Amy's Yard

If you need more convincing, check out this article from last week's NYTimes: http://nyti.ms/rYJaxh

Mission Statement

“Our mission is to repeal the practice of compressing year-long courses into a one semester format, because semesterized teaching is detrimental to our children’s educational experience.”

What is C.A.S.E.?

Citizens of Albemarle Supporting Education is a citizens’ network dedicated to improving accountability and performance in Albemarle County Public Schools. This group was founded to educate the Albemarle community about the 4×4 schedule and semesterization using peer reviewed research. C.A.S.E. seeks to increase transparency and to improve community involvement in local educational policy.

A conversation I had this past weekend with a local high school teacher and friend has convinced me that this system is detrimental to the quality of education in Albemarle. My freshman daughter has complained about the 4x4 repeatedly, especially as regards keeping up with her English classwork. But it turns out the teachers, our most valuable resource, are also overwhelmed keeping up with the instructional pace and workload created by this system. In some topics (for example English) the semester scheduling simply does not allow sufficient time for the students to digest and the teachers to cover the curriculum. Let me know your thoughts: Is anybody out there in favor of the 4x4 for any reason other than "it saves money" ?

I hope you enjoy these photos, which start with an INSANE metro ride and end with me spotting a celebrity leaving the rally ( yes, I found Waldo amongst the hundred of thousands of bodies ). I tried to focus my lens primarily on the signs and the faces of my fellow rally goers, but there are a few of the larger crowd and the rally stage (via jumbotron).

Musical Highpoint: Cat Stevens aka Yusuf Islam, singing/dueling with Ozzy Osbourne....although honestly I was disappointed not to get to enjoy Peace Train uninterrupted.

Overall Highpoint: Stewart's final speech, see prior blogpost. Really quite moving.

Lowpoint: none: great crowd, great weather, great city. We are so lucky to have the National Mall and Freedom to Speak.

Finally, thanks to Fran and Jenna: I enjoyed your company and sharing this experience with you both.

To sum it up: the rally was fantastic ( and fun ) and for all those who were wondering "what was the point", here you go. Photos to follow soon.

Jon didn't say it, but I will. Please be a good citizen and vote on Tuesday.

Jeff Sharlet

Speaker: Jeff Sharlet          Date: October 22, 2010

In his book, bestselling author JEFF SHARLET examines the political power wielded by a Christian fundamentalist group known as “The Family,” which includes some members of Congress. A contributing editor for Harper's and Rolling Stone, he co-founded an online literary magazine, KillingTheBuddha.com, in 2000. This led to a travelogue based on the year Sharlet and co-author Peter Manseau spent exploring the margins of faith in America. Sharlet has also served as an associate research scholar at New York University's Center for Religion and Media, and he joined the Dartmouth College faculty this year. A book signing will follow his Forum.

The biggest news about the Child Nutrition Act pending in Congress isn't increased funding, or more vegetables and whole grains in school meals. The reason we need this bill passed now is to save children from government standards that are destroying kids' health.Every day I visit the cafeteria in my daughter's elementary school here in the District of Columbia and watch a quiet struggle unfold. It's the same battle schools fight all over the country: trying to provide kids the calories the U.S. Department of Agriculture says they must have, on a budget that won't cover the cost of healthy food. The result? Meals loaded with sugar -- enemy No. 1 in our current epidemic of childhood obesity.

Sugar, and especially the high-fructose corn syrup that proliferates in cheap processed food, has emerged as the leading culprit behind a host of modern ills. It packs fat onto waistlines, raises blood pressure, creates bad cholestorol and unhealthy arteries, primes bodies for diabetes and heart failure, and now is suspected in an outbreak of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease in children.

Right behind smoking, sugar has become the health scourge of our time, contributing greatly to this country's estimated $147 billion annual tab for weight-related illnesses. Yet in the world of federally-subsidized school meals, sugar not only goes virtually unregulated, but has emerged as the go-to ingredient to boost calories in perpetually under-funded cafeterias.

Take breakfast, for instance. The USDA says that a school breakfast must provide 554 calories for children in elementary school. Where do those calories come from? Well, if you have less than $1 to spend, your breakfast might very well look like the ones that used to be served every day in D.C.: Sugary Apple Jacks cereal topped with strawberry-flavored milk, accompanied by a Pop-Tart, a pack of Giant Goldfish Grahams, and a carton of orange juice.

All together, children as young as five routinely were consuming the equivalent of 15 teaspoons of sugar before classes even started.

This year, D.C. school officials have taken the extraordinary step of eliminating not just flavored milk and sugary cereals, but also those other processed "treats" that were standard fare in the breakfast line. Now we see low-sugar Kashi cereal, organic yogurt, sunflower butter, and cottage cheese on the menu. But how do you make a small blueberry muffin, a scoop of cottage cheese, a carton of low-fat milk and four ounces of orange juice add up to 554 calories?

We're lucky here in the nation's capitol. As the result of a "Healthy Schools Act" passed by the D.C. Council earlier this year, we now have 10 cents extra to spend on breakfast and another 10 cents for lunch. Few local jurisdictions have been so generous. That's why you see cookies and brownies in subsidized school lunches all over the country. The sugar provides a cheap boost in calories. In the Chicago area, parents continue to complain about "brunch for lunch," meaning pancakes, phony syrup, and cookies posing as the midday meal. Other healthy food advocates despair of getting sugary flavored milk off the menu, because their schools would then fall short of the USDA's calorie requirements.

The measly 6 additional cents that the U.S. Senate recently approved for school meals as part of its version of the Child Nutrition Act re-authorization won't solve the problem. But its call for new meal standards might. Under the Senate bill, the "Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act," the USDA would be required to "update meal patterns and nutrition standards" within the next three years. Proposed new standards have already been developed by the Institute of Medicine at the USDA's behest.

Don't look for any regulations aimed specifically at sugar. The sugar lobby is too strong for that. Instead, the IOM attempts an end run around sugar's tyranny over school meals, lowering calorie requirements while boosting the amounts of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains schools must serve. Sugar essentially would get squeezed off the menu.

In fact, the current calorie minimums enforced by the USDA exceed the IOM's proposed maximums. The calorie requirement for an elementary school breakfast, for instance, would change from that flat 554 calories, to a range: 350 calories up to a maximum of 500. That means 204 calories that cash-strapped schools wouldn't have to pay for, calories kids might not be exposed to in the form of sugar.

For lunch, the IOM recommends a range of 550 to 650 calories for kids 5 to 10 years of age, compared to the USDA's current fixed amount of 664. The Institute of Medicine also proposes to raise the percentage of calories that can be derived from calorie-dense fat in school meals, from 30 percent to 35 percent, a move that would further reduce schools' reliance on sugar and bring the meals program more in line with the federal government's dietary guidelines.

In addition, this year's version of the Child Nutrition Act for the first time would give the USDA authority to regulate all foods sold in school, not just in the subsidized meal line, as Tom Laskawy blogged last week. If the agriculture secretary is in a mood to take on the processed-food industry, that could mean no more sugary drinks and snacks in vending machines, no more ice cream bars or fruit roll-ups in a la carte lines.

For healthy school food advocates, the Senate's trifling 6 cents is hard to swallow. But we need to get over it for now, and make sure the House moves quickly on its version of the Child Nutrition Act, HR 5504.

As we've seen here in D.C., a lot can be accomplished just by ridding school meals of unhealthy foods, especially sugar. That's reason enough to make passage of this bill now an urgent priority.

Grist Get Off Your Ass opportunity: Contact your House representative via this handy look-up link and urge him or her to pass the "Improving Nutrition for America’s Children Act" (H.R. 5504) -- note that phone calls are more effective than emails, legislative activists say.

I don't normally share an entire article here, but this one is important enough that I have.  Please lobby Congress to pass the Child Nutrition Act.

Strong public schools make strong communities. Investing in Public Education is the only guarantee our community has to remain competitive in a global economy and maintain the quality of life that we so proudly enjoy. By not providing the funds that are necessary to educate and transform the young, we fail to provide a better future not only for them, but for the entire society. 

In light of the imminent budget cuts that our community faces, the efforts that school administrators are making to continue to provide quality education for all children despite the persistent budget cuts, and taking into account the Board of Supervisors' campaign of providing a World Class Education which in turn is consistent with the data provided in this introduction, the citizens of Albemarle County feel compelled to ask the Board of Supervisors to fully fund the school's budget request.

Product design initiatives for Humanity, Habitats, Health, and Happiness.

Project H Design connects the power of design to the people who need it most, and the places where it can make a real and lasting difference.

We are a team of designers, architects, and builders engaging locally through partnerships with social service organizations, communities, and schools to improve the quality of life for the socially overlooked. Our five-tenet design process (There is no design without action; We design WITH, not FOR; We document, share and measure; We start locally and scale globally, We design systems, not stuff) results in simple and effective design solutions for those without access to creative capital.

Our scalable long-term initiatives focus on improving environments, services, products, and experiences for youth and K-12 education institutions in the US through systems-level design thinking and deep community engagements.