Union County Public Schools has scored a victory. After a two-month long trial, a jury has decided Union County owes the district a whopping $91 million.
“To be perfectly honest, I’m in awe and humbled at the number,” says school board chairman Richard Yercheck.
“I think whoever tells you they’re not surprised at a verdict of $91 million would be lying to you,” says attorney Richard Schwartz who represented the district.
School districts in North Carolina are feeling the squeeze. They continue to lose students and money to charter schools and then there are all the home school students out there. At least a couple of local school districts are finding ways to lure those students back into the public school fold and get some money for them too.
Eight preschools in York and neighboring counties are among several pre-school centers across the country that will reopen Wednesday after a couple in Texas picked up the federal government’s $10 million tab.
At Guilford County Schools, more than 1,500 ASUS tablets were reported to have cracked or broken screens. The district indefinitely suspended the program last week.
Many school systems are wrestling with ways to serve students with mobile technology such as tablets. But Guilford County Schools has learned there’s a downside to the devices. The district has suspended its tablet program after students reported 1,500 cracked or broken screens in just the first month of school.
Mecklenburg County voters will decide in November if the county will issue $290 million in bonds to fund academic programs, construction, renovations and upgrades for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. Superintendent Morrison says that CMS has real and urgent needs that the 2013 bond issue would address. And there are other issues at hand like the master’s pay cut-off, the new reading requirements for third graders and the reevaluation of standardized testing. Join us for a conversation with Superintendent Morrison.
The chancellor of Oregon's higher-education system currently oversees all seven of the state's public colleges and universities. But as of July next year, she'll be chancellor of four.
The schools aren't closing. Rather, Oregon's three largest state schools are in the process of breaking away from the rest of the public system.
Parents, teachers, and students may be in for a rude awakening next month when they get the scores of standardized tests taken at the end of last year. Less than half of North Carolina students were deemed proficient in most subjects. But that doesn’t mean students are necessarily performing any worse.
North Carolina students took re-tooled standardized tests at the end of last year. They’re designed to assess students based on more rigorous standards under the Common Core. For example, some 8th grade math is now being taught in 6th grade.
Standardized testing is nothing new in schools, but over the last several years the amount of it has significantly increased as the push for accountability has picked up.
The state of North Carolina now administers 49 exams to students. Some people in high positions have joined the backlash against all this testing and now the state is looking at ways to ease up a bit.
North Carolina third-graders have a big year ahead of them. This is the first year by law third-graders will be held back, if they aren’t reading at grade level. But it’s not so cut and dry.
WFAE’s education reporter Lisa Miller joins me now to explain how this will actually work:
