City Schools

The proposal to rapidly overhaul Baltimore's aging school facilities that district CEO Andrés Alonso presented to a state Senate committee last week represents one of the most important and innovative ideas the city has offered in recent years to break out of its cycle of poverty and disinvestment. Baltimore cannot flourish without high-quality public schools, and although students have made impressive gains in recent years, the city will not be able to attract and retain families if children are trying to learn in dilapidated facilities.

On Tuesday, Baltimore school communities went before the city school board to express concerns about the district's  recommendations that would either shut down or dismantle their schools at the end of the year. You can read a bit about their presentations, which the board embraced, here. We've covered the plight of Cherry Hill neighborhood, which has vowed to fight to keep its community high school Southside Academy from closing at the end of the year. The only school recommended to close this year, school officials said Southside was recommended because its achievement, enrollment and popularity in the school-choice process has continued to decline.  The Southside community came out 50 to 60 strong Tuesday to protest the process by which they were informed of the recommendation for closure (the news media)

The Baltimore city school system is projecting a nearly $26 million increase in its fiscal year 2014 budget, officials said, however the district's central office will once again take a hit, with a near 9 percent cut. The figures were released in a preliminary budget forecast presented to the city school board last week. In the presentation, district officials project $1.17 billion in baseline revenues next year--roughly 2 percent increase from FY2013-- that includes increased local and state funding.

A local, prominent business law firm announced this week, a five-year, $500,000 commitment to a new funding stream for Baltimore city schools. In celebrating its 25th anniversary, Rosenberg Martin Greenberg LP established the continuing fund--meaning it will be a permanent charitable endowment--through the Baltimore Community Foundation, the longtime stewards of philanthropic, charitable investments in the Baltimore community. The two organizations also announced that two city schools partners--New Leaders for New Schools and Access Art-- would received $12,500 grant awards from the continuing fund.

The Baltimore branch of the NAACP requested Friday that city and school leaders hold a three-hour public hearing solely devoted to parent testimonies about school bullying. In an e-mail to school and City Council officials, Marvin Cheatham, president of the chapter, said that a recent bullying panel hosted by the organization pointed to an "urgent necessity" for such a hearing to understand how pervasive the issue is in city schools. Cheatham also said that recent reports of bullying and cheating in city schools indicates the need for a partially elected school board that answers to the public.

All Baltimore schools are now recycling, officials announced Thursday, an initiative that generated 27 tons of recycled material in its first month. Until the systemwide effort began in February, 72 schools out of Baltimore's 205 had separated paper, bottles and cans from other garbage. The announcement, held at Highlandtown Elementary/Middle School, was met with applause from students who have been working to expand recycling this year. As Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and schools CEO Andrés Alonso made the announcement, second- and third-grade students clad in green T-shirts held handmade signs on the front steps of Highlandtown.

The Baltimore city school system will host its first-ever spring food festival, an event desgined to showcase the strides the system has made in offering new, nutritious options in student meals.  The event will take place Saturday, April 14 at the Polytechnic Institute/Western High complex from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., according to a release from the system. More than 40 vendors that are either currently providing food services, or intend to, will be featured at the event including the school system's own Great Kids Farm.

Twenty-two Baltimore schools will open Monday without permanent principals in place, continuing the unprecedented turnover under Andrés Alonso — moves that the administrators union says reflect "vindictive" and "capricious" decisions by the schools chief. The union's president, Jimmy Gittings, said Alonso demoted 15 principals, including four whose schools are being investigated for possible cheating on state tests. He said two of the four were placed back in the classroom as teachers after an investigation turned up no evidence.

Once students hurled computers out the windows at Calverton Middle School, but today they are learning on state-of-the-art technology that has flooded into the West Baltimore school. Once teachers couldn't wait to transfer out of a place where students ruled the classrooms, but now faculty turnover has slowed. Calverton is among seven Baltimore schools benefiting from a $3 billion federal program that is focused on the worst of the nation's schools. And though it is far too early to declare the effort a success — at Calverton or the other city schools — some improvements are clear.

Kindergartner Breon Stepney looks forward to his weekly reading session at Barclay Elementary/Middle School with Caroline Bennett, an employee at the Johns Hopkins University. He loves when she makes funny voices while she's reading his favorite book, "Naughty Little Monkeys." That kind of bond between Bennett and Breon is exactly what Baltimore schools CEO Andres A. Alonso and Hopkins President Ronald J. Daniels envisioned when they unveiled Tuesday their new partnership, "Johns Hopkins Takes Time for Schools," which allows the 14,000 employees at Hopkins to take two days of paid leave a year to pursue service opportunities in the school system.