GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• A Rockaway Park principal details the trials of sharing his school with a displaced school. (Schoolbook)
• A international education council rejected the use of value-added teaching assessments. (Answer Sheet)
• An educator explains the distinction between Rockaway Park and the Rockaways. (NYCDOEnuts)
• An I.S. 318 student joined “Brooklyn Castle” filmaker on “The Daily Show” last night. (NYC P.S. Parents)
• The Learning Network blog has a Common Core lesson on Hurricane Sandy’s effect on the coast.
• Regional school districts are unsure when to reopen schools after Sandy’s devastation. (EdWeek)
• Schoolbook is answering questions about when many of the city’s educational programs will resume.

After slashing its test monitoring program in the face of budget cuts this year, the Department of Education is now making plans to build it back up.

The department is looking to hire a new test security chief and triple the number of schools that it sends monitors into, according to a job ad that appeared online this week.  The person who formerly occupied the position is retiring this fall, department officials said.

In 2011, the city monitored 97 elementary and middle schools during state testing days as part of a program that was meant to deter staff from violating test security guidelines. In 2012, the program shrank and monitors visited just 37 schools, most of which were already under investigation for cheating.

Chancellor Dennis Walcott blamed the reduction on budget cuts. Now for the 2013 exams, the city is putting renewed attention on test security, according to details provided in the job ad.

Key responsibilities for the new test security chief include creating a “unique” list of at least 100 schools every year that would be monitored by about 50 people, the ad says. The manager would also recruit and train monitors, then disperse them to schools during the testing period. (more…)

After another day with abysmal attendance figures at dozens of schools relocated because of Hurricane Sandy, the Department of Education has its sights set on next week.

“I think Tuesday [will be] the best barometer of how well we’re doing,” Chancellor Dennis Walcott said Thursday night as he fielded questions about the department’s steady but logistically complicated progress in getting students in storm-battered areas back in school.

More than 40 schools will still be housed in temporary relocations when classes resume after the Veteran’s Day holiday — the seventh day the city’s schools will have been closed since Sandy struck Oct. 28. But for the first time, the department will be able to provide bus service to elementary and middle school students in all of them, and new generators mean that some schools will reopen in their own buildings.

The seven schools that received generators are all on the Rockaway Peninsula, which is served by a power company that has drawn fire for not restoring power quickly enough. Another Rockaways school that is reopening did have its power restored this week, but the Long Island Power Authority now says some customers on the peninsula will not see their power come back on until after Thanksgiving, or more than two weeks from now.

Attendance in relocated schools has been very low — 36.9 percent today, up from 30 percent on Thursday — and schools on the Rockaway peninsula have had the fewest students show up, with attendance remaining around 4 percent at some schools today. (more…)

In response to the devastation Hurricane Sandy wrought on schools and families last week, city officials and educators have been scrambling to help school communities—some impacted more immediately than others—cope.

For some schools, that means making sure students have access to the resources they need to get their schoolwork done, whether it’s internet they lack, or unable to return to their homes. In other schools, some of the most pressing concerns for teachers and administrators include creating meaningful lessons out of the hurricane, and making up for the lost week of instruction.

In our Community section, iSchool teacher Christina Jenkins argues that schools should take the opportunity to teach students about how communities respond to crisis and natural disasters.

“Real life should trump our lesson plans,” she writes. “There’s so much to analyze: cartography, disaster risk and our ability to mitigate it, the fake disaster images circulating online, the power of crowdsourcing.”

Commenters agreed that engaging students on the challenges facing the city now was a good idea, but they suggested a few different approaches for doing it without preventing them from covering the curriculum they had already planned. (more…)

The basement at P.S. 15 in Red Hook was flooded with between five and seven feet of water during Hurricane Sandy, staff said.

Teachers across the city and region are turning to DonorsChoose, a website that allows educators to solicit funds for small-scale projects, to get their classrooms righted after Hurricane Sandy.

The site set up a dedicated page featuring only projects from schools affected by the powerful storm and so far, according to DonorsChoose’s current statistics, individual donors have given more than $50,000 to projects that will reach more than 19,000 students.

The quick pace of donations means that many projects are completed very soon after they are posted, giving schools an immediate boost at a time when goodwill is running high but coordination to deliver donated supplies to where they are most needed is only now being established.

In one remarkable example, a science teacher at Brooklyn International High School raised $1,080 from a single donor after explaining how his students’ science materials were destroyed when the school building lost power. “Unfortunately, our school cannot afford to replace the several thousands of dollars in chemicals and restriction enzymes we lost due to Sandy,” he wrote.

Other city teachers have gotten money to buy toys for students at P.S. 15 in Red Hook, which was flooded and has been relocated; give supplies to colleagues at a newly co-located school; replace graphing calculators for students at Staten Island’s New Dorp High School.

Some projects to help city schools still need funding. (more…)

Chancellor Dennis Walcott takes questions after the Panel for Educational Policy meeting.

The city postponed some Panel for Educational Policy votes to next month after Hurricane Sandy threw the Department of Education’s public hearing schedule off track. But at the panel’s monthly meeting Thursday night, several members argued that the department was getting back to its regular business too quickly.

“We need to give people time to recover from this tragedy that we all have experienced in some way or another,” said Kelvin Diamond, the new Brooklyn borough president’s representative on the panel.

Diamond proposed a resolution to suspend all public hearings until 2013 for Brooklyn schools. Hearings about four proposals to co-locate or shrink schools in Brooklyn were rescheduled because they were supposed to take place during the week when all schools were closed because of the storm. Hearings about another 6 proposals for changes to Manhattan and Bronx schools are set for between now and Dec. 20, when the panel is to meet next. The hearings must happen before the panel can vote on the proposals.

Diamond said it would be unfair to hold hearings when many Brooklyn residents cannot focus on changes to how school buildings will be used next year.

“They’ve been hit hard. We just can’t have a machine run through them,” he said. “I have a [Community Education Council] member who is grieving, who attended a funeral and didn’t have time to respond to a letter” from the city.

Other panel members jumped to support the resolution, even suggesting that it be broadened in scope. (more…)

• Mixed messages from the city about post-Sandy enrollment rules kept some students out of class. (NY1)
• Many Rockaway schools have abysmal attendance rates; some students have fled. (GothamSchools)
• One Far Rockaway school, Wave Prep, had just three students show up to its relocated site. (Post)
• Parents say the city’s plan for students to get buses at closed schools makes little sense. (SchoolBook)
• D.C.’s four-year graduation rate rose by 2 percentage points last year, to 61 percent. (Washington Post)