According to Chunky’s: “Chunky’s believes hard work and dedication in academics should be rewarded.  We would like to inspire and motivate the students and families in our Community to strive for excellence in education.”

Questions about this program should be directed to Ariane Roche – aroche@chunkys.com – 603.320.9397

Thank you, Chunky’s, for giving our students recognition and recreation!

I would like to take a minute to applaud the efforts of the students in this story.

I listened to Aaron Pinet speak about his program to the School Committee at their last meeting.  I admired his enthusiasm and entrepreneurial spirit.  Aaron and his fellow language tutors exemplify the good that is happening in our schools.

The overwhelmingly positive response to his program and the number of students wishing to enroll show the need to find a way to return the foreign language program to the middle schools.  We expect our children to have accomplished much before they graduate from High School and yet we continue to take away the tools they need.  Here, our students are creating their own toolboxes with which to repair our troubled system.

Thank you!