The Rumor Mill

Imagine my surprise when reading the police blotter in last week's "Grosse Pointe News" detailing a serious incident at South. The short story spoke of a supposed threat made by a student that he would return "with a gun and his homeys" following a fight with another student. That was the rumor mill, and frankly I don't know how that even reached the paper.

Here is the skinny on what happened...one student approached another in the cafeteria during lunch. A brief altercation took place, but punches were not even thrown. On the way out of the building, the first student would not stop when asked by school personnel. Student number two thought he heard from others that the first student said something similar to the quote cited in the paper. However, when administrators questioned students that were in the vicinity, we could never get anyone to validate anything close to the alleged threat.

In addition, when we met with the student and parent that supposedly made the threat, he reiterated that no threat was made. In addition, the parent never tried to hide the whereabouts of her son, as stated in the police blotter. On the contrary, the parent was most cooperative with school personnel.

This is another example of sensationalism that often reaches the newspaper and the media in general. It happens so often that I normally refrain from responding, however, in this case the information was unusually erroneous.

Just as we teach our students to critically read information they find on the Internet, I hope our parents read and listen with a certain skepticism information they encounter about our schools.

Dropout Factories?

If you've been reading the newspaper in Michigan, or following the local TV news, there has been much written about the dropout rate of Michigan high schools. Some in the news media have even referred to our schools as "dropout factories". A couple of weeks ago Channel 7 even dedicated an hour of prime time with guests such as Bill Cosby and State Superintendent Mike Flanagan to discuss the issue. This is critically important and deserves our attention.

I am happy to report the latest statistics for South High School. We were just informed of the "official" dropout rate for students from the class of 2007. In this case, South's graduation rate was 96.55% in comparison to the state average of 74.98%. For obvious reasons, we are proud of our graduation rate. However, we also realize that even one dropout is too many.

This isn't like the 1950's when the state graduation rate hovered around 50%, yet non-graduates (dropouts) could walk across the street and get a well-paying and career-long job with the auto industry. We have to do better, and all of us know it. At least all of the adults know it. Some teenagers still have to be convinced that there is life beyond next week and that decisions made today may impact their future.

On the right side of this blog page, under the 'Articles of Interest' there is a podcast titled, "The Haunting Impact of School Dropouts" featuring State Superintendent Flanagan. It is worth the 10 minutes of your time that is required to hear his message. The dropout rate should be a concern to all of us.

A Tech Visit

During the last in-service, four staff members from South traveled to Bloomfield Hills Andover High School to see how their teachers have implemented the use of interactive whiteboards. This piece of technology is now in place in every classroom in the Bloomfield Hills district. We were joined there by four staff members from North and two from central office.

The implementation at the high schools began on January 2nd of this year, meaning they have had only about four months to get adjusted to the new tools. However, all of us were very impressed with its use so far.

For our visit, Andover made eight of their teachers from various disciplines available to us to show us how they use the whiteboards. Although each of them use it in different ways, the benefit to students and staff is obvious. The technology is used to provide much more detailed information at a quicker pace. Teacher and student thoughts and ideas can be quickly saved and shared again at a later date. It was readily apparent that interactive whiteboards facilitate increased engagement for students.

We also talked to their tech staff about student use of blogs, wikis and youtube. Simply stated, Bloomfield Hills schools have more open access for students. They have a filtering system, but students are not as "locked down" as they are in GP. The result is that blogs and wikis can be used to supplement what takes place in the classroom. Students can respond to the teacher and other students from their class from their homes.

I have attached a recent article from eschoolnews that speaks to the benefits of students using blogs. You can read it by clicking to the right under Articles of Interest on the link titled, eschoolnews.