community

About 35 sixth-graders at DSST Stapleton learned some hard lessons about cheating last month. The students were caught worming their way into an online instant assessment program in science and English (called “mastery checks”) and changing answers so their teachers would believe they had mastered subjects.

The Natchez-Adams (Miss.) School District will operate a magnet school beginning in the fall with a focus on STEM (science, technology, engineering and math). The Natchez Democrat reports that the school board voted this past week to locate the magnet school at the former Robert Lewis Middle School. The program will have 125 sixth-grade students.

Two Ohio high school football players have been found guilty of raping a drunken 16-year-old girl in a case that roiled a small city and stirred reaction from activists online. Judge Thomas Lipps ruled Sunday in juvenile court that Steubenville High School students Trent Mays and Ma'Lik Richmond are guilty of attacking the girl after an alcohol-fueled party last August.

The Columbus Metropolitan Library’s trustees on Thursday committed to selling the 88,000-square-foot Ohio Deaf School campus at 400 E. Town St. next to the system’s main branch to the Cristo Rey Columbus High School just a couple of weeks after buying the 114-year-old property and adjacent land for $2.16 million.

The Boston School Committee, in a momentous vote Wednesday, scrapped a school assignment plan developed under court-ordered desegregation almost a quarter-century ago and embraced a new system that seeks to allow more students to attend schools closer to home.

Now that P.S. 64 Pura Belpre school in Mount Eden is set to phase out in three years, parents are concerned that children in the school are condemned. The kindergarten through fifth grade school is beset with feckless teachers, bullying, large classes and a lack of textbooks and homework, parents charged.

In one Northern Kentucky high school, students have come together to help their classmates get computers and connect to the internet with a classroom project called Communities to Computers.

Parents, staff and students from school districts across the state — Trenton, Camden, Irvington, Gloucester City — shared horror stories of broken windows, collapsing roofs and choking mold in dilapidated schools at a meeting yesterday of the state Schools Development Authority.

Only a week remains until the School Reform Commission is to vote on the largest wave of school closings in Philadelphia history, but community organizations are fighting for more time. The NAACP and ACTION United, a statewide organization of 52,000 low- and moderate-income families, have asked for a one-year delay to find additional sources of funding and alternatives to the proposed closing of 29 schools.

Until we see education as an investment, not a cost, the image in the mirror isn't going to be pretty.