The next post will be the long one today. Its an email from my recent corespondent who I’ve suggested run for the School Board. It will redacted a bit because she mentions some folks who I’m afraid to unnecessarily embarass but it will contain lots of names of teachers who have been her salvation. They deserve a little praise for their decency.
As for this post. Like the previous post that is a potpourri of stuff I’ve been reading watching thinking this one is a collection of recent questions that have crossed my mind and to which I hope to attach some answers.
How much is Tony Stauber’s concern about our teaching of vocational subjects relevant to the Duluth public schools today?
Tony ran our District’s vocational ed for years. He was probably doing this before the state severed the community college from the oversight by Duluth’s School Board and turned it into a community college and later LSC. What remained were vocational classes which themselves changed about the time the District in the 1990’s built the STC now closed up by Central High School. STC stood for Secondary Technical Center.
Tony has written regularly to Board members much the same thing he has taken to writing as Op Ed pieces for the Tribune. He quite correctly warns that treating the public schools as little manufacturing plants churning out College Freshman is short sighted. Treating our kids as though they were all the same is similarly short sighted. Still, our public obligation to them is to prepare them for their futures post high school……if they graduate. If they drop out, even to attain a GED, we have failed them.
So today there was a story about a $900,000 grant to the LSC for the kind of mechanical training that Tony is so interested in. I’ll need to plan a trip to the new downtown campus of LSC. Then I’ll need to visit our secondary technical classes to see if they’ve benefited from being severed again into Denfeld and Eastern wings at our two new and or improved high schools.
Last week I met with the new teacher at Lifehouse. Last year I volunteered, mostly to stand around one day a week, at Lifehouse as a friendly but not terribly noteworthy old graybeard willing to chat up the kids or play table tennis with them if they were in the mood.
This was a part with my long standing concern about kids who were not well served by traditional public education. In the Ven diagram of kids Lifehouse habitues are more likely to find themselves in the section of the circles that are less enamored of traditional public school. Gosh, that last sentence is vague and roundabout. Back when I ran for the School board in the ninties I was worried about dropouts. Still am. Last year I became aware that lots of the kids at Lifehouse were heading over to their location downtown from our ALC (Alternative Learning Center). That’s where the Lifehouse teacher spent a fair amount of time with the kids. The new Lifehouse teacher told me that he was placing more of the kids at the Harbor City International School which is a decade old high school charter.
After I left Lifehouse I got to wondering if this was significant and if so for what reason. We do have our new closed campus policy but it hadn’t occurred to me to ask if this would apply to the ALC. If so, this would chase kids away in droves, especially those in that particular corner of my Ven diagram.
I have never imagined that the Red Plan school would be particularly user friendly for this portion of our school population. That the Red Plan has come with fewer teachers, larger classes and less adult/student contact time has only aggravated this remove. I’m left with a lot of questions some I probably can only barely articulate at this point one year short of my first anniversary on the School Board.
Well, that’s two questions of many that have been aggravating me this week. Now on to a paean to wonderful teachers.
