These thoughts on the “aging facilities” require that I amend my earlier comment about the lousy school board members.

Wolf is the only one who doesn’t just settle for the lies and excuses. One brain, however, doesn’t absolve the rest. Thank you, Mrs. Wolf.

You might be married to Berlin your defense is so swift and equally wrong. Ever heard of VGLAs? Or VAAPs? Our special ed teachers sure have.

Spare us the moralizing about babysitting problems, puh-leeze, with the undercurrent of telling someone how to arrange the duties in their marriage.

As to students not taking the SOLs, that is not true. All students are taking them. Perhaps with the exception of severely mentally impaired. Though in the past you may have been right, I have witnessed the change first hand.

Guilty Mom, imagine what you and the other parents are spending on private school could do to improve the quality of a public school… Do you get a tax rebate from the city for your expenditures on private school or do you end up paying for a public education you aren’t utilizing? It reminds me of the babysitting problem. Both parents get jobs to pay the bills but then have to spend half the salary of one worker on babysitting. Seems to me a househusband/wife would be the better choice.

Of course, Berlin and RPS administrators want to blame these costs on those least able to defend themselves. Perhaps, someone can explain why it is that there has been a dramatic increase in the number of “special ed” students who DO NOT TAKE SOL tests, but whose successful completion of alternative SOLs count towards the highly touted MIRACLES claimed by Deborah Jewell-Sherman. Would that someone would also connect the dots that reveal a drop-out rate worse than a graduation rate that ought to inspire everyone on that alleged school board to resign.

Yeah, you are expecting too much. Regardless of you “spending your money” (aren’t we all) a booth is for more than, say 1 person. Kitchen 64, which we all admit gets a bit more than busy on the average night, can serve 3 more people than yourself, at said booth.

Just because you frequent restaurants doesn’t mean you can tell them how to handle their business. The hostess/server gave you 3 alternates to your request ( i personally don’t mind eating at the bar, bartenders rock! ) but did not turn you away, that seemed to be your choice to leave, per your post.

You seem to like 64, it’s a shame that you will let your supposed need for placation get in the way of your enjoyment of good food.

Cheers.

As to the race issue. . . first of all, our schools aren’t that dangerous. Secondly, the city of Richmond is failing to educate its adults as well as its youth and thus what role models have our impoverished students?

What our paranoid white parents fail to realize is that by keeping their kids out of our schools they increase racism, fail to provide an opportunity to share cultures, and take their dollars out of our schools, so they become even worse. You know school funding is per pupil based right?

Why is per pupil cost so high? Have you seen the number of special ed. students in our schools? Wonder why they are special ed.? I doubt it is because they are eating lead based paint.

Yes, it is true, the good ol’ boys are alive and well. They waste our money and call in their cronies rather than employing highly qualified individuals. Yes, they have their small groups that make 3-4000 votes in a district enough to get them elected.

Would Coca-Cola be the corporation it is today if the people running it were elected by the general populace? Would an appointed school board avoid cronyism? I doubt it.

There is no quick fix, but sure as I am a teacher, white kids, latino kids, and all the others need to be in our schools.

Also located for eats on the Northside: Tastebuds, Stir Crazy for YUMMY sammichs and the previous owner of Dots has a truck outside of Once Upon a Vine on the weekends. Don’t forget Belle Arte and if you’re in the mood for take out, Zorba’s makes a decent pie.

So Crampy Sue, we do have something.

As you can probably tell — I dig living in the Northside.

I am on vacation right now and have limited access to e-mail. Dr. Brandon and the school board attorneys are preparing full answers to the questions that require a legal and authoritative response. I am assured that all concerns will be addressed in preparation for the LLPC Committee meeting on this topic scheduled for 8/28/08 @ 11:30 pm on the 17th Floor of City Hall.

I received some answers to our questions earlier, which upon analysis, simply engendered more questions. Once those questions are answered, I will happily post everything I know (and don’t know).

Meanwhile, anyone who wants to know the history of “open enrollment” in Richmond’s public schools should consult an excellent book titled “The Color of Their Skin: A History of Richmond Public Schools from 1954 to 1989,” by Robert Pratt.

Please continue to post questions, concerns and suggestions about how RPS can better meet the needs of our children and community. Many thanks to John Sarvay for allowing this forum and to everyone for weighing in. ~ Carol

seriously, how can you reasonably expect to take up a whole booth by yourself. that’s ridiculous.

especially in a place that fills up like 64, they are trying to serve as many people as possible from a business standpoint as well as ensuring that customers like yourself don’t have to wait due to lack of tables this is common practice.

I think that this discussion shows that the draft “Proposed Procedure for Open Enrollment” is a bit confusing. The main problem is that it deals with more things than open enrollment.

Priority 1 has nothing to do with open enrollment. It is an entitlement growing out of the No Child Left Behind law. Under NCLB, when a Title I school does not meet its Annual Yearly Progress requirement, parents must be notified and they have the right to move their child to another public school within the district. In the City of Richmond the schools from which parents are entitled to move their children under the NCLB Public School Choice provision are Chandler, Elkhardt, Brown and Boushall middle and Reid and King elementary schools. (Chandler, Reid, King and Boushall met their AYPs for 2007 and may be on their way out of the Public School Choice requirement.)

The last part of Priority 2, dealing with specialty secondary school programs, also has nothing to do with open enrollment. These are programs in which children compete for admission and qualify on the basis of merit.

As for true “Open Enrollment,” we are dealing with situations in which parents choose not to use their neighborhood school and instead apply for their child to be admitted to some other public school in the city. Under the draft children may be admitted to a school other than their neighborhood school when space is available, subject to a lottery when there are more applicants than available spaces. Under the draft, parents must transport their child to the open enrollment school and admission is for one year only.

I have a few questions about open enrollment:

1- Why do we have it? RPS’s attendance zones are based on the assumption that children will attend their neighborhood school. Yet, some children are permitted to attend schools outside their attendance zone. Is it intended to fill schools that would otherwise be under-attended? Is it intended to provide school-choice for some of the parents in the city? Is it consistent with RPS’s stated goal of “making all schools exemplary?”

2- What is the origin of open enrollment? It is not something that is common in other school districts. In most districts children attend their neighborhood school unless there is some legitimate reason to enroll them elsewhere (location of parent’s job, location of child care, etc.)

3- How were the open enrollment schools chosen? Ignoring megazones, the open enrollment elementary schools are Fisher, Southampton, Cary, Fox, Munford, Bellevue, Ginter Park, Whitcomb and Woodville. Is it intended that these will remain the open enrollment schools under the new draft, or will all schools be open enrollment?

Other observations:

a- If we’re going to talk about racially segregated schools in Richmond, we need to look at the entire system. According to the RPS website, for school year 2006-07 (the most recent year posted) only about 7% of the entire student population attending Richmond Public Schools is “white.” This means that, no matter how those white students are distributed throughout our schools, RPS is a segregated school system.

Putting that in context, if about 35 to 40 percent of the city’s population is white I would expect that about 35 to 40 percent of our school population would be white. But our school population is only 7 percent white. This means either that white people in Richmond are particularly infertile or that they are not sending their kids to RPS. I suspect it is the latter. If we are going to integrate Richmond’s public schools, we must find a way of convincing white parents that their children will receive a quality education in those schools.

b- As to relegating “poor children to poorly performing schools,” the issue is more complicated. First, how do we determine that a school is performing poorly? Not by SOL scores. Schools don’t take SOL tests; only children take them. So, if children in a particular school do not do well on SOL tests, does that mean that the school is performing poorly? Many poorer students start kindergarten unequipped to learn. They have not had the benefit of one or two years of preschool. They start school behind and it takes them many years to catch up.

This does not mean that RPS can use the poverty of its students as an excuse. What it does mean is that if we are serious about giving our children in Richmond a quality education we need to start educating them at a younger age. We have to make sure that they start kindergarten as well prepared to read and do math as are middle-class children. Will this be expensive? Yes. Can we afford it? The real question is can our children afford our not doing it?

c- Are we in Richmond serious about the goal of making all schools exemplary, or is it just another slogan that we frame and hang on the office wall of all of our schools? To me it is unthinkable that we need an open enrollment policy that allows some children to escape their neighborhood schools. We cannot continue to accept it that students attending two different elementary schools receive vastly different educations. So, let’s stop worrying about open enrollment and get on with the task of making sure that all our schools are good as we can make them.