Wichita schools superintendent Winston Brooks told The Eagle editorial board this week that he doesn’t think the discovery of two starving girls in a Wichita home in July indicates anything should have been handled differently by the district. In fact, personnel at the girls’ school twice reported possible abuse to the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services, most recently in May. But Brooks and others in the district have pondered what difference year-round school might have made in that case — and those of the June contract killing of a pregnant 14-year-old and the July discovery of two children in a house with 68 pit bulls. “It kind of makes you wonder,” Brooks said.
It does. At the very least, the emaciated girls would have been able to eat lunch and perhaps breakfast at school.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
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19 Comments
It does not make me wonder…the idea falls into the “gee if we only stop making tires there would be less car accidents!”.Good God what a stupid arguement for year round school! Which BTW I do not support because the time already use in school is not being use wisely.
It was a failure of SRS, not the school district. So the answer is to fix the school district…Well if that is the thought perhaps there are some who really do need to go back to school!
writerdog: I am one that believes the Wichita schools do a good job educating some 49,000 students of all levels, all cultures, all abilities. The idea of keeping the schools open year round is interesting but I’m not sure how it would work.
On one hand, now that virtually all Wichita schools are air conditioned, they would be usable in summers. Would meals also be served to students at summer school? Would buses run? Would summer school be open on a limited schedule for example in the mornings only? Even though schools are air conditioned, temperatures might be 100 degrees or more outside on the walk home from school. Would schools offer a full schedule of courses? Would teachers teach year around or would this be scheduled in such a way that all could get a vacation some time during the year?
And writerdog, you are often on target on some subjects. So could you please mention the ways you think the schools “are not being used wisely” in doing their job? Lets be specific here. Some might have a response to your thoughts.
Over a 10 month period these girls were abused and neglected. The school district reports them twice in 10 months. WOW! Let’s give the school credit for staying on top of the situation. We would not want the schools to be held accountable for the safety of our children now would we?
If the school did not feel that SRS was taking action with the children then they had another option and that was to call the police. The police could have taken the children into protective custody. But the school did not do that. They made a couple of calls and now feel that they did everything they could possibly do.
Stop trying to cover yourself Winston and found out what went wrong in your system. These children were seen everyday by their teachers and staff in their school. You made 2 phone calls and thought you did your job. You did not.
I am not saying that the school is totally responsible for what happened to these little girls but they are part of the system. Stop worrying about yourself and let’s help find a system that truly works for children.
It will be interesting to see what the governor’s investigation shows assuming she does not hide behind “confidentiality”.
The whole thing is incredibly sad. I tend to agree – somewhat – with Brooks. Perhaps if kids are seen by ‘third-parties’ regularly then perhaps someone will raise a red flag. However, as noted above, people DID raise red flags.
One thing that we don’t know here is how much the situation deteriorated between the end of school and now. Perhaps the situation the teachers saw was not as severe as what the police found. I just don’t know.
By the way – I must salute the cop for his restraint. I suspect I would have ‘lost it’ and done something ‘not very nice’ to the step-mother!
Short answer to the question–yes.
But then we’d have to pay teachers 25 percent more for the summer months they teach.
Not gonna happen.
I’m not defending the SRS, but, they get it both ways. When they pull kids out of the home they get accused of being too ready to take kids away from parents. So they are careful, and being humans, not perfect.
The other thing to remember is that the government will never be able to make up for the shortcomings of parents. These were bad parents and I don’t see things getting better. The world has changed for the worse in the last 40 years.
sure thing J, if you have not noticed it would seem that the system is “dumbing down” the students.When I was in school ( boy that sure makes me sound old…In my day!) the whole purpose of school was gear to going to college. From K through 12 was building to the day you started your freshman year at a university. Even though the majority had no intent to go pass High School, still the flow of knowledge was upward pass a base line of graduation of High School.
There were tech schools for those that is was a certainty that they were going straight into the job market.But still the flow was upward in K-12, now it would seem that for the majority the system has recognized the fact that they will never proceed to beyond their station of general laborer. I am sure that for those whom intent is to farther their education the opportunity is there. But the system has become to liberal, not in the sense of political leaning but in that they focus far too much on the outer edge of knowledge and not in the basics of general knowledge. We are gearing the majority for a life at Wal-Mart and not in a field that demands higher thinking. (I work at Wal-Mart but that is because when I was in School I did not understand I was building my life…It is what ever you think it is) but a case in point as to this is not a recent development, I am one of the older workers on my shift, one night I thought it would be an interesting trivia fact. Who was the artist that was hired to censor the faros of the sateen chapel that Michelangelo had painted? I knew that in fact no one would know the answer as the real name of the artist had been lost in time. Even the art experts only referred to him by the Italian phrase for “Big under pants”. But the joke was on me, the majority of my co-workers who graduated in the eighties did not even know who Michelangelo was! Nor had they even heard of the Sateen chapel, as I implied I was a very poor student in School. There were only three who did worst and still graduated. Yet I knew all this from School and art was a poor subject for me.
Recently a survey was done of students, over forty five percent thought the Germans were one of our allies in WWII when we were fighting the Russians. This country once was the technological masters of the world, we now have to recruit from other countries for such things as science and technology. By teaching only the basic knowledge that is need for low thinking jobs, we are dooming this nation to be a slave to the world. Knowledge is like a grains of sand and the mind is a pail. There really is no way to know just which grain of knowledge you may need in twenty years. So it is best to gather as much knowledge as is possible.You will never know everything in just one life time, but even if you are not to be a art expert you still need to know most of the major players in the history of mankind. Who know you may get a chance to be on Jeopardy.
Here is an after thought, from conversations I have had with Teachers the dumbing down could be a result of the way that “No-Child-Let-behind” has been implemented. It has become a reverse to the way the system use to be. Before it was the slower students that were force to try and keep up. Now the majority of the students must slow down to not out pace the slower students. My fear about year round School is that there would not be any more knowledge taught. It would simply be that the present curriculum would be stretch out to fit a longer period.
Did anybody watch The Ron Clark Story on TNT last night? Teachers can make a difference…if they’re allowed to.
Writerdog, I’ve heard the same from teachers that NCLB is not helping but hurting students and teachers.
Bush’s education system in Texas failed, why do we think NCLB would be any different nationally?
Oh, wait. 51% of the country’s voters voted for a man who ran 3 Texas oil companies into the ground, yet expected him to be able to run the country.
writerdog, it’s the SISTINE chapel.
Rhonda is becoming amazing. Many of you know about my running debate with Apophis. I know he’s begun classes again, so we can’t have the intercourse we enjoyed over the summer vacation. But, just before Rhonda posted this blog, I was thinking about the fact that we could enormously increase students’ learning by going to a four-quarter, 11 week per quarter system.
Suppose we did this, and added morning Saturdays. Let’s call this 5.6 days per week times 44 weeks per year. That’s 246.4 teaching days. Compare that to our current ca. 170 teaching days. If we started this in kindergarten, then by the end of 8th grade, our students would have the equivalent of a 12th grade education. Many could start college. We could use high school to continue to educate slower college-bound students and vocational courses.
I’ve already done this experiment at home. Like Apophis said, I’m an outlier. That’s not new to me, it’s what my med school dean told me 27 years go. He used the exact same term. ‘course he also nominated me to be the only med student on the school’s task force to develop a next-generation med school, and nominated me to be the first non-PhD, non-MD to teach a course. Smart societies USE outliers to advance themselves.
But the point is, I figured out, as a doctor who worked weekends, and as a former college student who used weekends to learn stuff, my kids could study one weekend day. It wouldn’t kill them. Nor would studying during the summer. There are some really good universities and prep schools that offer summer courses, not to remediate, but to accelerate.
How smart do you want your kids to be? More time devoted to learning = more knowledge acquired.
writerdog: Sounds like you pride yourself on continuing to learn even though you might not have used your high school experience to the best of your ability. Keep on inquiring, learning, mixing it together and writing about your opinions. I remember meeting you at the EAGLE’s get-together. By the way, what has happened to some of the former regular bloggers?
Heartlander: I have enjoyed your verbal debates with Apophis on education issues during the past months here on the WE Blog. I have been curious about real-life identities of each of you. But perhaps your debates are sharper and more intense without real life personalities entering in. Perhaps that’s another new reality of blogging.
It’s interesting you both are intensely interested in educational issues but from generally opposing positions. The arguments you have both made would make a good case-study collection in a college education classroom. I describe your positions as conservative (Apophis) vs progressive/futuristic (yourself).
I am not a professional educator but I am interested in the subject of how to maximize the education experience for all our students. I attended a small town high school, community college,later K-State (engineering) and K.U. graduate school. So I campare my education experience to the track students are following today. When dealing with larger student populations of all skills, cultures and motivations, I have difficulty seeing giant steps that could be taken to improve our “big city” schools — without an infusion of even more dollars.
I hope Apophis finds time to return to debate education issues with you from time to time. Are you still out there Apophis?
Thank you Heartlander, for the correction. I have four dictionaries setting beside my computer. I could not find even a reference to the Sistine chapel in any of the four. So I took a SWAG as to the spelling.
I had a chance to chat with some one from Germany. I learned that in Germany a student in order to graduate from High School must be able to speak four Foreign languages and receive a passing grade in the four major subjects math, science, English(as we learn in school not the language) and social studies. Along with several electives that they also are expected to pass.
Jwink, I am not sure if it is pride more just a personality fault at times LoL. I can not dance and I am one male that seem to find little in sports that interests me. My co-worker actually find me the most boring person to work with. Not quite as bad as Cliff on Cheers. But I am always willing to share news and information I have just learned. But it generally ends in what I call the three day rule. I come back from lunch and tell of something I read in the news. My co-workers respond with a sigh and a deer in the headlights look then go back to talking about sports or gossip. Then three days later one of them will suddenly say “Hey did you hear about…..” It will be the same thing I had told about three days earlier that they had no interest in.
If we truly are the most intelligent species on earth ( BYW by our own judgment for the most part. It is pretty easy to win the contest when you set the goals and standards as yourself) Then we as a species should be the most intelligent to our abilities.
People like engineers, mathematicians, scientists, physicians and research university faculty think analytically. The vast majority of K-12 teachers don’t. This is a major issue that needs to be addressed. In times of enormous change you can’t rely on once-dependable ideas and measures to dictate your course. At very least, you have to review why the old measures were enacted, and determine whether the same or similar circumstances exist today. If not, you have to dispense with them.
For example, suppose there were no schools today. Would we design the schools that we know? Absolutely not. Schools are an invention. The schools we know were designed to dovetail with an industrial economy, to serve that economy’s growth and advancement. We have to understand that educating children must serve a different mission this century. This means we need new methods in education. Not just improvements on the old model, but entirely new models.
We can’t do this overnight. It took more than a half-century to go from the German idea of mass compulsory schooling to its full implementation in every industrialized country.
But we can work on some things now. We know that schools were never designed to maximally educate kids in the subjects they teach. We have ca. six hours of daily instruction for ca. 170 days per year. This means we have 195 days in which kids do not go to school. There is an available-time opportunity here that’s going to waste. In other words, time is a resource. We should use it.Will it cost more to educate kids more days per year? It depends on how we spend the money. For example, with well-designed interactive software, in which machines teach a lot of subject matter, you could raise student/human-teacher ratios. Computers have become very cheap. They constitute a useable resource that warrants more tapping.
Alaska and Montana are pioneering distance education. Kids now receive expert math instruction (and in other subjects as well), in isolated communities that cannot attract expert resident instructors. But do we think that this idea is only applicable to two states that have a very low population densities? It’s applicable to rural communities in Kansas. It’s applicable to Wichita.
Suppose education costs rise with year-round education. That’s okay. Education done well isn’t a societal overhead expense, it’s a capital investment. You gain a long-term return, individually, and societally, that far exceeds the investment outlay.
One of our major problems is that in an agrarian society, and the early industrial society, children were valuable becausethey contributed significantly, through working, to families’ survival. Child anti-labor laws, forced schooling and mothers going to work every day converted children to non-contributing dependents, essentially parasitic entities. Some people might immediately object to this characterization, but it’s true. Why we you think American couples now have 1.9 children instead of 8? Because kids are no longer net-contributors, they are net-drains on parents’ resources.
So, as adults, we need to learn how to make kids be productive. If we use schools to educate kids, then we need to redesign them. The LA Times story about a small-scale contest that paid kids to learn math was enlightening. My grandma used to give me a dollar for every A I earned. It didn’t really affect my behavior, because I earned more in one night of busing tables. But, if she had said, when I started college, “College is going to be really hard. I’ll give you $500 for every A you earn,” I would have put my nose to the grindstone from day one. Had she then said, after my sophomore year, “I’m not giving you any more money for A’s. You have learned how to study hard. It is for your future benefit to continue. You decide what you want to do.”
If society pays teachers to teach, why shouldn’t we pay kids to learn? Send them a message: EFFORT = TANGIBLE EARNED REWARD. Move kids to a higher level of performance, and good teachers will develop a higher level of performance as well.
of course shouldnt be year round r u fucking insane!!!!!!!!
Should we have year round schooling? Im Heather im working on a school project on if we should have year round schooling or not.
I think it’s well past time to do year around school. It would be better for the kids, and better for the parents. WHY don’t we do it?
Kids get too bored after all that time off. They would have 1 month every three to catch up on behind studies, do remedial work, instead of trying to catch up a whole year over the summer. Vacations could be planned for all different times of the year. Not everyone can take off over the Christmas break, so if they extended that a month, it would be a lot easier on families.
I just think it’s time.
Capt, we already pay teachers year around.
As far as protecting kids, it’s not the school’s job. Many kids are homeschooled, and there is nowhere where it is the government’s responsibility to make kids go to school to make sure that nobody is abusing them.
This is a failure of the SRS system. The school DID report, twice. Considering how SRS disregards police AND the schools, and concerned neighbors, and concerned family members….so much so that nobody even wants to bother to call SRS anymore.
There are many ways that kids fall through the cracks.
okay i was reading the other comments, and it is not better for the kids to go to year round schools. Yeah we might get bored over the summer after awhile, but we always find stuff to do, and that’s alot better than going to school. Plus, if we went to year round schools, we would be even more bored because then we would have to sit at school for the whole year and have broken up vacations instead of a full vacation. It’s bad enough we already have to go to school for seven hours a day, five days a week, for ten months of the year. I seriously see the people at school more than my family at home. Just think what it would be like if we went to year round school. I think it would be even worse. Also with year round school, kids are robbed of free time. They always have school and homework over the summer, they never get a break before they have to go to the next grade, and they don’t usually get to go to summer camp. It would also be confusing to the parents and students who were transitioning from regular schools to year round. All of the information I have found on year round schools talks about how the schools have different groups who are at school at different times of the year. This is confusing and unfair sometimes for families who have more than one student in the year round schools. There have been times when the students of one family are in different groups, so one student is always at school, and the family never gets to go on vacation at all. I think it is just way to confusing and not worth the hassle.Kayla 8th grade