Kansas House panel cuts school funding increase, advances bill

A plan to increase school funding by about $278 million over two years is headed to the House floor under heavy criticism. An earlier version of the school finance proposal called for an increase of $750 million over five years. The House K-12 Budget Committee cut the amount before voting to send the plan to the House. Read more>>

Everyone from parents to educators seems to be talking about it. More specifically, they’re arguing about how best to present the sensitive topic to impressionable prepubescent youths while complying with a new state law that put extra demands on sexual education courses. For some districts, that has meant completely redoing their curriculum. Read more>>

Administrators say programming and services could be at risk should Congress follow through with plans to change the way Medicaid is distributed. They say any reduction in the estimated $4 billion schools receive in annual reimbursements would be hard to absorb after years of reduced state funding and a weakened tax base. Read more>>

Matt Zalaznick

More districts now use digital badges to highlight students' specific skills, such as critical thinking or leadership. If your district is innovating or experimenting in this area, we’d like to interview an administrator to gain some details and deeper insight. Please follow the link to connect with us. Read more>>

The Detroit Public Schools Community District should have paid off a huge debt to a janitorial services company with money provided by the Legislature last year, but district officials opted to keep fighting the debt in court, according to federal court documents filed. Read more>>

School leaders don't want to see Michigan become the next state to assign letter grades to schools. Too simplistic, unfair, inequitable, misleading and harmful are just a few things that have been said about switching to a letter grading system for school accountability. The Legislature ultimately decide if grading, supported by Gov. Rick Snyder, becomes law. Read more>>

Several public schools in New Mexico, including Las Cruces High School, are trying to tackle teen's sleep deprivation problems by providing napping pods for their students. While the Las Cruces school pods were bought to remedy sleep deprivation, it also turns out to be good for anger and stress. Read more>>

Chris Wolk

Principal preparation programs continue to place more demands on candidates, in some cases requiring a yearlong internship. Read more>>

Segregation in the city’s schools cannot be dismissed as an unsolvable problem. And though housing plays a role, decades-old educational policies have reinforced inequality and actually trapped many low-income children in an inferior system-within-a-system. Read more>>

Teachers in municipalities with lower populations earn significantly less than their counterparts in larger communities. To use a sports analogy, rural districts act as a farm system for the bigger ones. Under a proposal, school districts would still make their own hires, but the state would pay their salaries based on a negotiated statewide contract. Read more>>

Nebraska’s new statewide testing approach should give the state’s teachers more data to tailor and improve instruction for individual students. The new data could boost learning, assuming schools pair the information with results from the Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP, test, which many Nebraska schools already give earlier in the school year. Read more>>

Through Marana USD’s new relationship with Discovery Education, science educators in grades 3-6 are integrating the Science Techbook digital textbook series into classroom instruction. Additionally, the Discovery Education Community will help the educators’ efforts to transform students’ learning experiences with digital media. Read more>>

Microsoft Philanthropies announced the expansion of TEALS (Technology Education and Literacy in Schools), which pairs technology professionals with teachers to "co-teach" computer science. The TEALS program will add nearly 100 U.S. schools and will recruit 1,100 volunteers for the coming school year. Read more>>

In January 2017, a joint announcement was made offering the CASE Benchmark Assessments on the Nextera Platform for the 2017-18 school year. TE21 and Questar have decided to delay the partnership. The enCASE platform will be continue to be ready for full release in August 2017 to deliver TE21's CASE Item Bank and CASE Benchmark Assessments. Read more>>

Jennifer Covington, principal of Murray City School District's Hillcrest Junior High School, has been appointed superintendent of the Utah suburban school district, the first woman to serve in that position. She succeeds Superintendent Steve Hirasi, who is retiring. Covington has been an educator for 23 years, all with Murray City School District. Read more>>

Brian Blake will be the new superintendent for the Ipswich Public Schools. Blake is currently the superintendent of the Sanborn Regional School District in New Hampshire, which he has led since 2009. He replaces Superintendent William Hart, who is retiring after leading the district for four years. Read more>>

Matt Donkin, the superintendent of Franklin, Williamson, Johnson and Massac counties, will become the district superintendent of the Frankfort School District. In recent years, the number of regional superintendents in Illinois had been reduced, requiring Donkin to take on two additional counties. Read more>>