School Safety

Henry Donohue, Executive Director of VH1’s Save The Music Foundation, talks about the impact of musical instrument donations to our nation’s schools and students. For the past 20 years, VH1’s Save The Music Foundation has donated over $50 million in instruments, virtually saving music programs as it enriches the lives of students. Henry adds his insight into past DIY musicians and the changes technology inspired. On a side note: Punk Rock is finally given the much-needed attention it deserves.

by Sgt. Thomas Rich
This post, Understanding Cyberbullying Through Immersion: Educate, Empower, Engage, was originally published in SEEN Magazine.
Today’s technology has taken on a life of its own. Words such as “tweet,” “hashtag,” “snap” and “follow” have become integrated into our daily vocabulary. Every day there seems to be a new social media platform that kids are using, whether it’s Twitter, Snapchat, Yik Yak or Facebook.

Update: 

From U.S. Uncut – Detroit’s students are trying to learn while breathing in black mold and sitting in classrooms filled with buckets catching toilet water leaking through the ceiling. And that’s not even the worst part. Republican Governor Rick Snyder is not only using the financial emergency management laws to poison children in Flint; he’s doing the same thing in Detroit via the public school system, which the state has controlled for the last seven years.

School districts are under pressure from the federal government, foundations, and states to include value-added assessment as a part of a teacher’s evaluation to meet the widely supported policy goal of identifying the most effective and the least effective teachers in a school system. On its face, the argument for value-added models (VAM) seems to make sense. How well a student does after a year with a teacher should serve as an indicator of how effective that teacher was. But by what measures? How valid are those measures? If the student measure is a score on a standardized test, what evidence do we have to indicate the standardized test accurately measures teacher effectiveness? Which students are being compared?

Mark Garibaldi, Researcher with American Institutes for Research’s Health and Social Development Program, discusses his research in this growing and vital field in education.

by Mike Anderson

When I was growing up in Minnesota in the 1960s, “after school activities” for me meant walking out my family’s back door to play with the other kids who lived on my street. In the summer, we played kickball or we explored the nearby woods; in the winter, we built snowmen or stayed inside to play board games. My mom and the other neighborhood moms never had to worry about organizing activities for us; they just had to call us for dinner in a couple hours.

Elementary schools would be allowed to eject students only if they do serious harm or are a threat to safety