January 30, 2017

Delaware News

Cape Gazette
Virtual reality presentation held at Sussex Academy
James Wheatley of VRWheatley and the University of Delaware visited Sussex Academy Jan. 17 to demonstrate the educational platforms available through augmented reality systems. Students in 10th to 12th grades from the elective class Programs, Applications and Media were given the opportunity to explore a variety of virtual reality apps.

Delaware Public Media
Quickly expanding language immersion program a Markell legacy
“It’s good to know another language, so you don’t have to speak English all the time,” 6-year-old Emma Bonis says. “It’s important to communicate with the Chinese people,” adds 8-year-old Jordana Risi. “If I know Chinese, I’ll know what they’re saying.” Emma, a first-grader, and Jordana, a second-grader, attend John R. Downes Elementary School in Newark, one of the first schools in the state to participate in the World Language Expansion Initiative announced in 2011 by former Gov. Jack Markell.

The reach of language immersion in First State schools
For the current academic year, 22 schools in 11 districts are participating in the Delaware World Language Immersion Program. Ten more schools will join the program during the coming school year, according to the state Department of Education. Families interested in immersion programs should contact a school in their district or a nearby district.

Enlighten Me: Generation Voice candid conversations
Recently some students at Generation Voice have been working on interviewing skills and as part of that effort were asked to sit down with their parents and dig deeper into their stories and their relationships.   Some of these interviews sparked frank and candid conversations, conversations we’ll share over the next couple of weeks in our Enlighten Me segment. We start with Mount Pleasant junior Chris Smith and his mother, Dawn Smith.

Delmarva Now
Teachers staying in droves in coastal Delaware schools
Bradley Layfield has been a part of the Indian River School District for much of his life. He started kindergarten there during the 1985-86 school year and is now the principal of Sussex Central High School in the Indian River School District. “It’s not just merely a job or a place where students go during the day,” he said.

Middletown Transcript
State Education Association endorses Hansen in 10th District election
The Delaware State Education Association (DSEA) announced Wednesday that the association has endorsed Democrat Stephanie Hansen in the special state Senate election in the 10th District. The district includes parts of Middletown and the Glasgow area in southwestern New Castle County.

The News Journal
Charters say they will be resource after graduation
A network of New Castle charter schools is committing to its students for the long term, promising to help them long after they graduate eighth grade and move onto other schools. The recently rebranded Vision Academies, which is made up of the Charter School of New Castle (formerly Family Foundations Academy) and EastSide Charter School, is expanding its scope, hiring a director of what it hopes will be a six-member team charged with helping middle-schoolers not only get into high school, but college and career of their choice.

Delaware bill mandates school safety measures
Last spring, a wave of bomb threats directed at schools across the nation and in Delaware forced districts to initiate lockdown procedures and evacuate students, at the same time prompting a seemingly inevitable question in such situations — are our schools, and our children, safe? Rep. Earl Jaques, D-Glasgow, isn’t so sure they are.

National News

Arkansas Online
Learning initiative to focus on teachers
About 1,000 Arkansas teachers of kindergarten, first- and second-grade classes will have the opportunity next summer and into the 2017-18 school year to receive training on the science of reading and instructional strategies. The training is one element of a new, multifaceted effort to improve lackluster student reading skills, as evidenced by standardized test results, and to generally create a culture of reading across the state.

Chalkbeat
Indianapolis Public Schools are using new ways to reduce absenteeism. And they’re working.
Getting kids to school can be hard: They miss the bus. Their families are evicted. They have dentist appointments. Some days it’s trivial issues that keep kids home. Other times it’s steeper challenges. But a growing body of research shows that when students are chronically absent from school, they are much more likely to face problems with everything from learning to read to graduating high school.

NPR
Does your school arrest students?
Niya Kenny pulled out her cell phone and began recording. It happened in 2015, after a classmate had refused to hand over her own cell phone during class and was being pulled from her chair by a police officer based at their school, Spring Valley High School in Columbia, S.C. When Kenny loudly protested and, like her classmate, refused to hand over her phone, she too was arrested.

The Hechinger Report
We’d be better at math if the U.S. borrowed these four ideas for training teachers from Finland, Japan and China
Why don’t American students really get math? Because their elementary school teachers don’t either, says Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), a policy institute that studies what America can learn from the world’s best-performing education systems. Tucker describes a vicious cycle.