Some things to look at from across the country

•  In another round of trying to get religious charter schools to happen, Oklahoma has rejected a Jewish charter school, and the proposers plan to sue. This is of course aimed at getting such a case back in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, whose 4-4 decision last year on St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School was due to Justice Amy Coney Barrett recusing herself.
  
  
• South Carolina has advanced a bill out of their education committee which would bar districts from having minimum grades rather than the grade actually earned for students. One might expect the conservative support, but I'll observe that support also came from their state teachers' association. 
  
  
• Maine is looking at their school funding formula. I thought this part was especially interesting: 
  

  Maine Educational Policy Research Institute proposes a 90/10 model for calculating how much of their costs districts can afford to cover with local funding. That means 90% of the expectation would be based on property taxes (the current system) and 10% would be based on the economically disadvantaged student rate. Researchers found that rate to be the best proxy for the poverty level in a community.

  Note that Maine's formula does include transportation, which Massachusetts does not include. Also this is an "I know, right?" with a different answer: 
  

   Johnson said special education is the area of the model that is “the most under stress.” Because of a step in the formula that bases state funding on past spending, the current formula disproportionately privileges wealthier districts.

  But before changing the formula, the institute proposes shifting special education to a regional model, wherein districts would collaborate on providing special ed services. Researchers are planning a forthcoming special education-specific report.

Wise words from South Dakota on state oversight and cell phones

 Excellent commentary piece from South Dakota: 

....passage of the bill flies in the face of local control for school boards. While SB 198 leaves it up to local boards to decide on discipline and what constitutes a school day, it takes away their power to decide on the use of cellphones in a one-size-fits-all policy.

The beauty of local school boards is that they reflect the wants and needs of their communities. Some have students squirrel away their phones all day. Others give students access to their phones during lunch. Still others use the freedom for students to have a phone during the school day as a lesson in responsibility.

Banning student cellphone use in schools sounds good on the surface. So did substituting ag classes for science classes and allowing athletes to substitute sports participation for a gym credit. Whenever the Legislature gets into the business of micromanaging school districts, there are pitfalls aplenty.

go check what cameras your district has

 ...and what cameras might have been placed on district property by the police¹, due to what has been uncovered in an article jointly reported by The 74 and The Guardian:

The audit logs originate from Texas school districts that contract with Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based company that manufactures artificial intelligence-powered license plate readers and other surveillance technology. Flock’s cameras are designed to capture license plate numbers, timestamps and other identifying details, which are uploaded to a cloud server. Flock customers, including schools, can decide whether to share their information with other police agencies in the company’s national network.

Multiple law enforcement leaders acknowledged they conducted the searches in the audit logs to help the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) enforce federal immigration laws. The Trump administration’s aggressive DHS crackdown, which has grown increasingly unpopular, has had a significant impact on schools.

Note that this may well not even be your local police department doing the search for ICE: 

Flock searches are typically broad national queries, and officers do not select individual cameras, he explained. Instead, with each search request, the system automatically checks every camera that Flock customers share with the nationwide database, including those operated by school districts.

The closing is very apt:

 “School districts are in a unique position, they have a unique level of responsibility to protect their students in specific ways”, including their privacy, Wandt said.

 It's worth noting that Flock has partnered with Ring, they of the Super Bowl ad that, while attempting to convince us all that they wanted to find lost puppies, made it newly clear that having a Ring camera is to now be part of a national surveillance network. While the comment from Ring was:

For the record, Ring says Search Party is not designed to process human biometrics, and that Search Party footage is not included in the company’s Community Requests service, which allows law enforcement to request video for voluntary sharing by Ring users. 

...do you want that on your house? Let alone in your school. 

Go ask.  

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¹my recollection is that there are cameras that are on WPS property that are not WPS-controlled. Someone may want to look into that?

Secretary Tutwiler to step down Friday; Steve Zrike will succeed him in March

 The Secretary announced his departure on Instagram this afternoon: 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Executive Office of Education (@masseoe)

State House News Service reports here. WGBH reports here.

The Secretary, as a reminder, is an appointed position, serving at the pleasure of the Governor. They head the Executive Office of Education, and they have a voting seat on the three Boards that oversee public education in Massachusetts: Early Ed and Care; Elementary and Secondary Education; and Higher Ed.

Zrike has been superintendent of Salem since 2020; Lt. Governor Driscoll was mayor in Salem when he was appointed and was a member of the School Committee. He previously was the receiver of Holyoke.

and speaking of children and ICE

 Don't miss this piece from ProPublica on the children in the detention center in Dilley Texas. 

When I asked the kids to tell me about the things they missed most from their lives outside Dilley, they almost always talked about their teachers and friends at school. Then they’d get to things like missing a beloved dog, McDonald’s Happy Meals, their favorite stuffed animal or a pair of new UGGs that had been waiting for them under the Christmas tree.

They told me they feared what might happen to them if they returned to their home countries and what might happen to them if they remained here. Thirteen-year-old Gustavo Santiago said he didn’t want to go back to Tamaulipas, Mexico. “I have friends, school, and family here in the United States,” he said of his home in San Antonio, Texas. “To this day, I don’t know what we did wrong to be detained.” He ended with a plea, “I feel like I’ll never get out of here. I just ask that you don’t forget about us.”

ProPublica features their letters here.  

Don't miss their art, as well as their words. 

ICE kept kids out of school in Maine

 The Portland Press Herald this weekend took a look at the attendance in Maine due to ICE activities: 

More than half of all multilingual students in South Portland, and nearly half in Portland, were absent on some of the most affected days. Between Jan. 20 and 28, Black and Hispanic students in Portland missed school at a rate 30 percentage points higher than their white peers.

Absence rates varied on a school-by-school basis: In Portland, one elementary school was missing as many as 34% of students some days, while others were missing less than 10%. At Biddeford’s PreK-2 school, 23% of all students — and 58% of multilingual students — missed school one especially stark day during the second week of the operation.

They do a nice job with graphing.  

point five, Worcester

 When I posted about the Worcester School Committee taking up the FY27 budget projections for the first time, we didn't yet have the FY25 net school spending compliance report. The summary file of that is now available, and now we can see what impact the $3.8M the City Council transferred from free cash, as highlighted in yellow in Ms. Consalvo's presentation here: 

Note that part of the reason that the city had as much ground to make up as it did is that in FY25, the city underfunded the schools by $1.9M (99.6% of required). That gets carried over into the next year.

That puts Worcester at a projected point five percent over required net school spending for the current fiscal year (FY26). 

Statewide average (projected) for FY26 is 26.3% over required