By Jessica Rogness
This year’s ambassador for the Vacaville Neighborhood Boys and Girls Club has been chosen.
Sergio Maciel, 15, a sophomore at Will C. Wood High School, will serve as the 2017 Youth of the Year for the Club. He will go on to compete in the Northern California Youth of the Year competition.
“I’m really going to do my best to represent the Boys and Girls Club as well as the youth of Vacaville,” Maciel said at the podium in the Vacaville City Hall council chamber Thursday.
By Ryan McCarthy
A resolution declaring the Fairfield-Suisun School District a “safe haven” and reminding families about laws that protect students from questions about their immigration status goes before trustees Thursday.
State Superintendent of Schools Tom Torlakson on Dec. 21 encouraged all California public schools to be declared safe havens, Kris Corey, superintendent of the Fairfield-Suisun School District, said in a report to trustees.
They’ll receive the proposed resolution for information Thursday and take up the proposal Feb. 9 for potential action.
Source: Fairfield-Suisun School District considers ‘safe haven’ resolution on immigration status
By Rachel Raskin-Zrihen
Adolph “Al” Berenguer of Vallejo said he plans to die with his boots on, though, since he doesn’t wear boots, loafers would probably be more accurate. That also might be entirely believable, considering the 88-year-old teacher is still in the classroom at least a couple days a week.
Besides teaching English as a second language, Spanish and Latin at the Vallejo Adult School and the Florence Douglass Senior Center, Berenguer is presently working on his third book. And this is only since retiring after more than 50 years teaching in the Vallejo City Unified School District.
Source: Vallejo man still in the education trenches at age 88
By Richard Bammer
Sierra Vista School officials plan to host on Tuesday an informational meeting for parents highlighting all that the K-8 campus has to offer families.
The meeting will begin at 6:30 p.m. at the 301 Bel Air Drive school.
A school tour, beginning at 9 a.m. Feb. 10, also is available for families that seek to learn more about the school.
Sierra Vista is Vacaville Unified’s only K-8 school. Formerly a traditional elementary that closed in 2011 due to declining district enrollments, it re-opened in August as a way to offer area families a “small-school option” for middle school and to help ease overcrowding in several other elementaries across the 12,500-student district, Jennifer Leonard, the district’s public information officer, noted in a press release
By Kimberly K. Fu
With knowledge comes power and a group of Vacaville teens hope their second-annual gathering will bring awareness and empowerment to fellow youths.
On Feb. 11, the Teen Summit is coming to town.
From 8:30 a.m.-3:30 p.m. at the Will C. Wood High School campus, teens will be engaged in workshops that touch on topics of concern to youths today.
“We’ll have speakers like Sabrina Word and Ashanti Branch,” said Sadie Cunning with Wood’s Interact Club, naming two outspoken youth advocates. “Our main focus is substance abuse and living healthier lives.”
Sadie, a Wood senior, added that she’s “super excited” for the event, which she also helped plan last year.
Source: Second annual teen summit to focus on substance abuse
By Daily Republic Staff
Newly appointed Solano County Superintendent of Schools Lisette Estrella-Henderson is one of seven new directors on the Solano Economic Development Corporation board, which also includes two area councilmen.
Dixon Mayor Thom Bogue and Rio Vista Vice Mayor Ronald Kott were also added to the organization’s 45-member board of directors, which is a mix of private sector and public officials.
By Nick Sestanovich
The Governing Board of the Benicia Unified School District heard further discussion on student responses to the Relationships, Effort, Aspirations, Cognitions, Heart (REACH) survey at Thursday’s meeting, this time focusing on the district’s efforts to improve its scores.
The REACH Survey is administered to students in grades 6 through 12 to examine the relationships between students and teachers and see what further work needs to be done. Students are polled in the five following categories.
*Relationships: Do teachers believe in their students?
*Effort: How students view their own intelligence influences the effort they put into their school work.
*Aspirations: Do students have positive visions of their futures and set and work toward their goals?
Source: Benicia Unified dives into survey data at Thursday’s school board meeting
By John Glidden
Vallejo school district officials announced the start of a new initiative Thursday, aimed at providing an opportunity for “positive student and staff expression.”
The campaign, named Strength in Unity, emphasizes that the Vallejo City Unified School District and Vallejo community need to work together for the betterment of everyone, officials said.
“The Strength in Unity Campaign provides an opportunity for all of us to celebrate our students, staff and community and highlight our best practices,” said VCUSD spokesperson Alana Shackelford, in a follow-up email to the Times-Herald.
Each school site, for the following school year, and possibly during the 2017-18 school year, will engage in several activities, Shackelford added.
These activities include open mike sessions during lunchtime, allowing students to sing, read poetry, or share their respective views, while also holding restorative community circles, giving students and staff the ability to share “positive thoughts and wishes for the future of our city and our nation,” according to a district news release.
By Richard Bammer
Local, state and national high school graduation rates are rising, but not everyone earns a diploma in the traditional way.
There is another option: through a public library.
For those who did not earn a high school diploma, the Solano County Library, in association with the California State Library, offers a career online high school program, a chance to earn a diploma and career certificates.
If interested in knowing more about this pilot program, the first step is to visit www.solanolibrary.com/cohs.
Once there, you will be asked to take a “self-assessment,” which can be completed in several minutes. It will ask you to select your library and for some personal information (name, address, telephone number).
By Richard Bammer
California school districts must devise a plan of action to meet the educational needs for every student.
To that end, the Solano County Office of Education plans to launch a “cultural proficiency” program to better serve an increasingly diverse student population.
The Equity Institute, with the Association of California School Administrators’ Diversity and Equal Access Division, will be held in February, March and May in Fairfield, Gethsemane Moss, the director of educational services at SCOE, wrote in a press release earlier this week.
She described the institute as a professional learning opportunity “designed to build cultural proficiency capacity that will help educators lead with equity.”
By Murray Bass
Last year I had breakfast and conversation at Huckleberry’s and then a visit to Mary Bird School with Fairfield-Suisun School District Superintendent Kris Corey.
We share an interest in the education – development – of children. Her interest is professional, mine is more amateur.
Kris invited me to join her to look at what was going on at Mary Bird School. Mary Bird is a school for young children with special needs, kids 3 and 4 years old.
By Marcus Lomtong
Imagine you’re at an audition for a national commercial but instead Steven Spielberg personally invites you to be in his upcoming film.
Well, something like that happened to 10-year-old Eleanor Wyly, who goes to school at K.I. Jones Elementary and has been doing gymnastics since she was 18 months old – currently working out at North Bay Gymnastics of Vallejo.
While Wyly was at the USA Gymnastics Training Facility at the Karolyi Ranch in Huntsville, Texas, vying for a spot on the TOPs National A team, she was offered an even better opportunity mid-tryout.
Source: Fairfield 10-year-old invited to work with USA gymnastics staff
By Susan Hiland
A group of dedicated high school students spent their weekend learning some new skills that they will then pass on to the younger generation.
The 4-H Science, Engineering and Technology program was held at the 4-H offices on Texas Street for high school students to learn how to teach science to elementary and middle school students in an after-school program for approximately one hour during the week.
Mia Baez is a freshman at Rodriguez High School and for part of her community service requirements she is doing the 10-hour program. She is the youngest in the group, the others are all high school seniors.
Source: Students learn teamwork, science for next generation
By Joan Moss, Catherine D. Bruce, Bev Caswell, Tara Flynn, and Zachary Hawes
Our journey began when we conducted an extensive literature review at the outset of the project (Bruce, Flynn, & Moss, 2012) and learned about the crucial importance of spatial reasoning. This theme was consistent across many research disciplines, including biology, cognitive sciences, psychology, developmental sciences, education, as well as educational neuroscience—an emerging transdisciplinary field which sits at the intersection of these other disciplines and aims for a collaborative approach in which educational theory and practice are informed by new findings in the cognitive sciences, and vice versa (Fisher, 2009). We also learned—and have experienced in our careers as mathematics educators and researchers—that spatial reasoning is a curiously unacknowledged and neglected area of the curriculum. During our involvement with the M4YC project, we have become more and more convinced of reasons why we should pay attention to spatial reasoning in early years mathematics. Below we offer our Top Five reasons why, as educators, we should care about spatial thinking when we plan, observe, and assess mathematics in our classrooms.
Source: Five Compelling Reasons For Teaching Spatial Reasoning To Young Children | MindShift | KQED News
By John Glidden
Vallejo school district officials announced the start of a new initiative Thursday, aimed at providing an opportunity for “positive student and staff expression.”
The campaign, named Strength in Unity, emphasizes that the Vallejo City Unified School District and Vallejo community need to work together for the betterment of everyone, officials said.
“The Strength in Unity Campaign provides an opportunity for all of us to celebrate our students, staff and community and highlight our best practices,” said VCUSD spokesperson Alana Shackelford, in a follow-up email to the Times-Herald.
Each school site, for the following school year, and possibly during the 2017-18 school year, will engage in several activities, Shackelford added.
By Richard Bammer
The California economy is slowing down, and school districts should exercise “extreme caution,” Jared Austin, executive director of Kairos Public School Vacaville Academy, said during Wednesday’s board of directors meeting.
Noting that he and two other officials from the independent charter school attended Tuesday’s annual Governor’s Budget Workshop in Sacramento, Austin said School Services of California leaders, who sponsored the workshop, advised district leaders to consider fiscal restraint during the 2017-18 budget-planning process.
“Don’t commit to anything ongoing,” requiring funding year over year, was one piece of advice, Austin noted during the meeting in the Elm Street campus’ library.
Additionally, state fiscal leaders said the new cost-of-living adjustment, or COLA, will be 1.48 percent, he said.
Source: Kairos exec director: State economy slowing, time for fiscal restraint
By Pat Maio
With two days remaining before President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration, the U.S. Department of Education has rejected California’s request to begin administering online tests this spring based on new science standards, in lieu of a test based on standards established in 1998.
The state’s final administrative appeal following a six-months-long battle over science testing in California was denied Wednesday in a Jan. 18 letter sent by Ann Whalen, a senior adviser to U.S. Secretary of Education John King Jr., to State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson and State Board of Education President Michael Kirst.
Whalen wrote that she made her ruling based on concerns about the lack of transparency of science testing data during California’s transition from online pilot testing to fully operational tests set for the 2018-19 school year.
Source: U.S. Education Department rejects California’s science testing plans | EdSource
By Mayrene Bates
There’s so much gloom and doom around these days that it’s hard sometimes to find a bit of cheer anywhere, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be this way. Maybe we just need to look at things in a different way and focus on what we as an individual can do to spread a bit of cheer here and there.
The other day the phone rang and it was my friend Becky Lum who called to say that she hadn’t seen Jim and me in a while and wanted to know if we were OK. The other reason was that she has been walking past a table in her house with a Christmas and a birthday card from me and she wanted to thank me for thinking about her. We hadn’t spoken or seen each other in several months, so I, too, was pleased to hear from her as well.
Source: We can all do 1 kind thing
By Richard Bammer
Buckingham Charter Magnet High School officials have begun to accept enrollment applications for the 2017-2018 school year.
Enrollment is open to all high school-aged students, no matter where they live, and will continue through 3 p.m. Jan. 31.
Buckingham, a charter school within Vacaville Unified with a focus on STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts, and Mathematics), offers a curriculum that prepares students for the 21st-century college experience or workplace, Jennifer Leonard, the district’s public information officer, wrote in a press release issued Wednesday.
Students also will learn the importance of respect, civic responsibility, global awareness and appreciation of social and cultural diversity, she added in the prepared statement.
By Richard Bammer
Vacaville Unified’s new school start times plans are increasingly taking shape.
Secondary schools, that is, high schools and middle schools, will start no earlier than 8:20 a.m., with elementary school start times beginning no earlier than 8 a.m., Mark Frazier, the district’s chief academic officer, told the governing board last week.
As he did in previous updates on this matter, he noted that research supports delaying start times for secondary students, since a vast majority of them are sleep-deprived, findings that align with the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Costs are expected to be “neutral,” according to the text of his slide presentation, “or increase our costs by no more than $50,000 as compared to current costs for the 2016-17” academic year, Frazier noted during a computerized slide presentation Thursday in the Educational Services Center.
Source: Vacaville Unified’s new school start times taking shape