Published: December 05, 2005 10:58 am            

Northeast faculty to learn about bullying

GOOSE LAKE — Northeast teachers will learn new ways of dealing with bullying this year, as well as improved ways to teach reading and math.

“At one point or another,” said elementary principal Diane Schumacher at the Nov. 21 school board meeting, “probably most of our kids have had somebody intimidate them in some way. Some of it is just ‘boys being boys,’ but that doesn’t mean we have to accept it.”

Joining in the nationwide effort to reduce bullying, the Northeast School District has enrolled in the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program.

“It’s the only federally recognized program,” she said. “There are a million bullying programs out there, but this one has been proven effective by research.”

Approximately 30 years ago, Dr. Dan Olweus of Norway started a large scale project that, according to his Web site, is now “generally regarded as the first scientific study of bully/victim problems in the world.”

His program was recently endorsed by the United States Department of Justice because it had been “exposed to rigorous scientific evaluation, with positive and long-term results.”

People from the Area Education Agency who have been trained at the state of Iowa level will come to Northeast and train about 12 teachers, who then will share the training with the rest of the teachers, elementary through high school, Schumacher said.

“We’re excited about that,” she said, “but it’s not a canned program. Our teachers are going to have a lot of work to do, making it fit our school.”

Another program new to Northeast elementary classrooms this year is called “reading naturally.”

According to Schumacher, an associate will work with struggling readers trying to help them read at a rate so they can actually comprehend what they read.

“When kids are stumbling over every other word, they can’t tell you what the story is about.”

For other students, an AEA leader will help teachers with a guided reading program in which students will be grouped according to reading ability, then meet with the teacher to read stories at their skill level.

Still another new program at Northeast Elementary School is the state math initiative, Every Student Counts.

Four Northeast teachers have gone to the AEA to be trained and came back to share with the rest of the staff, according to Schumacher.

They then will go back to the AEA for more training and share that with their peers.

An AEA staff member will present a program on Every Student Counts to Northeast teachers this month and then will return in January to actually deliver a math lesson to each grade, so the local teachers can observe her “walk the walk,” Schumacher said.

Jarvis presents more scores

Northeast middle/high school principal Joe Jarvis presented to his school board Nov. 21 three years of data comparing the test scores of students who have/are taking the “core” subjects and the scores of “non-core” students.

Core refers to a program of four years of English and three years each of mathematics, social studies and natural science.

“I wanted the board to particularly note that there is a large discrepancy between core kids and non-core kids,” Jarvis told the Herald later.

For the last three years, English scores for core students were 19.4, 20.1 and 18.8, while scores for non-core students were 15.4, 17.1 and 16.4.

Math scores for core students were 19.4, 20.7 and 18.9, while for non-core students they were 13.8, 15.7 and 15.6.

Science scores for core students were 20.3, 21.2 and 18.8, while for non-core students they were 17.0, 16.4 and 19.6.

“We’re not just hanging our hat on one particular year,” Jarvis said. “When we look at three years of data we can say precisely that we know kids that take the core curriculum are going to do far better than kids who don’t.

“And we have data that goes back a lot further that consistently shows that core is where we need to be.

“My whole thing here is that we’re going to remedy some of this with our new graduation requirements,” which will require all students to take the additional years of core subjects.

“Another thing that’s very, very obvious is, we see in research and hear constantly is that if you have higher expectations for kids there are actually fewer failures,” he said. “I believe we’ll be preparing our kids better for the future. And that’s what this is all about.”

        

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