FIU to bring back marching band

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It’s hard to believe that a university in one of the greatest music cities in the world didn’t have a band to play at its football games and other big events.
But Florida International University, which serves the Miami area, lost its marching band last June due to budget cuts. There’s good news, though. It’s coming back this fall, the university announced Friday.

Some student and university leaders developed a plan to cover the $300,000 annual costs, which includes private donations. The band will sport a new tropical look this fall, although the exact design hasn’t been chosen yet. Maybe we’ll get to hear some great rhythmic sounds of Miami, such as salsa and merengue.
FIU President Mark Rosenberg said even after the unfortunate cuts last year, the university always wanted to bring the band back.
“Everyone loves a marching band and we are pleased to be able to give our students an [...]

Source: South Florida Education Blog

Bus woes: A reader’s experience with Broward schools transportation

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From Staff Writer Megan O’Matz:

Since news of the Broward School District’s Transportation Department investigation broke, readers have been contacting the Sun Sentinel with their own frustrations with the school bus operation.
Among them: Claudia Krysiak of Tamarac.
She told the paper that several first grade classes at Broadview Elementary School in North Lauderdale lined up one morning in April 2009 to board a school bus for a field trip to Young at Art Children’s Museum in Davie.
In an email that day to the School Board, Krysiak, a volunteer aide at the school, wrote: “There were two wheelchair users, myself included, who were boarded first to be secured. It took about 40 minutes for three transportation employees to figure out how to secure us. This is a task that would have taken a competent person trained on the equipment 10 minutes at the most.

Source: South Florida Education Blog

National award for Boca Raton High science teacher

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It’s a big time honor for Katherine Roberts, science department head at Boca Raton High School. She recently received a Siemens Award for Advanced Placement.
The prize, established in 1998, recognizes 50 teachers nationally for their dedication to students, to the Advanced Placement Program, and their success teaching a rigorous curriculum.
Each high school of a Siemens Award winner receives a $1,000 grant to be used to support math and science education.

Source: South Florida Education Blog

Broward School Board meeting times are movin’ on up… a half hour

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Consider yourself warned: Broward School Board meetings are starting earlier.
The board is moving its start time to 9:45 a.m., starting this Tuesday. Board meetings had started at 10:15 a.m.
Seems like no big deal, right? But moving the board meeting earlier by a half-hour came after weeks of discussion, prompted by objections to chairwoman Jennifer Gottlieb’s decision to move public comments and committee reports to a time slot after lunch.
Public speakers had been at 11:30 a.m. Committee reports came at the beginning of the meeting. Special presentations were typically wedged in between. Problem was, more often than not, the board didn’t get to voting on agenda items until after lunch.
So Gottlieb, who took over as chairwoman in November, moved public speakers to 1:30 p.m. and committee reports to 1 p.m. Gottlieb said she was responding to complaints about time slots for public input being in the middle of the day, [...]

Source: South Florida Education Blog

Dalai Lama speaks with college presidents

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Some college leaders got to hear insight from the Dalai Lama as part of his South Florida visit Wednesday. But if they were looking for some specific advice on how to improve the state of education, they might have been disappointed.
Tibet’s spiritual leader answered questions from college presidents at Broward College Tuesday afternoon, after his public visit to Florida Atlantic University in the morning. He kept his statements broad and vague when asked to offer ways to improve the American education system.
“Education is very, very important, but how to do it, I don’t know,” he said.
Now, to be fair, I was sitting in the back of the auditorium, and His Holiness was speaking pretty low into the microphone, so I probably missed some of what he said.
One thing that was clear is that you shouldn’t expect to text the Dalai Lama on his Smartphone.
Broward President David Armstrong mentioned that [...]

Source: South Florida Education Blog

Will Day of Silence get School Board support?

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Broward School Board Chairwoman Jennifer Gottlieb wants the district to endorse a national event known as Day of Silence, where students use quiet to speak out against the name-calling, bullying and harassment gay students endure.

When teen activists at about 30 middle and high schools participated in the event two years ago, a memo went out saying “the School Board and District leadership have not officially recognized this event or activities associated with it.”
Confusion and controversy ensued. Participation was left up to the discretion of individual school principals. Some parents kept their children home, protesting the protest which they said promoted “unmoral behavior.”
Not this year.
Gottlieb has asked the Board to vote on a resolution Tuesday that officially supports National Day of Silence on April 16. The resolution quotes a 2007 survey of gay teens that says about 90 percent experienced verbal, sexual and physical harassment at school and 30 [...]

Source: South Florida Education Blog

Broward Schools: closing gaps and improving multicultural education

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The Broward County School District is a minority-majority district—meaning a majority of the students are ethnic and racial minorities—that is closing the achievement gap and improving multicultural education among staff and students.

Or so went the message delivered last week during a town hall meeting on the state’s taskforce on African-American history by Superintendent James Notter. The aim of the meeting was to the raise awareness of a state statute that requires Florida schools to include in the curriculum the contributions of black Americans.
To make sure African-American history is taught in Broward Schools, Notter said the district has created lesson plans, prepared live and online staff training courses and used BECON to educate students and staff.
He also noted Broward public schools have 255,000 students, of whom 38 percent are black and 25 percent are Hispanic. And, he said, in the last four years, the percentage of black students scoring [...]

Source: South Florida Education Blog

Creek hoping new innovative program keeps students at school

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Last year, when Coconut Creek High School was working to rehabilitate its image – and move up the grading scale from the F it received from the state in 2008 – I wrote a series of stories about the school and its efforts.
One of the things that the community asked for was a magnet program to bring students in from around the district, and keep students from leaving Coconut Creek for other schools.
While the school didn’t get a full-fledged magnet program, next school year it will have a new “innovative program” – meaning only students in Creek’s boundary can apply.
The Global Academy of Environmental Research & Design will launch in August, though students already are enrolling in classes for next year, said principal David Jones.
Stephen Feller at the Coconut Creek Forum wrote a story recently about the new academy. From his story, which ran Sunday in the Sun [...]

Source: South Florida Education Blog

Report: Florida colleges must produce more college degrees

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Florida isn’t producing enough college degrees to meet the future needs of the workforce, an education advocacy group said.
In a report released Wednesday, ENLACE Florida, a group best known for focusing on the needs of Hispanic students, said the state will fall 391,000 degrees short, if degree production remains at its current level.
To make up for the shortfall, Florida will have to increase its growth rate of degrees to 5.7 percent per year, up from the current levels of 4.4 percent for bachelor degrees at public universities and 3.8 percent at private universities. The current growth rate for community colleges is 3.8 percent per year, the report states.

Source: South Florida Education Blog

Congress talks charter schools

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Congress is talking charter schools, or at least they will be Wednesday morning during the House Committee on Education and Labor’s hearing on the privately-run, publicly funded schools.
Florida has a plethora of charter schools compared to the rest of the country—ranking fourth nationwide in both the number of schools and students. There are 389 charter schools educating 118,000 students statewide. Broward has 56 schools educating close to 20,000 students, which is one reason given by the superintendent for the 33,000-empty-desk projection in 2013-2014.
But, I digress.
Wednesday’s hearing is to examine proposals that would improve families’ access to quality charter schools. The other thing on the agenda is a discussion about a piece of new legislation (H.R. 4330) that the committee’s Website says “would create a new competitive grant program to expand and replicate successful charter schools to serve additional students, with a priority for low-income students, students in schools [...]

Source: South Florida Education Blog