Orientation/Open House dates for the Marysville School District 2014-2015 school year
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By Brandi N. Montreuil, Tulalip News
TULALIP – Native teen girls, age 14-17, have been busy this summer at the Tulalip Family Haven’s Girl Group building pride in their accomplishments as well as building self-esteem.
The group provides teen girls the support they need to become the most successful person they can be. Using the “Canoe Journey, Life’s Journey” curriculum guide by June LaMarr and G. Alan Marlatt, the young women are taught to make choices that promote positive actions and learn to avoid the hazards of alcohol, tobacco, and drug use.
To promote positive experiences, the group has participated in a whirlwind of summer activities that have included a rope course to teach overcoming one’s fears and learning to trust, a tour of the University of Washington campus to learn college preparation, a chance to watch basketball star Shoni Shimmel at a Storm’s Game played in Seattle –a reward for good group attendance and a visit to listen the Seattle Pixar Symphony, among others.
“Our mission is to help girls experience and learn life skills to help them through their teen years. We want to build positive memories and confidence so they can be successful in their goals,” said Sasha Smith, Girls Group lead youth advocate.
Girls Group is held Tuesday through Thursday, 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. at the Tulalip Family Haven building across from the Tulalip Boys & Girls Club. Transportation is available. For more information about the Girls Group, please contact them at 360-716-4404.
Brandi N. Montreuil: 360-913-5402; bmontreuil@tulalipnews.com
By Andrew Gobin, Tulalip News
TULALIP – “Our club!” the children exclaimed as they greeted Dr. Becky Berg, Superintendent of the Marysville School District. Dr. Berg’s visit to the club was part of a back to school kick off on Tuesday, August 19.
“We have been working all summer to make sure our schools are ready for you all,” Dr. Berg said. “We are all very excited to see you back at school in two weeks.”
Dr. Berg’s tour of the club is part of an effort to create an afterschool community that encourages educational success. Statistics show that students who attend Boys and Girls Clubs perform better in all areas of learning.
“These numbers from the Arlington School District compare Boys and Girls Club kids and kids that don’t come to the club,” said Bill Tsoukalas, Executive Director of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Snohomish County. “At fourth, fifth, and sixth grade, you see a constant trend across reading, math and science where club kids score much higher.”
Excited by the data from Arlington, Dr. Berg intends to look at similar demographics for Tulalip students in Marysville schools to see if there is a similar trend. Tsoukalas and Tulalip Boys and Girls Club Director, Chuck Thacker, believe there is.
Thacker said, “We see so much improvement in our kids. We bring them into a different environment, providing support for the kids.”
“This is their club,” he continued, “you heard them say it. You will notice that the walls are not drawn on and marked up, trash is picked up. They take pride in their club, and that’s what makes it successful.”
That way of thinking was instilled in Boys and Girls Club kids more than seven years ago by Don “Penoke” Hatch, long time supporter for the Boys and Girls Clubs of Snohomish County.
“Kids come here to have fun and to be in a safe place afterschool. But we also want them to learn while they’re here,” Tsoukalas added.
The tour moved into the computer lab as Dr. Berg was shown all of the resources available to children at the club. The newly-renovated lab is complete with brand new computers, two main monitors, and a smart-screen for interactive teaching.
“This is all state of the art. We want to be up and ready, fully functional for the open house in a few weeks,” Tsoukalas proudly explained. “We’ve invited both of our senators, Cantwell being a huge proponent of programs like ours.”
Hatch said, “I think the tribe ought to be proud of what they’ve got here, what they’re doing here for our kids.”
Dr. Berg was thanked for her visit to the Tulalip Boys and Girls Club, and was presented with a special gift, a traditional hand drum with original artwork by Heritage High School senior Ayrik Miranda, who is employed with the club through the summer.
By Andrew Gobin, Tulalip News
TULALIP – The Parent Committee of the Tulalip Early head Start program gathered with staff and students Tuesday, August 12, at the Tulalip Amphitheatre to celebrate their children as they transition into preschool, beginning their academic careers.
“I think it’s a great event where we can honor our children. The parents and staff worked together to make this event happen,” said Alicia Horne, who chairs the EHS parent committee.
The program curriculum is focused on developing basic skills through sensory learning. As children advance in academia, these first few years are crucial in determining how a child will perform in school. The EHS staff are committed to preparing these young children to excel in school.
As much as the event is for students, parents take the time to honor the staff for the work that they do with the tribal children.
Tulalip Councilwoman Marie Zackuse said, “Thank you for setting that foundation for our kids, helping them towards success in their education.”
“I think it’s a great way to honor the teachers for what they do for our children,” said Felicia Holland, one of the parents on the committee.
Children enter the EHS program as early as two, and move through three levels of the program. When they do move on, they are entering the beginnings of public school. Many of the students will advance to the Tulalip Montessori or Tulalip ECEAP.
The event is funded solely through fund raising. In addition to honoring the staff and advancing students, there was an art auction of student work in an effort to continue fundraising for other EHS events. Two walls featured traditional hand drums with unique designs that the parents and students worked on together.
By The Associated Press
PERRY – U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Interior Secretary Sally Jewell took a firsthand look at a tribal school as they promoted President Obama’s goals for education reform.
The two members of Obama’s Cabinet on Monday visited the Beatrice Rafferty School, located on the Passamaquoddy Pleasant Point reservation, which serves more than 100 students. They were joined by Bureau of Indian Affairs Director Monty Roessel, along with Pleasant Point Chief Clayton Cleaves and Principal Mike Chadwick.
Last month, the study group issued a Blueprint for Reform. Goals for the 183 elementary and secondary schools and dormitories that are part of the Bureau of Indian Education include high-speed Internet, additional training for teachers and greater spending flexibility for tribal schools when it comes to meeting education goals.
The Beatrice Rafferty School, which was built in the 1970s, is due for replacement with federal funds. The funding was announced by Reps. Mike Michaud and Chellie Pingree earlier this year.
Roger Fernandes, of the Lower Elwha S’Klallam Tribe in Washington State, was in Guam this past week at the GOPEACE Conference held by the Guam Behavioral Health and Wellness Center.
Fernandes is a master storyteller, and he told the Pacific News Center that his goal is to communicate through storytelling, which he believes is more effective than simply giving people statistics.
“Often today we look at issues like, we look at drug abuse or alcohol abuse or domestic violence. We look in terms of statistics, of numbers or reports and data. My teacher said we have enough data, we have enough reports, we have enough information, we need to act upon it,” he told PNC. “I think that once people understand that storytelling is more than cultural entertainment or just something to amuse children, when they understand that for most of human history 99 percent of human history, that’s all we did was tell stories to one another.”
The two-day conference was held August 13 and 14 at the Westin Resort on Guam. Nonprofits and volunteers listened to storytellers then broke into groups to discuss what they learned. According to PNC, the objective is to go back to their organizations and use what they learn to empower their communities.
Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/08/17/video-communicating-through-storytelling-156396
By Andrew Gobin
August 4 through August 8, Tulalip students involved in the summer youth program attended the Junior Achievement camp. Each year Junior Achievement (JA) teaches students ways to successfully manage finances. This year, the camp focus was on the importance of setting business goals and entrepreneurship.
The first exercise was in developing an idea for a youth center, then designing it.
“The kids have the freedom of imagination,” said Lee Veal, one of the community educators hired by JA. “They get to design a teen center with what they would like to have. There are no limits, the only stipulations were that their designs had to include bathrooms and a study room.”
In groups of two to three, students designed unique concepts including multi-level facilities with a wide array of amenities including retail space, computer labs, game rooms, recording studios, and quiet areas for relaxation and meditation. All of the plans included a fitness area complete with a lap-pool, spa, and sauna.
With the freedom to plan without limitations students were very creative with their design concepts, paying close attention to details like design scale, layout, doors, and building flow. Drew Hatch went so far as to layout the bathroom fixtures, right down to the urinals.
“I’ve done this with a lot of students for a lot of years, but this is the first time I’ve seen this,” said JA Regional Director, Gary Hauff, about the attention to detail in the layout of the restrooms in Hatch’s design.
The unique designs are extravagant, but not so much that they are unrealistic.
Student Diana Aguilar said about her project, “It’d be cool to see the design built.”
While that would be a dream, the purpose for the exercise was to have students create a concept, then learn how to make that concept a reality.
Hauff said, “This year we are focusing on entrepreneurship. Last year, and the years previous, the camp was focused on investment and personal finance management, which can get boring crunching numbers all day. This year we wanted to do something a little more hands on, and get a little more participation.”
“We learned to work together better, and better planning for projects,” said Aguilar.
The goal of the camp is to show students how to make their ideas into a profitable reality. With creativity and planning, anything is possible. Now that their designs are finished, students will use them as business models to learn about start up costs and business planning. The youth are our future, both for our culture and our economic prosperity. With entrepreneurs as our future leaders our economic successes are sure to continue.
Andrew Gobin is a staff reporter with the Tulalip News See-Yaht-Sub, a publication of the Tulalip Tribes Communications Department.
Email: agobin@tulalipnews.com
Phone: (360) 716.4188
By KIMBERLY HEFLING Associated Press
KENNETT SQUARE, Pa. (AP) – The cheerful sign outside Jane Cornell’s summer school classroom in Pennsylvania’s wealthiest county says “Welcome” and “Bienvenidos” in polished handwriting.
Inside, giggling grade-schoolers who mostly come from homes where Spanish is the primary language worked on storytelling with a tale about a crocodile going to the dentist. The children and their classroom at the Mary D. Lang Kindergarten Center, near both mushroom farms and the borough’s bucolic red-brick downtown, are a subtle reminder of America’s changing school demographics.
For the first time ever, U.S. public schools are projected this fall to have more minority students than non-Hispanic whites enrolled, a shift largely fueled by growth in the number of Hispanic children.
Non-Hispanic white students are still expected to be the largest racial group in the public schools this year at 49.8 percent. But the National Center for Education Statistics says minority students, when added together, will now make up the majority.
About one-quarter of the minority students are Hispanic, 15 percent are black and 5 percent are Asian and Pacific Islanders. Biracial students and Native Americans make up a smaller share of the minority student population.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan called the changing population a seminal moment in education. “We can’t talk about other people’s children. These are our children,” he said.
The shift creates new academic realities, such as the need for more English language instruction, and cultural ones, meaning changes in school lunch menus to reflect students’ tastes.
But it also brings some complex societal questions that often fall to school systems to address, including issues of immigration, poverty, diversity and inequity.
The result, at times, is racial and ethnic tension.
In Louisiana in July, Jefferson Parish public school administrators reached an agreement with the federal government to end an investigation into discrimination against English language learners.
In May, police had to be called to a school in the Streamwood, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, to help break up a fight between Hispanic and black students after a racially based lunchroom brawl got out of control.
Issues of race and ethnicity in school can also be more subtle.
In the Kennett Consolidated School District, Superintendent Barry Tomasetti described parents who opt to send their kids to private schools across the border in Delaware after touring diverse classrooms. Other families, he said, seek out the district’s diverse schools “because they realize it’s not a homogenous world out there.”
The changes in the district, about an hour southwest outside of Philadelphia, from mostly middle-to-upper class white to about 40 percent Hispanic was driven partly by workers migrating from Mexico and elsewhere to work the mushroom farms.
“We like our diversity,” Tomasetti said, even as he acknowledged the cost. He has had to hire English language instructors and translators for parent-teacher conferences. He has cobbled together money to provide summer school for many young English language learners who need extra reading and math support.
“Our expectation is all of our kids succeed,” he said.
Private schools nationally are changing as well, seeing a smaller number of white students and a greater number of Hispanic students in their decreasing pool of children.
The new majority-minority status of America’s schools mirrors a change that is coming for the nation as a whole. The Census Bureau estimates that the country’s population will have more minorities than whites for the first time in 2043, a change due in part to higher birth rates among Hispanics and a stagnating or declining birth rate among blacks, whites and Asians.
Today, slightly more than 1 in 5 kids speaks a language other than English at home.
But even as the population becomes more diverse, schools are becoming more racially segregated, reflecting U.S. housing patterns.
The disparities are evident even in the youngest of black, Hispanic and Native American children, who on average enter kindergarten academically behind their white and Asian peers. They are more likely to attend failing schools and face harsher school discipline.
Later, they have lower standardized test scores, on average, fewer opportunities to take advanced classes and are less likely to graduate.
Duncan said the disparities are unacceptable, and the country needs to make sure all students “have an opportunity to have a world class education, to do extraordinarily well.”
As the school-age population has become more nonwhite, it’s also become poorer, said Patricia Gandara, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA who serves on President Barack Obama’s advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanics.
Roughly one-quarter of Hispanics and African-Americans live below the poverty line – meaning a family of four has nearly $24,000 in annual income – and some of the poorest of Hispanic children are dealing with the instability of being in the country illegally or with a parent who is, Gandara said.
Focusing on teacher preparation and stronger curriculum is “not going to get us anywhere unless we pay attention to the really basic needs of these children, things like nutrition and health and safety, and the instability of the homes,” she said.
This transformation in school goes beyond just educating the children. Educators said parents must feel comfortable and accepted in schools, too.
Lisa Mack, president of the Ohio PTA, encourages local leaders to include grandparents and replace events such as a sock hop with one with a Motown theme that might be more inclusive or to provide opportunities for people of different ethnic groups to bring food to share at monthly meetings.
“I think one thing that’s critical is that schools and PTAs and everyone just need to understand that with changing demographics, you can’t do things the way you’ve done them before,” she said. “That you have to be creative in reaching out and making them feel welcomed and valued and supported in the school system.”
Some schools are seeking teachers to help reflect the demographics of their student population.
Today, fewer than 1 in 5 of the public schools teachers is a minority. “It is an ongoing challenge to try and make our teacher population reflect our student population,” said Steve Saunders, spokesman for the Adams County, Colorado, school district outside Denver that has seen a large shift toward having Hispanic students.
The New America Foundation, in a recent report, suggested teacher prep programs have at least one class for teachers on working with non-native English speakers and that education programs embrace bilingualism.
Andrea Giunta, a senior policy analyst at the National Education Association who focuses on teacher recruiting, retention and diversity, said you can’t assume that teachers are a good match just because of their background.
“Just because you speak Spanish doesn’t mean you speak the same Spanish your students are speaking and communicating with,” she said.
This comes as the NEA, the nation’s largest union, just elected an all-minority leadership team in July. The new president, Lily Eskelsen Garcia, is Latina, and the vice president and secretary-treasurer, Rebecca S. Pringle and Princess Moss, are black.
In Kennett Square, superintendent Tomasetti said Hispanic students in his district are performing at levels, on average, higher than their peers statewide. One recent graduate, Christian Cordova-Pedroza, is attending Harvard University this fall. Cordova-Pedroza is one of five children of a mushroom farmer from Mexico.
Cordova-Pedroza credited the motivation instilled by his parents combined with access to a variety of educational opportunities for his success, including an after-school program that included tutoring and help with college applications. He also was active in a Latino leadership club that helps provides translation services in the community and participated in summer programs at Penn State and Princeton.
“Certainly, I had to work hard to get there, but I feel like at every opportunity that I had a chance of participating in or doing that, I was always like, ‘Yes, I want to do that,'” he said.
Nearby, at El Nayarit Mexico Grocery Store, owner Jaime Sandoval, a native of Mexico with six kids, said he’s been pleased with the education his children have received. His 9-year-old daughter, he said, wants to be a teacher.
“She loves to read and all that stuff,” Sandoval said. “She always has good grades on English and she loves it much.”
Source: Indianz.com
The Puyallup Tribe of Washington is taking advantage of a program in the Affordable Care Act that brings doctors and funding to the reservation.
Using $1.5 million in federal funds, the Puyallup Tribe Health Authority is training 10 doctors this year as part of the Teaching Health Center Graduate Medical Education. The five-year, $230 million program was authorized by the 2009 law.
“We don’t want to just train technicians — we want to train healers,” Alan Shelton, the clinical director for the tribe’s authority, told McClatchy News. “And the way we train healers is we connect them to the Native American community and they learn about ideas of wellness and spirituality. And when they connect with patients, they connect with them on a deep level.”
The Puyallup Tribe was the first in Indian Country to utlize program. The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma is the second and more tribes could join if Congress authorizes an extension.
“[W]e’re actually training doctors in rural settings or tribal settings so that they will then be employed there, where we have the highest need,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington), who has introduced the Community-Based Medical Education Act to keep the program running through 2019, told McClatchy.
S.2728 was introduced on July 31.
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With funds for physician training set to expire, rural doctor shortage persists (McClatchy News 8/5)