Northam proposes $1.2B investment in K-12 education – By Sydney Lake, Virginia Business
Gov. Ralph Northam’s proposed budget includes a $1.2 billion investment in K-12 education, he announced Monday.
The budget includes the largest increase for at-risk schools in Virginia history, Northam said. It would also raise teacher salaries by 3%, fund additional school counselors and new staff supports for English language learners and makes flexible funds available for local school divisions.
“Students deserve quality public schools, no matter where they live,” Northam said in a statement. “This budget provides extra funding to help close the achievement gap in high-need schools, especially in urban and rural Virginia. Every child should have access to a world-class education, and this budget advances that commitment.”
Governor Ralph Northam of Virginia
Number of high school seniors ‘hooked’ on vaping more than doubled in the last year – By Melisa Healy, The Los Angeles Times
With public health officials scrambling to understand a mysterious lung affliction linked to electronic cigarettes, a new survey of American teens suggests that the behavior tied to the deadly illness has spread at a historic rate.
In a yearly poll of U.S. high school students, 14% of 12th-graders acknowledged they had used an e-cigarette to “vape” marijuana at least once in the past month. That’s nearly double the figure from the year before, when 7.5% of high school seniors said they had vaped marijuana in the past 30 days.
In the 44 years that 12th-graders have shared details of their tobacco, drug and alcohol use with public health researchers, only one substance has taken hold more quickly: The share of high school seniors who had used an e-cigarette to inhale nicotine in the previous month jumped from 11% in 2017 to nearly 21% in 2018.
Student numbers continue to slide at St. Paul Public Schools – By Anthony Lonetree, Star Tribune
Enrollment woes continue for the St. Paul Public Schools, with a 948-student drop in the all-important category of those who generate state revenue.
Figures presented to the school board Tuesday night showed total enrollment in the state's second-largest district at 36,994 students in preschool through high school, and state-funded enrollment at 35,906.
Superintendent Joe Gothard told board members that he now will direct his staff to review programs and building capacity, as well as school choice and enrollment trends, throughout the district.
Is School Choice Gutting Ohio’s Public Schools? – By Peter Greene, Forbes
Ohio has five school voucher programs, with EdChoice (established 2005) the most far-reaching. The maze of laws governing Ohio’s vouchers has allowed them to steadily expand, and Ohio’s public schools (and the taxpayers who fund them) appear to be paying a big price for choice.
The EdChoice program is supposed to be providing an escape hatch for students in underperforming schools, but that hatch has become barn-door sized. Stephen Dyer at Innovation Ohio finds that the voucher bite of public school funds has jumped $47 million since last year. According to Patrick O’Donnell, reporting for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, individual districts are seeing new, huge losses. A year ago, there were zero vouchers being used in Parma school district; this year there are 359, to the tune of a whopping $2.1 million.
The number of districts affected in 2018-19 was 40. This year, it’s 139. The list of eligible schools for 2020-21 runs to twenty-five pages, with almost 50 schools listed on each page. These are schools that have been deemed failing by the state, using a complicated formula that can be triggered with just a couple of low scores. Further complicating the matter is the safe harbor given to districts in order to adjust to changes in testing. Report cards from 2015, 2016 and 2017 don’t figure in, but now, because three years have to be considered, school report cards from 2013 and 2014 do count.
