Franklin Schargel’s Blog

Franklin has been invited to present a session entitled “Stopping Dropouts:  Linking At-risk Students to Data-Driven Strategies” at the SREB Conference to be held at the New Orleans Convention Center.

Do you remember the “good old days” when all educators had to worry about were gum-chewing in class, talking or passing notes, or shoving in the hall?  Now these minor disruptions are the least of our problems.

We are now concerned about budget cuts, bullying, and weapons in school.  Schools are now addressing problems which used to be addressed by other components of society – families, the church and government.  And like many other elements, we have created “zero tolerance” rules and regulations which lead to suspension from classes or even school.  These zero tolerance rules increase the likelihood of students dropping out of school.  The harsh penalty of exclusion leads students further down the road toward prison. 

I favor the penalties for bringing a weapon into school.  But a “one size fits all” penalty has resulted in a pre-school child being expelled for bringing a paper gun to school.

Students shouldn’t be excluded from school but placed in a different environment where a child may be given a second chance.  The message we give students who are tardy and then suspended is , “you were absent for 10 days, so your punishment is to be suspended for 10 more days.”  How can a student possibly make up the work?

School officials need to look at the individual infraction and then determine the penalties.

Many of America’s teens smoke cigarettes as well as use smokeless tobacco, and the tobacco industry’s marketing fuels their addiction, says the first U.S. surgeon general’s report on youth tobacco use since 1994.  “The numbers are really shocking,” Surgeon General Regina Benjamin said in an interview, citing data in the report that nearly one in four high school seniors and one in three young adults under age 26 smoke despite a half-century of federal warnings about tobacco.  “It’s a problem we have to solve,” Benjamin said, calling it a “pediatric epidemic” in need of greater public action. She said one of every three young smokers will quit and one of the others will die from tobacco-related causes. She said adolescents, because their bodies are developing, are more susceptible than adults to nicotine’s addictiveness and tobacco’s damage to hearts and lungs.

Another factor, experts say, is the industry’s successful opposition to state tobacco tax increases, which the report credits as an effective way to fight smoking.

The voluminous report finds that progress in reducing youth cigarette smoking “” quite dramatic from 1997 to 2003 “” has slowed in recent years. It says more high school students are using smokeless tobacco and many (at least half of white and Hispanic male tobacco users and nearly half of Hispanic female users) both smoke and chew tobacco.

The report concludes that the tobacco industry’s $10 billion in annual marketing, some of it in promotions to reduce prices, encourages young people to begin and continue their tobacco use.

“Tobacco marketing is a big cause of the problem,” said Danny McGoldrick of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, citing his group’s report this week on the industry’s partnerships with convenience stores to prominently advertise and display tobacco products.

According to Ken Garcia of Altria Group, the parent company of Philip Morris USA, the nation’s largest tobacco company about half the price of a pack of cigarettes is state and federal taxes, and states have not used much of the industry funds they’ve received via a national settlement in 1998 to curb teen use of tobacco.

With the recession and cutbacks in the federal and state budgets, there might be a reluctance to cut into the taxes received from tobacco products.

 

I am a member of the Association for Career and Technical Education. (ACTE) and they sent the following along.  If you want to support this legislation, contact your senator and House of Representatives Representative.  I did.

Perkins Level-funded in Senate Spending Bill
On June 14, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved the Fiscal Year 2013 Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education spending bill by a vote of 16-14 along party lines, following passage by the appropriations subcommittee earlier in the week. The bill provides $158 billion for a range of federal Labor-HHS-ED programs and includes level funding for Perkins! While we are still in the early stages of the appropriations process, this is a very positive sign that Congress recognizes the value and importance of CTE. Thank you for all your great advocacy work! In another victory, the committee also included a proposal in the bill to change the name of the Office of Vocational and Adult Education to the Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education. This is an issue that ACTE has been working on for a number of years and we are very pleased to see this positive momentum.

House Marks Up Workforce Investment Act Reauthorization
The House Education and Workforce Committee met on June 7 to mark up the Workforce Investment Improvement Act of 2012 (H.R. 4297). Introduced by Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), the bill would reauthorize the Workforce Investment Act. Causing controversy between the Republicans and Democrats on the committee was the fact that Rep. Foxx’s bill consolidates 27 programs into a single workforce investment fund. Read more…

Franklin has now posted the “con” argument about whether to raise the dropout age as President Obama proposed in his State of The Union Address.  Here is a link to the topic so that you can vote as well.

https://politix.topix.com/homepage/942-should-the-school-dropout-age-be-raised-from-16-to-18

It is well known that Hispanics are the fastest growing population in the United States.  And while the high school graduation rate for Hispanics is still among the lowest of most demographic groups -only 70 percent of Hispanics between the ages of 19 and 24 have graduated from high school, the Pew Research Center recently reported that the number of Hispanics in college rose by 15 percent between 20007 and 2008,  This increase is larger than that of African-Americans, Asians and Whites.

The Boston Channel reported that in Massachusetts 2,210 pre-k-3rd grade students were suspended in the 2009-2010 school year. This amounts to 6,028 days out of school.

I believe that students should be suspended if they are a danger to themselves or others.  But isn’t their a better way than putting them out of school?  Taking students out of classrooms and out of school denies them of an education and at the same time leads them down the path of dropping out.

The Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has reported that there is a 23% increase in autism cases from 2006 to 2008, and a 78% increase since 2002.  The largest increases are among black and Hispanic children, who have lagged behind whites in the past. Numbers are higher for boys with one in 54 8-year-olds now considered to have autism.  No one knows why the condition is five times more likely to affect boys than girls.

The impact of this information on schools is dynamic.  Schools which provide Special Education Services for autistic young people needs to expand its programs for them.  Difficult when school education budgets are being reduced.