Saturday, February 9, 2019

Questions I'm wondering about the Worcester Public Schools this week

  • This article about Lowell High School made me wonder: hey, so where ARE we at with Doherty High? There's about half a dozen school building projects where I can off the top of my head tell you more about than the one happening at the school one of my children attends in the city I actually live in.
  • The 2018-19 enrollment of the Worcester Public Schools has now been posted, and we have  57.5% of the student population as first language other than English; the English learner population is down a smidge from last year, but is still around one-third. Is there going to be any sustained, district and city level attention to this beyond adding EL teachers and boosting the translation line in the budget?
  • Does the superintendent have new goals? That usually happens post-evaluation, and they'd need to be deliberated and voted in public session. 
  • I hear we've hired hall monitors now. Really?
  • There was another article this week in The Atlantic about how useless and yet psychologically harmful lockdown drills are. Are we ever going to reverse the trend of doing something regularly for which the only impact is harming our kids?
  • The cancellations and delays of the past few weeks and the ensuing discussion around them ("without any snow!") have me thinking long-term: as climate change brings harsher winters and stronger storms, how are we planning to handle that, particularly in a district in which half the kids walk, a good number of them over a mile and a half? Are we going to expand busing? Shift the day? Change the year? Add blizzard bags? What?

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