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I have written extensively about improving the food served in our schools, but what if your school doesn’t have a fully equipped kitchen, which is the case for most New York City schools? What do you do then? Below, Helen Martineau, a parent serving on the Wellness Committee at the Neighborhood School in the East Village, describes the steps her school community has taken to improve school lunch, despite not having a stovetop and exhaust system.

Guest post by Helen Martineau

In the cafeteria kitchen of the Neighborhood School and P.S. 63, our Ansul system (a fire suppression system typically found in restaurants and food-service kitchens) broke more than 10 years ago — so long ago that no one who presently works in the cafeteria remembers a time when the kitchen staff was able to actually cook. In the meantime, the remnants of our Ansul system and our exhaust system have become so obsolete that fixing them is a massive job.

The first step in undertaking the huge task of getting a working kitchen is having a feasibility study done. The Department of Education is presently giving priority to problems that pose a danger to students, so they weren’t likely to pay for our study ($35,000!) any time soon. We applied for and received public money from the City Council for the study. Next, we have to try and get our kitchen on the DOE’s Five-Year Capital Plan. Again, updating our cafeteria to a working kitchen is a low-priority project for the city. The project didn’t make it onto the city’s current plan, which goes through 2014, and there’s no guarantee that it will make it onto the next one either, especially with the budget cuts we’re seeing.

We are working on a request to the City Council for money for our new kitchen in an attempt to speed up the process, but even if that funding comes through, we’ll still have to rely on the School Construction Authority to do the work, and they are notorious for working at a glacial pace. So who knows when, if ever, our schools will have a full, working kitchen.

In the meantime, we have explored other options to facilitate cooking in our kitchen. One of the families in our school owns a restaurant (Ciao for Now), and they have an induction burner, which doesn’t require an Ansul or exhaust system. We repeatedly tried to get permission from the DOE’s Office of SchoolFood to purchase one — it costs $2,500, which we planned on financing ourselves somehow — but were denied. (more…)

• Because of President Obama’s visit today, Mayor Bloomberg delayed his budget announcement. (Post)
• Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer wants parent elections redone. (GothamSchools, WNYC)
• In Newark, the DOE’s Cami Anderson is taking over a troubled district. (Times, WSJ, N.J. Spotlight)
• John White will earn $281,000 a year in New Orleans, less than his predecessor. (Times-Picayune)
• Buffalo school officials say they won’t change policies in response to a planned boycott. (Buffalo News)
• J.C. Brizard says a personality clash with labor caused his problems in Rochester. (Chicago Sun-Times)

• Sandra Day O’Connor called students’ failing grades on a civics exam a “crisis.” (Times)
• For the most important age group — 12th graders — scores have fallen since 2006. (Eduflack)
• Mike Petrilli: Whether poor kids need different schools is a hard conversation worth having. (Flypaper)
• A Wildcat Academy teacher is giving her school the graphic novel treatment. (Edwize)
• A New Yorker comic pokes fun at the rigamarole of private school admissions. (Abacus Mom)
• A new book by the founder of Education Week lays out education principles for all. (Jay Mathews)
• Providence, R.I., has rehired three-quarters of the teachers it controversially terminated. (AP)
• Newark’s new schools chief, Cami Anderson, doesn’t know Diane Ravitch but gets her passion. (Russo)
• Prospective Republican presidential candidate Mitch Daniels unveiled his ed platform. (Politics K-12)

New York City’s Department of Education already has contracts with Wireless Generation — a Brooklyn-based education technology company — but the timing of this latest one is bound to cause a stir, fairly or not.

About six months after former Schools Chancellor Joel Klein joined News Corporation and the company bought Wireless Generation, the DOE plans to renew a $4.5 million contract — $1.5 million a year for three years. The document describing the contract says only that it is for “published and copyrighted assessment and testing materials.” A spokesperson for the DOE said a fuller description of the contract was still being written and would not be available until several days before the Panel for Educational Policy meeting on May 18, when the contract will be voted on. She said the city has been using Wireless Generation’s software for seven years and is voting to renew a long-standing contract.

[Update 5/5/11]: Wireless Generation spokeswoman Andrea Reibel said that the contract permits schools to purchase assessment software from the company. The software allows teachers to watch their students as they read or work on math problems and enter their observations into a program on a mobile device that can then sort and analyze the data.

“The $1.5 million is their [the DOE's] estimate of what the expenditure is likely to be so they can provide the Panel for Educational Policy with a sense of how much money we’re talking about,” Reibel said. (more…)

Following complaints from parents about this year’s council elections, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer is calling on the city to postpone the elections for a second time.

Calling the process “badly flawed,” Stringer said that a series of mistakes made by the Department of Education’s Office of Family Information and Action had undermined parents’ confidence in the elections for members of the Community Education Councils. In a letter sent to Chancellor Dennis Walcott, Stringer asked that the city redo the elections.

Walcott responded that the elections would take place, as planned, on May 7.

“I cannot stress enough the importance of parent involvement in our schools and the Office for Family Information and Action will take all necessary steps to ensure that all of our parents have an opportunity to cast a vote in the CEC elections by May 7th,” the chancellor said in a statement. (more…)

So far, New York City hasn’t tried a turnaround, the most dramatic of the four school revamp strategies being pushed by the federal government, in which the principal and half of teachers are replaced. But next week, when the city is set to announce its revamp plans for 43 struggling schools, Green Dot Public Schools could get the green light for local turnarounds.

Green Dot, a charter school operator whose teachers work under a contract, launched its most prominent turnaround endeavor in 2008, when at teachers’ request it took over a failing high school in Los Angeles. A new book by Alexander Russo, “Stray Dogs, Saints, and Saviors: Fighting for the Soul of America’s Toughest High School,” looks at what happened inside Locke High School after Green Dot arrived.

Russo, an education journalist who runs two news blogs, This Week in Education and District 299, about Chicago’s schools, followed Locke’s teachers, students, and administration closely after the turnaround began. He chronicles a slow improvement in school culture and an even slower uptick in academic performance. Ultimately, “Stray Dogs, Saints, and Saviors” makes clear that no one should expect a school undergoing turnaround to, well, turn around, at least not immediately.

Visit the Community section to read an exclusive excerpt from the book, in which Russo describes the role of the teachers contract at Locke once it became a charter school. On Monday, Russo will participate in a discussion on “charter schools, teacher unions, and the state of education reform” hosted by the group Democratic Leadership for the 21st Century.

By traditional labor standards, the contract governing Green Dot charter schools is woefully insufficient — there’s no tenure, or right to strike — and the union itself is a misbegotten creation of founder Steve Barr’s imagination (a management, or “yellow” union). But public employee rights and union contracts vary substantially across the country, and public school teachers in many districts — and most charter school teachers — work without any formal collective bargaining authority at all.

So how much contract is enough? Is it all or nothing? This is one of the key issues of my book, “Stray Dogs, Saints, and Saviors,” which tracks the turnaround effort at a South Central Los Angeles high school called Locke where teachers petitioned to turn the school into a unionized charter school under Green Dot Public Schools. There are a handful of unionized charters already operating in the city (including a Green Dot high school opened with the support of Randi Weingarten), and the New York Times has reported that the city Department of Education is talking with Green Dot founder Steve Barr about doing a turnaround high school next year.

The excerpt below — part of the chapter that Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews referenced in his recent review of the book — gives a peek into how the contract played out that first year at the “new” Locke, when nearly all the teachers were new, hundreds more neighborhood kids had showed up than anyone had expected, and school administrators and Green Dot were scrambling to keep things afloat.

Previously uninterested in union issues, veteran art and drama teacher Monica Mayall became union rep for the building and began communicating teachers’ complaints about class size and other workload issues to the union president and Locke senior management. Campus aides weren’t in the halls when they were needed. Classroom phones didn’t work. The bells rang at random moments—worse than having no bells at all. Counselors and administrators sent notes to students during the middle of class, another bothersome interruption.

‘‘She grieved a litany of things,’’ said Coleman. ‘‘Some things I had bullheadedly gone into, trampling toes. Other things I was like, ‘Come on, Monica. How ticky-tacky are you going to get?’’’ (more…)

• City investigators are scrutinizing a top DOE official’s relationship with a tech contractor. (Daily News)
• A senior at Bronx School for Law, Government, and Justice won a prestigious scholarship. (Daily News)
• Four charter schools are approved for Queens in 2012, but schools have no space for them. (Daily News)
• A top DOE official, Cami Anderson, will head Newark’s schools. (Times, WSJ, Newark Star-Ledger)
• Singer Beyoncé made a surprise visit at Manhattan’s PS 161 during a high-profile fitness day. (Post)
• The DOE isn’t publishing the names of parent council candidates, and parents are upset. (Post)
• The teachers union went to court to keep teachers’ ratings private. (GothamSchools, Post, NY1, WNYC)

• Cami Anderson, a top NYC school official, will be Newark’s new superintendent. (Star-Ledger, WSJ)
• Honoring National Teacher Appreciation Day with a local thank-you tweet. (#thankateachernyc)
• Ed Sec Arne Duncan’s teacher appreciation letter is receiving critical comments. (Ed.gov, Edweek)
• A retired teacher’s new blog fact-checks the city’s education reporters. (Untamed Teacher via Ed Notes)
• What to do if you want to go to public high school in September but didn’t apply. (Insideschools)
• On New York City’s two DOEs: Dennis Walcott’s and Shael Polakow-Suransky’s. (Ed in the Apple)
• Near Ground Zero, Stuyvesant High School students reflect on Osama bin Laden’s death. (City Room)
• The post-Osama invention of a Martin Luther King quote is a lesson plan on punctuation. (Atlantic)
• Why is a May 12 labor rally unlike all other rallies? Because it involves teaching. (GS Community)
• An involved parent shares an open letter about issues with this year’s CEC elections. (NYC PS Parents)
• There might still be room at tomorrow’s screening of a new documentary on Pace HS. (GS Calendar)
• Michelle Obama’s fitness-focused dance moves were caught on tape at a school today. (Jezebel)
• There are just 223 black teachers in Denver’s schools, down in the last decade. (Ed News Colorado)
• Atlanta’s Board of Education has announced it will stop communicating with the press. (WABE)
• A teacher describes what standardized tests are like for the students who don’t pass them. (GOOD)

Teachers and parents at the city’s second-biggest school say they’re worried that teacher layoffs could undercut the city’s promise to shrink enrollment.

Now-famous for its 14 period days and classrooms that are right at — and sometimes right over — class size limits, Francis Lewis High School enrollment could fall below 4,000 next year. Following an agreement reached last year between the Department of Education’s Office of Student Enrollment and the school’s leadership, Francis Lewis’s enrollment fell by 200 students last year and is poised to drop by another 200 next year to roughly 3,980 students, according to a source at the school.

With fewer students, the high school will be able to move to a 10 period day next year, though it will still have to use trailers as classrooms for some of its students.

Last Friday, some parents and teachers at the school held a rally to tell city officials that even with the agreement in place, they’re worried Francis Lewis could backslide. (more…)