Sunday, April 13, 2008

NC State law, school policy clash over guns

For Robert Lumley, the decision to bar his East Wake High School club marksmanship team from a statewide shooting tournament was as arresting as a shotgun blast. Less than a day before the March 15 district round of the decades-old N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission competition, one of East Wake's principals, with the support of the area superintendent who oversees that school, stopped the team from participating. The reason: Ammo and students don't mix, the school officials said.

Like districts across the nation, Wake County bans deadly weapons from campuses and prohibits students from carrying them on school trips. But the decision to bar the East Wake team from the tournament extends that prohibition to students participating in an off-campus event sponsored by a state agency and supervised by adults certified in firearms safety.

That call pits school policy against state law that allows firearms education at schools. The decision also runs counter to the efforts of wildlife agencies, hunting organizations and gun groups to recruit youths to replenish the dwindling number of hunters. It also underscores the tension between the fear of school massacres and the traditions of rural Wake, where hunting is still common. "I can appreciate the fact they may have a policy, but all the government agencies need to remember, they're there to serve the public," said Wes Seegars, chairman of the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission. "There is something lost in a policy that does not serve the needs of the community."

The East Wake decision nullified months of practice by Lumley, a 17-year-old senior, and the rest of the 16-member marksmanship and orienteering team -- an offshoot of the school-approved FFA club, formerly known as the Future Farmers of America. Lumley was riding with a team member the day before the tournament when he got the call that the principal "had put the red light on it," he said. "If we had more time, we could have done something about it," Lumley said....

The participation of Lumley's team in the shooting tournament came to the attention of school officials when another Wake school sought permission to participate. That request drew the attention of Danny Barnes, area superintendent, and Sebastian Shipp, one of four principals at East Wake, and prompted them to review the status of Lumley's marksmanship team. This led to East Wake not being allowed to compete because of district policy....

The Wildlife Commission tournament, now in its 30th year, is an incentive for middle school and high school students to participate in the hunter education course and is part of a larger effort to attract youths to hunting.

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Charter Schools To Receive Multimillion-Dollar Boost

Charter schools that have been struggling to find homes in New York will receive a boost today from the Bush administration, in the form of a multimillion-dollar grant. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings is presenting the award to a local group that finances, constructs, and renovates charter school buildings, Civic Builders, Inc. The money will be used to aid building efforts in New York City and Newark, N.J., charter schools, according to sources familiar with the grant.

Both the New York City schools chancellor, Joel Klein, and the Newark mayor, Cory Booker, will be on hand at today's announcement. The grant comes as charter schools in the city face what officials at Civic Builders have termed a space "crisis." Charter schools are publicly funded but privately managed, and state laws often do not guarantee them space in public school buildings. In New York City, Mayor Bloomberg and his Department of Education have worked to help secure space for charter schools, welcoming them into public school buildings with some extra space, where the charter schools usually get a hallway or floor and part-time access to the cafeteria and gymnasium.

They are becoming more and more common, but these sharing arrangements are politically perilous, with parents and teachers at existing schools crying foul and enlisting elected officials to back their protests. One school's protest has migrated to the Internet, where a Red Hook mother started a Web log, Charter-Free PS15. Another protest planned for this Wednesday is also expected to draw attention to the issue.

Civic Builders helps charter schools construct and lease buildings that are separate from public facilities. With the help of private philanthropy, it has transformed a Bronx parking garage into a 43,000-square-foot school and a kosher salami factory in Hunts Point into a school with an arts specialty, and built a 90,000-square-foot school complete with a 10,000-volume library, a climbing wall, and a rooftop athletic area in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. The grant is part of a federal program aimed at making it more attractive - and less risky - for philanthropists to invest in charter school construction projects. The Bush administration has already awarded more than $175 million in grants to similar projects across the country, according to Education Department grant lists.

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Australia: Schools to get report card, too

The conservative Howard agenda lives on under a centre-Left government

The Federal Government will push the states to give parents unprecedented information on how schools perform, renewing fears about "league tables" that would name and shame schools. The Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, will use her first education ministers' meeting in Melbourne next week to discuss plans for a more comprehensive reporting system.

Ms Gillard said she wanted all schools to be accountable for their results, and raised concerns parents were not getting enough reliable information on how their schools perform. "I think we need to understand in a much more sophisticated way what's going on in schools," Ms Gillard said. "And I think the more information that enables people to understand it in a sophisticated way, the better."

The Government plans to publish the annual results of individual primary and secondary schools on national literacy and numeracy tests, which begin next month, for students in years 3, 5, 7, and 9. It will also talk to the states about measuring how schools "add value" to students, and is keen for a reporting system that reflects the challenges faced by each school, for instance through socio-economic data, or trends between "like" schools (schools with similar groups of students).

But principals and teachers are worried that giving parents more information could result in controversial league tables - comparative data that could be used to name and shame the underperformers. The federal president of the Australian Education Union, Angelo Gavrielatos, yesterday said league tables were a "political construct that served no educational value", while the president of the Victorian Primary Principals Association, Fred Ackerman, said he would oppose any system that "unfairly stigmatises schools".

Asked if the reporting could lead to league tables, Ms Gillard said: "I don't think that's what's being discussed. What is being discussed is people getting appropriate and reliable information about the education system."

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