GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• The city’s Parent Academy is launching on Saturday, now with Sandy-related sessions. (Insideschools)
• Staten Island’s New Dorp High School and I.S. 2 are now sharing space with high spirits. (SchoolBook)
• The winners of  a federal innovation contest now have a month to secure matching funds. (Politics K-12)
• Federal jobs data shows that teachers hold second jobs more than others. (Inside School Research)
• An urban educator makes the case against the ubiquitous term “achievement gap.” (GOOD/Notebook)
• The end of a series on upping your progress report score precedes the high school reports. (Datacation)
• A teacher describes how the impulse to help Sandy victims is taking effect at his own school. (Mr Foteah)
• A city teacher says gas rationing is going to stop him from getting to school Friday. (NYCDOEnuts Twitter)

Just blocks away from P.S./M.S. 114 in Belle Harbor, a hard-hit neighborhood on the Rockaway peninsula, homes were heavily damaged by Hurricane Sandy.

Hundreds of students, mostly middle class, have fled their Far Rockaway schools to enroll somewhere else since Hurricane Sandy knocked the peninsula out of commission.

But attendance data suggests that many other Far Rockaway students are simply not attending school in the first days that the city has provided schools for them.

Attendance dropped slightly citywide today, from 87 percent on Wednesday to 82.6 percent, a decline that officials attributed to the snowstorm. “Attendance from both teachers and students, given the storm, was actually reasonably good,” Mayor Bloomberg said during a news conference.

The attendance rate fell more dramatically for students in 56 schools relocated because of damage from Hurricane Sandy. Just 30 percent of students in those schools were in class today, while students in relocated schools had a 43 percent attendance rate on Wednesday, their first day back after the storm.

Driving the decline was the addition of 13 new relocations that started today, all for Queens schools without power. Most of the schools without power are on the Rockaway peninsula, which still does not have subway service, and the Department of Education has been unable to muster enough buses to transport all students from the peninsula, instead offering to reimburse families who make their own way to school. Some of the schools where relocations began today posted attendance rates below 1 percent.

Overall, in District 27 today, which contains several neighborhoods in addition to those on the Rockaway peninsula, 26 schools posted attendance rates below 20 percent. (more…)

We know that some teachers and families can focus only on moment-to-moment, practical concerns right now. But many others are slowly returning to the regular cadence of teaching and learning, and a big part of that this year in the city’s schools is the Common Core standards.

We want to get educators from across the city talking to each other about the standards and the student work that reflects them — and we want to listen in on the conversation. That’s why we’re inviting teachers and others interested in the new standards to join us on Nov. 26 for “The Art of Teaching and Learning to the Common Core.” (more…)

A large tree, one of many Hurricane Sandy felled on Governor's Island, came close to hitting the Harbor School. (Photo: Murray Fisher)

Of all of the city’s 1,750 public schools, few were more exposed to Hurricane Sandy than the Urban Assembly New York Harbor School.

Schools sit near the waterfront across the city, and many of them were damaged by the storm last week. But the Harbor School sits on Governor’s Island, and so it is surrounded by water, smack-dab in the center of New York Bay.

Usually, that location is a boon: Harbor School students learn how to maintain boats, farm fish, and deep-sea dive. Last week, though, the site made the school vulnerable: When Sandy’s surge came, it would be coming straight at the school.

It took school officials two days to survey the entire scene — but what they found was reassuring, according to an email message they sent to supporters late Thursday afternoon.

“Fortunately for Harbor School, trees went out of their way to fall away from our building and the water stopped just inches from our doors,” said the message, which was signed by Executive Director Murray Fisher and first-year Principal Edward Biederman. They said a weekend of preparation had protected the school’s fleet of boats, as well.

That’s not to say there was not any damage. (more…)

• Displaced schools had low attendance on their first day back. (GothamSchools, News, NY1, WSJ, Times)
• New York State delayed the release of teacher ratings because of privacy issues. (Newsday via HuffPo)
• A Vermont school, disconnected for a reason, grapples with necessary upgrades in technology. (Times)
• Some of the evacuation space-sharing arrangements began with relatively little incident. (Schoolbook)
• Although one high school abruptly bounced evacuees from classrooms to make way for students. (Post)
• Students at a school-turned-evacuation center reluctantly returned after hearing it might be unsafe. (GS)
• The new “Brooklyn Castle” documentary is a reminder that most teachers aren’t bad apples. (Post)
• An unknown substance prompted a middle school to send 20 students to the hospital.(DNAInfo)