School Community

Education is big business. More and more schools and colleges recognise that in this competitive world students are looking to increase their job prospects by arming themselves with the best courses available. Parents too are hugely aware of the immense competition out there, and have become increasingly mindful of the need to place their children, from the very beginning, in schools that are best equipped to meet their educational needs; strategically placing them in schools that offer the best prospectuses, resources and sporting activities.

Schools too are conscious of the need to entice students into their establishments. By presenting their unique selling points (yes, schools do have unique selling points!) in the best way possible, they can build on their promises to ensure top class educational courses. School prospectuses are sometimes complex, and contain detailed lists of information. The school prospectus design will give a simple and uncomplicated overview of what each school has to offer.

Bearing in mind the importance that is placed by parents on ensuring that their children receive the best in primary education, it is worth investing time and effort into presenting the primary school prospectus of your school in the most visibly powerful way. The use of graphic design and high definition photography gives parents an at-a-glance picture of what is available.

Top of this list is the creation of a high quality website. Virtually 100% of parents begin their initial research into schools via an online search. An effective call to action should aim to ensure that a parent will want to bookmark your website for further follow up. Getting parents through your front door is half the battle, and once you have arranged an appointment in person, you can then put your own communication skills to work. You are then in a position to encourage parents to witness first-hand the facilities that you have on offer, as well as answering any questions that they may have.

By engaging the services of a school prospectus design company, you will be placing your requirements with experts who will portray your school in the best possible manner. If you are confident in the ability of your school prospectus to deliver courses that will best meet the needs of your students you will be well placed to fill all course placements. Teachers are busy, you are busy; hand over this essential task to those who have the appropriate experience and watch your school head towards number 1 in the top schools list.

• Twitter was filled with moving #ThankATeacher messages today for National Teacher Day.
• A former student of beloved childrens author Maurice Sendak, who died today, recalls him.
• In a recent interview, Sendak praised childrens complexity and was curmudgeonly.
• In honor of Teacher Appreciation Week, a compendium of quotations about teaching.
• Were remembering some of our favorite teachers, and asking readers to do the same.
• A city teacher praises a math coach who helped him along by teaching without teaching.
• Mayor Bloomberg thanks one of his teachers for making history come alive and feel relevant.
• A principal asks why the USDOE would hold charter school week during teacher week.
• And a teacher laments the evaluation focus of John Kings appreciation letter.
• Pop star Justin Bieber has graduated from high school, but hes not headed to college.
• A Pearson vice president says she supports cares about assessment as a mom, too.
• Technologists painted a picture of the computer-aided testing of the future.
• Bayside High School is holding an open house tomorrow — to recruit students for 2013.
• A longtime parent activist and educational advocate is the new head of the city YMCA.

Outdoor toys bring novelty and promote good health. It’s like exercise for your child and all parents know the benefits of exercise. They are necessary to release toxins from the body in the form of sweat. Not only does this exercise also releases well-being hormones and pumps up blood circulation. An increased blood flow would have a direct effect on skin and hair. This article provides some useful information on outdoor toys like trampolines, berg go karts uk and climbing frames. They are developed for children of different age.

There are many options to play outside and the toys can be installed in your garden. These toys are lightweight and can easily be moved from one place n your garden to another. All products are made from high quality and durable materials and will last for years.

If your child loves adventure, then climbing frames will catch his or her fancy. The rise can be difficult and require strength and energy. Outdoor toys are certainly different from those inside, because they are necessary for health development not only fun.

Trampolines can be fun to play and your child can invite his or her friends. This toy helps to improve coordination and makes the child healthy and fit. If you are too busy to watch your children while using the trampoline, you can choose a closed structure. There are offset safety boxes. Before buying this toy you should look tough several jumpking trampoline reviews.

A wooden playhouse is like a dollhouse for your daughter. Boys will like it too. Wheeled toys are perfect for boys and girls as well. You can decide to but a scooter or trike that suits for children from the age of 3-5. Outdoor toys can really make a huge difference for recreation.

The documentary Bully opens in theaters Thursday, and the heated controversy over the appropriate rating for the film has frustrated many schools hoping to use it as a teaching tool.

Administrators have struggled to find effective ways to help curb bullying in their schools in recent years, and a growing number of bullying prevention programs have emerged to meet the demand.

Many schools started by cracking down on bullies, then later focused on propping up victims, with the hope of helping to make them “bully-proof.” Now, they have shifted their efforts to people who witness bullying.

Fostering ‘Upstanders’

“A few years back, I used to be a bystander,” panelist Lee Tu, a student from Allston, Mass., tells the audience during a recent anti-bullying conference sponsored by Harvard University. Tu says she saw a fellow student “called a whore … and I didn’t really do anything.”

But for most kids, it’s a big leap to imagine they shoulder any blame for doing nothing when they see bullies in action.

“If they’re not the person shoving someone in a locker, or they’re not online spreading rumors, they think they are not part of the problem,” says Marc Skvirsky, vice president of the organization Facing History and Ourselves.

Skvirsky helped create a study guide to accompany the Bully documentary. The guide focuses both on bystanders and what many anti-bullying campaigners call “upstanders”: kids and adults who stand up to bullying when they see it.

If they’re not the person shoving someone … they think they are not part of the problem

- Marc Skvirsky, vice president, Facing History and Ourselves

“We really want students to really reflect on their choices and the consequences of indifference,” Skvirsky says.

Erica Newell works with the Massachusetts Aggression Reduction Center, or MARC, which provides schools free or low-cost programs aimed at combating bullying. Today, she’s teaching middle-schoolers in the town of Medway about the power of bystanders.

Bullies are much like performers, she tells the crowd. Their audience, she says, are bystanders, “just sitting there watching, right? So they’re not saying, ‘fight, fight, fight,’ — but they’re also not doing anything.”

“So who are they helping?” she asks. “The bully, right?”

Newell tells kids that she gets why they don’t want to stand up to bullies. She understands they don’t want to make themselves a target. But, she says, there are less risky options.

“Don’t join in. It’s OK to turn around and walk away,” she says. “You don’t have to be BFFs or sit together at lunch all the time. Something as simple as that is showing the victim support.”

Changing Perceptions Of What’s Cool

After the assembly, seventh-grader Carly Hundertmark says a friend once offered such a gesture to help her when she was bullied.

“She would always call me over to a different table and find [a] way out of the situation,” Carly says. “And she was actually the one who told my mom, ’cause I didn’t feel comfortable about it.”

Part of what made it hard to talk about was that the bully was one of Carly’s friends.

It was the same for Shannon McHugh. “In the movies, it’s always a big tough guy who picks on the little nerd. But, it was my friend,” Shannon says.

“We would all joke around … but then, she kind of took it to the next level and it started getting meaner,” she says. “And she took it to the next level, and the next — and she just turned and bullied all of us.”

Westfield State University professor Elizabeth Stassinos says that’s often the case. Kids often play both roles of bully and victim, and it’s often hard to know who is engaging in aggressive or bullying behavior. That’s why, she says, just cracking down on bullies is ineffective and why peer intervention is key.

“Kids themselves need to create new social norms where bullying is not cool, and create an environment where the cool way of dealing with bullying … is for one kid to say to the kid who’s aggressive, ‘Hey, why are you hating on so-and-so all the time?’

“It’s very much like drunk driving,” Stassinos says. “It’s more effective when a student takes the keys away from another student.”

Making it cool to stand up to bullies may sound like a tall order, but it begins to seem a little less impossible when stars like Lady Gaga get into the game.

At Harvard last month, when she announced her new Born This Way Foundation aimed at combating bullying, she told kids it’s on them to change their school culture.

“There is no law that can be passed,” the pop star told the students. “I wish there was, because you know I’d be chained naked to a fence somewhere trying to pass it.”

Indeed, some people feel that laws can do more harm than good. New Jersey recently passed the nation’s strictest anti-bullying law, leaving schools with an 18-page “compliance checklist.” One school made headlines for investigating a second-grader who said another kid had cooties.

Harvard education professor Rick Weissbourd says it’s easy for adults to overreact.

“There’s an allergy to kids experiencing any adversity,” he says. “[But] we don’t want adults intervening every time a kid teases another kid. We want kids to be able to learn how to develop coping strategies, and learn how to deal with conflict in constructive ways.”

Not All Programs Created Equal

The MARC program spends nearly as much time defining what bullying isn’t as what it actually is, but not all programs do. In fact, some experts say it’s a bit like the Wild West in the fast-growing industry of bully-prevention programs. Anyone can peddle anything — and they do.

Massachusetts anti-bullying campaigner Joe Wojick, also known as “Joe the Biker,” travels schools with his tough persona, rap songs and his motorcycle jacket to tell his story.

“When I was your age, they called me ‘yubbie,’” he tells a group of students.

They may be compelling tales told with the best intentions, but Stassinos says schools should not be investing in programs that are not research-based.

“It’s often a feel-good experience, but it’s a one-off event, and it doesn’t change the climate,” she says. “It seems just like a horrible waste of money to fund programs that aren’t proven to work.”

Stassinos says the evidence is clear about what works: the slow and tedious task of changing kids’ hearts and minds about what’s cool — and what’s not, and convincing them to speak out against aggressive behavior.

For the first time, the United Federation of Teachers is suing one of the charter schools where it helped teachers to unionize. The union filed suit today against Merrick Academy Charter School, alleging that the school had not honored its commitment to increase the salaries of some teachers.

Teachers at Merrick Academy voted to make the United Federation of Teachers their exclusive bargaining agent in 2007—a process that made Merrick the first of several charter schools to unionize through the UFT’s campaign to bring the typically non-union schools under contract. The UFT and the school struggled to reach a contract agreement from day 1, and those struggles came to a head summer of 2010, when 11 teachers at the Queens school learned theyd been fired via a FedEx mailing.

In November 2011 the UFT and Merrick Academy agreed on a contract which included salary increases for the teachers.  But after four months salaries have not increased, UFT Vice President for High Schools Leo Casey explained, so the union is suing the school over a breach of contract.

Casey said the teachers have not been given back-pay they are owed and are still waiting for their current salaries to be raised. He also said the union is notifying the Public Employee Relations Board about other contractual issues at the school, noting that teachers who represent the union are being punished with disciplinary letters and, in one case, suspension without pay.

In most places that we organize were actually seeing the ability to establish good, working relationships but we are having a problem with some schools, he said. Were not going to just organize a chapter and then walk away from it. [Merrick] organized into a union for a reason, and the law protects their right to do that and to have collective bargaining agreements respected, and were going to make sure that that happens.

Since the union began helping charter schools unionize, 15 schools have formed unions—most recently the French American Charter School in Harlem.