School Lunch Makes The ABC News

ABC's Wednesday Nightline and Thursday's Good Morning America had reports on student rebellion to the new federal regulations on what can be served for lunch.

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By AMY BINGHAM (@Amy_Bingham)

Sept. 26, 2012

According to Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, the solution to the growing grumbling over re-vamped school lunch menusboils down to a good old fashioned snack.

School lunch trays are a bit lighter this year after Congress-approved calorie limits on school lunches went into effect in August. The new regulations, which were championed by First Lady Michelle Obama as part of her "Let's Move" campaign to fight childhood obesity, have inspired protests and even a video parody from students who claim the reduced lunches are making them go hungry.

"It's not surprising that some youngsters will in the middle of the day be hungry," Vilsack told ABC News, responding to the controversy. "I remember my two boys when they came back from school they were always hungry, we always had snacks prepared for them."

Vilsack said the Obama Administration is working with school districts to create snack programs and encouraging parents to pack extra food for their active students to munch on before football practice or band rehearsal.

"We understand that change is difficult," Vilsack said. "Some folks love it, some folks have had questions about it, but that's to be expected when you're dealing with 32 million children and you're dealing with over a hundred thousand school districts."

Under the new regulations, cafeterias are required to serve twice as many fruits and vegetables while limiting proteins and carbohydrates. For an average high school student, that means two baked fish nuggets, a cup of vegetables, half a cup of mashed potatoes, one whole grain roll and 8 ounces of fat free milk is the fuel that served to get them through their last four hours of classes.

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But for a grumbling crowd of students, those 750 to 850 calories aren't cutting it.

"We hear them complaining around 1:30 or 2:00 that they are already hungry," said Linda O'Connor, a high school English teacher at Wallace County High School in Sharon Springs, Kansas. "It's all the students, literally all the students... you can set your watch to it."

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O'Connor teamed up with her hungry students and fellow teacher Brenda Kirkham to create a ballad to the growling stomachs that are now pestering her classroom. The YouTube song and dance video "We Are Hungry," set to the tune of Fun's "We Are Young," now has more than 108,000 hits.

"Give me some seconds, I, I need to get some food today," 16-year-old Wallace County High School football player Callahan Grund sings in the video. "My friends are at the corner store getting junk so they don't waste away."

Vilsack said it was "great" that students were speaking out, but said he had not watched the video.

"I think it's great that kids are creative and I think it's great that they're participating in the process by letting their feelings known and using that format to express themselves," he said.

Across the state at St. Mark's Charter School in Colwich, Kansas, middle school students are protesting the new regulations, which limit their calories to between 600 and 700 per meal, by bringing their lunches from home.

St. Mark's Principal Craig Idacavage said more than half of his 330-student school are opting for sack lunches because "they feel they are not able to get full" on the school offerings.

"I think they have a valid point and you can only hope that people will listen to them," Idacavage said.

The new school lunch regulations, which first lady Michelle Obama championed and a Democrat-led Congress passed in 2010, set a maximum calorie limit for high school lunches at between 750 and 850 calories. Under the old rules, cafeterias served a minimum of 825 calories per lunch.

Elementary students' lunches pack between 550 and 650 calories as opposed to the 633 calories allotted under the old rules.

For Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, that "scant diet" is a "rude awakening" for schoolchildren across the country. King and Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kansas, introduced the "No Kids Hungry Act" this month to repeal the new lunch menu standards and prohibit the calorie limits.

"Kids are of varying sizes, activity levels and metabolism rates," King wrote in a Des Moines Register op-ed. "How can we expect each child to flourish and grow on subsistence diets? This all because some are overweight."

But it is not just a few overweight kids that are causing calorie cuts across the cafeteria. One out of every four adolescents are too overweight to join the military, according to a report released Tuesday by Mission: Readiness, a group of retired military leaders who claim obesity is now a national security issue.

"Removing the junk food from our schools should be part of comprehensive action that involves parents, schools and communities in helping children make healthy food choices," retired U.S. Coast Guard Admiral James Loy said in a statement. "The bottom line is that the armed services must have a sufficient pool of fit young adults to draw from in order to field enough recruits with the excellent qualifications needed to staff a 21st century military."

Despite students' complaints over growling stomachs, the new nutritional requirements should actually be making them feel fuller, said Kristi King, a registered pediatric dietician at Texas Children's Hospital and a spokeswoman for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

The new rules double the amount of fruit and vegetables that are served and mandate that half of all bread products are whole grain. All three of those food types are chock full of fiber, which takes longer to digest, King said.

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Students are complaining that the new... View Full Size

Ban on School Lunch Blogger Overturned Watch Video

Cafeteria 'Boot Camp' Saves School Lunch Watch Video

Government Sets Sights on School Potato Consumption Watch Video

"It should be making kids fuller if they are actually consuming the whole product," King said. "If children are not picking the entire meal available to them they are obviously going to be hungry."

In Jackson, Miss., the state with the highest obesity rate, school cafeterias have been easing kids into the healthy food regulations.

Mary Hill, the executive director of food services at Jackson Public School District said her school district has been phasing in more fruit and vegetable options over the past few years to prepare for the regulations and while the new rules are an "adjustment" for the students, she said she has not heard any complaints.

"To me, if you hear that grumbling it's that typical grumbling with children," Hill said. "You know children will be children." ABC News' Arlette Saenz contributed to this report.

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Good Teacher Habits For Today

From the Interface Magazine web site:

Eight habits of highly effective 21st century teachers

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We hear a lot about the 21st century learner – but what about the 21st century teacher? Andrew Churches investigates what makes them succeed.

What are the characteristics we would expect to see in a successful 21st century educator? Well, we know they are student-centric, holistic, and they’re teaching about how to learn as much as teaching about the subject area. We know, too, that they must be 21st century learners as well. But highly effective teachers in today’s classrooms are more than this – much more.

1. Adapting
Harnessed as we are to an assessment-focused education model, the 21st century educator must be able to adapt the curriculum and the requirements to teach to the curriculum in imaginative ways. They must also be able to adapt software and hardware designed for a business model into tools to be used by a variety of age groups and abilities. They must also be able to adapt to a dynamic teaching experience. When it all goes wrong in the middle of a class, when the technologies fail, the show must go on.

2. Being visionary
Imagination is a crucial component of the educator of today and tomorrow. They must look across the disciplines and through the curricula; they must see the potential in the emerging tools and Web technologies, grasp these and manipulate them to serve their needs. If we look at the technologies we currently see emerging, how many are developed for education? The visionary teacher can look at others’ ideas and envisage how they would use these in their class.

3. CollaboratingBlogger, Wikispaces, Bebo, MSN, MySpace, Second life, Twitter, RSS – as an educator we must be able to leverage these collaborative tools to enhance and captivate our learners. We, too, must be collaborators; sharing, contributing, adapting and inventing.

4. Taking risksThere’s so much to learn. How can you as an educator know all these things? You must take risks and sometimes surrender yourself to the students’ knowledge. Have a vision of what you want and what the technology can achieve, identify the goals and facilitate the learning. Use the strengths of the digital natives to understand and navigate new products, have them teach each other. Trust your students.

5. Learning
We expect our students to be life-long learners. Teachers, must continue to absorb experiences and knowledge, as well. We must endeavour to stay current. I wonder how many people are still using their lesson and unit plans from five years ago. To be a teacher, you must learn and adapt as the horizons and landscapes change.

6. Communicating
To have anywhere, anytime learning, the teacher must be anywhere and anytime. The 21st century teacher is fluent in tools and technologies that enable communication and collaboration. They go beyond learning just how to do it; they also know how to facilitate it, stimulate and control it, moderate and manage it.

7. Modelling behaviour
There is an expectation that teachers will teach values, so we must model the behaviors that we expect from our students. We are often the most consistent part of their life, seeing them more often, for longer and more reliably than even their parents. The 21st century educator also models tolerance, global awareness, and reflective practice, whether it’s the quiet, personal inspection of their teaching and learning, or through blogs, twitter and other media, effective educators look both inwards and outwards.

8. LeadingWhether they are a champion of the process of ICT integration, a quiet technology coach, the 21st century educator is a leader. Like clear goals and objectives, leadership is crucial to the success or failure of any project.

ANDREW CHURCHES IS HOD INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AT KRISTIN SCHOOL IN AUCKLAND.

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Rock Hill Fundraisers

Fundraisers

►South Pointe's Athletic Boosters are now selling 8-10 lb. Boston butts for a $30 donation. The pick-up date will be this Friday, Sept. 29. To place an order, call Mike Grubb at 803.417-8048.

►The Rock Hill High Chorus will host a pancake breakfast at Fatz Café on Herlong on Saturday, Sept. 29, from 8:00-10:00. Tickets, at $7 for adults and $4 for children, will be available at the door.

You Would Think This Was Common Sense

From the Huff Post Education blog:

Technology Doesn't Teach, Teachers Teach

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Education is experiencing a seismic change. The chalkboard and print-based textbook classroom of yesterday is fast becoming the digital-whiteboard and e-book classroom of tomorrow. But as students across the country head back to school this month, the companies charged with helping to implement these changes cannot forget the golden rule: the motherboard and the memory chip will never replace the passion and inspiration of a real-life teacher.

Technology doesn't teach. Teachers teach.

All of us involved in education received the same mandate this past winter from President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan: to replace traditional, static textbooks with dynamic, interactive digital textbooks within the next five years. Several organizations have accepted this challenge enthusiastically and are partnering with districts every day to help transform classrooms into the digital learning environments our leaders envision. But the process is complicated.

Our every move affects tomorrow. No matter how far we evolve from the little red schoolhouse, we cannot afford to sacrifice the foundation of education that is built upon the unique relationship between teacher and student. At the same time, we know that new classroom technology, when used effectively, can produce amazing results across socioeconomic lines. So we are constantly studying models to strike the right balance.

We have seen the power of new technology in practice, especially when used by effectively trained teachers. In an initiative to replace traditional social studies textbooks, those students using digital tools in the Indianapolis Public Schools system, in which 85 percent of students are enrolled in subsidized lunch programs, had a 27 percent higher passing rate on statewide progress tests than students in classrooms that were not plugged in. Students in Miami-Dade County Public Schools who used digital resources achieved a 7 percent increase in their science FCAT (Florida's Comprehensive Assessment Test) exams. And students of the Mooresville Graded School District in North Carolina increased their performance on state exams by 13 percent over three short years, thanks to digital content and passionate, technology literate teachers.

These dramatic improvements would have been compromised if the teachers themselves had not been brought into the process responsibly. That is why our investment in upgrading classrooms needs to focus equally on making sure teachers know how to use digital tools effectively. No rational parent would put a child into a car operated by someone who could not drive, so why put our children into digital classrooms operated by teachers who are unprepared to teach in the digital age?

North Carolina's Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) perfectly illustrates both the power of effective teacher training and technology. Since 2008, CMS has provided digital science resources to Title I schools -- schools with a high concentration of students living in poverty. Along with digital content, the district provided teachers with ongoing professional development designed to show them how to build engaging lessons, enhance their current curriculum and inspire students by integrating digital media, hardware and software. The professional development, however, was not mandatory.

The results could not have been clearer: The students of teachers who opted into the professional development not only closed the achievement gap between themselves and students from Title I schools that did not have the same technology, they also outperformed the non-Title I schools, amassing a 57 percent passing rate on the state's end-of-year standardized science tests, compared to the 43 percent passing rate of those from wealthier schools. These are some of the most disadvantaged students in the state, remember, and yet they caught up to -- and surpassed -- students from more affluent schools.

Given this evidence, we urge our colleagues in the education community to increase their efforts to provide not only the resources to our teachers, but also the necessary professional development. We must recognize that the teacher-student relationship comes first. Only then will we continue to see improved results in the wired classrooms of tomorrow.

Technology doesn't teach. Teachers teach.

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September Rock Hill School Board Business Meeting Notes

The Rock Hill School Board held their September Business meeting on Monday, September 24, 2012 at the District Office. The meeting was very light on action items (2). There will be no replay on our local cable system because of technical difficulties with the sound system. Fellow  board member Ginny Moe has posted notes from the meeting which you can read by clicking here.

My additions to her notes are below:

• Dr. Julie Marshall is the first South Carolina Teacher to be recognized by the Horace Mann.
• Student enrollment went down and saw limited growth the last few years primarily because of the start-up of our local state charter, YPA. Area student growth continues to be fairly consistent at 2% per year.
• The state of South Carolina has no initiative from the state department of education to allow ebooks instead of hard copy books. One of very few states without such an initiative at the state level.
• Alan November will be one of the speakers for the student engagement conference on October 26. Check him out in the video below (click here for the link):

• The city of Rock Hill is partnering with our district on project based learning. The video below was submitted with a recent grant request:

The Innovation Equation Leveraging the Talents of Children to Solve Community Problems from Christopher Smith on Vimeo.
Click here for a link to the video.

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Taking A Bath and Archimedes' Principal

Click here for a link to the video.

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Frontline Looks at High School Drop Outs

Click here for the link to the article:

By the Numbers: Dropping Out of High School

September 21, 2012, 2:10 pm ET by Jason M. Breslow

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How costly is the decision to drop out of high school? Consider a few figures about life without a diploma:

$20,241

The average dropout can expect to earn an annual income of $20,241, according to the U.S. Census Bureau (PDF). That’s a full $10,386 less than the typical high school graduate, and $36,424 less than someone with a bachelor’s degree.

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Of course, simply finding a job is also much more of a challenge for dropouts. While the national unemployment rate stood at 8.1 percent in August, joblessness among those without a high school degree measured 12 percent. Among college graduates, it was 4.1 percent.

30.8

The challenges hardly end there, particularly among young dropouts. Among those between the ages of 18 and 24, dropouts were more than twice as likely as college graduates to live in poverty according to the Department of Education. Dropouts experienced a poverty rate of 30.8 percent, while those with at least a bachelor’s degree had a poverty rate of 13.5 percent.

63

Among dropouts between the ages of 16 and 24, incarceration rates were a whopping 63 times higher than among college graduates, according to a study (PDF) by researchers at Northeastern University. To be sure, there is no direct link between prison and the decision to leave high school early. Rather, the data is further evidence that dropouts are exposed to many of the same socioeconomic forces that are often gateways to crime.

$292,000

The same study (PDF) found that as a result — when compared to the typical high school graduate — a dropout will end up costing taxpayers an average of $292,000 over a lifetime due to the price tag associated with incarceration and other factors such as how much less they pay in taxes.

9/25

Those are the numbers. Even more revealing are the human stories associated with leaving high school without a degree. In Dropout Nation, premiering Sept. 25, FRONTLINE visits a once notorious “dropout factory” for an intimate look at four of the faces behind a national crisis in education.

In the film, viewers are introduced to Sparkle, a teenage mother whose schooling takes a back seat to finding food to eat and a place to sleep. There is Marco, who struggles to balance homework with a 40-hour-per-week job at a grocery store. Another student, Marcus, lives within a short walk to school, but on most days is nowhere to be found. Lawrence, meanwhile, is five years into high school, yet remains far from earning his degree.

Watch a preview here:

Watch Dropout Nation Preview on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

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