School Technical Ideas

Among the Blue Ribbon schools are:

The award honors elementary, middle and high schools whose students achieve at very high levels or have made significant progress and helped close gaps in achievement, especially among disadvantaged and minority students.

“We commend the Chadwick and North Shelby high schools for this prestigious recognition,” said Commissioner of Education Chris L. Nicastro.  “Their students, teachers, school administrators and community members deserve accolades for attaining this high level of student achievement.”

The schools were recognized earlier this year in the state-level Gold Star Schools program, conducted by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

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A lawsuit backed by the American Civil Liberties Union challenges hundreds of fees charged by California public schools for classroom materials and extracurriculal activities. The suit says such fees violate the California Constitution’s guarantee of free public education.

“Students who are unable to pay the fees or purchase the materials are disadvantaged academically and overtly humiliated by teachers and school officials,” says the suit filed Friday in Los Angeles County Superior Court on behalf of two students. The suit alleges that one of the plaintiffs, identified as Jane Doe, was instructed not to highlight in borrowed books her family could not afford to purchase and was asked for an exam fee in front of other students.

Doe’s unspecified Orange County school district required her to pay more than $440 annually in classroom and other fees, says the suit, which seeks class-action status and was organized by the ACLU of Southern California. The suit names the state as the main defendant, alleging that the state’s “failure to monitor and ensure its public school districts’ compliance with the free school guarantee” that has encouraged the proliferation of fees.

There is no official response to the suit yet, but in this article in today’s New York Times, a lawyer for the San Diego Unified School District suggests that some fees listed on school Web sites may be a case of outdated information, but that others are probably not in compliance with state law.

Given tight school budgets, more schools nationwide have turned to fees to balance their budgets, and the California case is not the first court challenge. In 2006, the Indiana Supreme Court struck down a school district’s $20 activity fee as a violation of the state constitution’s free school guarantee, as Education Week reported here.

On his State EdWatch blog here, Education Week’s Sean Cavanagh also writes about the lawsuit.

TALLAHASSEE — A teachers union lawyer told a circuit judge Wednesday that a proposed class-size amendment should be thrown off the Nov. 2 ballot for the same reason that the state Supreme Court recently struck three other amendments — because the ballot language is misleading about its purpose.

In this case, Florida Education Association attorney Ron Meyer argued, the ballot language doesn’t make clear that the purpose is to reduce the state’s cost of paying for public schools.

But the lawyer for the state said Amendment 8 is just what it appears to be — a proposal that would give school districts the flexibility they say they need by limiting class sizes at the school level rather than at the classroom level as the constitution currently requires.

Charles Frances, the chief circuit judge for Leon County, said he hoped to rule on the case by Friday, and both sides have promised to appeal to the Florida Supreme Court for a final decision before the Nov. 2 election. It’s too late to remove the item from the ballot because ballots have already been printed but the court could order supervisors of elections not to tally the votes if it is ultimately tossed.

Meyer referred to Republican lawmakers’ frequent complaints that the current class-size standards are too costly and argued that the measure they placed on the ballot is misleading because it fails to inform voters that, if passed, it would undo the requirement that lawmakers give “adequate funding” to schools to reduce class sizes, which he said was “at the heart” of the 2002 amendment that created the class-size restrictions.

“Amendment 8 changes all that. You don’t know that by looking at the ballot summary. You don’t know that by looking at the ballot title,” Meyer said. “That change inescapably changes the funding. The voter doesn’t know that. The voter doesn’t see that. The voter doesn’t get that.”

But Jon Glogau, a lawyer in Attorney General Bill McCollum’s office defending the state in the lawsuit, argued that it is “pure speculation” that funding for schools will decrease if the amendment passes.

“This case is not about adequacy of school funding,” Glogau said. “I don’t know what he’s talking about … The chief purpose of this amendment is to change the caps. It’s patently obvious.”

Current class size rules cap classes at 18 students in Pre-K through third grade, 22 students in grades 4 through 8, and 25 students in high school. Amendment 8 would loosen the standards by applying those limits to school averages rather than individual classrooms; it also would set higher limits for individual classrooms: caps of 21 (K-3), 27 (4-8) and 30 (high school).

The Palm Beach County School District, like the rest of the districts in the state, has chosen not to meet the standards that were required by the start of school this year. Palm Beach County schools need an additional 800 to 900 teachers to meet the standards, and Schools Superintendent Art Johnson has said the district would pin its hopes on voters relaxing the law in November rather than raising taxes or making the other cuts necessary to find the $59 million needed to hire that many teachers.

Of the six amendments the legislature had placed on the Nov. 2 ballot, three have already been struck by the state Supreme Court on the grounds that their ballot summaries were misleading. Meyer was the attorney for the challenging group in one of those cases; he successfully used the argument in challenging the legislature’s amendment regarding the way legislative and Congressional districts are drawn.

What’s at stake

• For core classes, school districts were supposed to have met strict limits on individual class sizes by the start of school this August: 18 students in kindergarten through third grade, 22 in fourth through eighth grade and 25 in high school.
• If voters approve Amendment 8, those same limits would be applied on a school-wide average rather than to each individual class. In addition, individual classes would have caps of 21 (K-3), 27 (4-8) and 30 (high school).
• For example, under the proposal, the average size of an elementary school’s K-3 classes could not be more than 18 students, and no single class could have more than 21 students.
• The new standards would be made retroactive to the start of the 2010-2011 school year.

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With the school year opening in much of the nation, educators will soon be facing two of their traditional challenges: how to raise funds for school operations and how to avoid legal challenges.

A recent federal district court decision may actually help schools with both of those issues, even though the court ruled for a group of parents and against a school district on a very particular issue involving free-speech and establishment-of-religion questions in the realm of school fundraisers.

A federal district judge in Houston has ruled that a Texas school district engaged in viewpoint discrimination in violation of the First Amendment’s free speech clause when it removed an explicit religious message as one option for greeting cards selected by parents as part of a school fundraiser.

U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal held that the district would not violate the First Amendment’s prohibition of any government establishment of religion by allowing parents to have this choice of message on the holiday cards sold through a third-party vendor: “And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name Jesus; for He shall save his people from their sins. – Matthew 1:21.”

Pattison Elementary School in Katy, Texas, was selling the holiday cards as a fundraiser for art supplies. The program allowed parents to choose artwork created by their own child as well as one of several stock messages for inside the card. Among the messages the district did not seek to disallow were “Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year,” “Peace on Earth/Let it begin in our hearts,” and messages recognizing Hanukkah and Kwanzaa.

In a 2009 ruling in the case, the district court upheld the district’s restrictions on when and where the fundraiser could take place, and it held at that time that the greeting-card fundraiser did not violate the establishment clause of the First Amendment.

On reconsideration, however, the court held in its July 30 opinion in Pounds v. Katy Independent School District that the free-speech rights of parents were infringed by the school’s decision to black out the explicit religious message as a selection and that the district was not required by the establishment clause to take that action.

“The fact that the school sent the order form to the parents does not make the contents of the form pure government speech,” Judge Rosenthal said. “It was evident that the form was prepared by a third party and that it was the third party that created the twelve preset messages for the parents to choose. … The form created a forum for, or facilitated, the creation of the cards, which was clearly private expression.”

Noting that the case has been active since 2006, Judge Rosenthal lamented the legal minefield that school officials must navigate when dealing with anything touching on religion in public education.

“As this case demonstrates, decisions in such seemingly innocuous and benign activities as elementary school parties and fundraisers for elementary school art classes too often lead to protracted litigation,” the judge said.

A hat tip for this case goes to the National School Boards Association’s Legal Clips, which recently added a frequently updated Web site to its other outlets, which include an weekly e-mail newsletter.