Superintendent of Schools Constance Clayton has initiated an anti-drug policy that appears to be the toughest yet adopted by a major school district.
Under the “zero tolerance” policy, students caught selling or possessing drugs with the intent to sell them will be expelled.
“Philadelphia may be the first to have instituted the policy,” said Jakki Dennis of the Council of the Great City Schools, which represents large urban districts.
The new policy, which took effect with the opening of the city’s schools last week, also calls for establishment of drug-free zones in and around schools.
The Boston School Committee has agreed to revive two bilingual programs in order to comply with a federal court’s order.
The committee had voted last spring to save $200,000 by eliminating Spanish bilingual programs serving about 200 students at English High School and South Boston High School.
But the committee reconsidered its decision after U.S. District Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. ruled that the plan violated desegregation orders. The judge said the com6mittee had failed to involve Hispanic parents in planning reassignments and had not considered the impact on students.
The committee decided not to appeal the ruling on a 6-4 vote earlier this month.
Students should not be “coerced” into wearing school uniforms, declare guidelines expected to be adopted soon by the District of Columbia school district.
Forty-one of Washington’s 188 public schools have adopted voluntary policies urging students to wear uniforms or standardized outfits.
At the behest of the school board, Superintendent Andrew E. Jenkins last week appointed a task force to study ways to ensure that principals of schools that encourage uniforms do not discriminate against students who do not wear them.
Greenville, Miss., parents have been asked to boycott their public schools until the white superintendent of the district is removed from office.
Morris Kinsey, state education chairman for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, this month called for the school boycott to supplement the existing boycott of white-owned businesses by Save Our Children, a local black parents’ group that claims that the district’s standardized testing is racially biased. The group is calling for the ouster of Superintendent of Schools Nolan Vickers and Janet Sweatt, one of two assistant superintendents. Both Mr. Vickers and Ms. Sweatt are white.
The boycott initally kept about a quarter of the district’s 8,700 students out of school, according to Mr. Vickers, but enrollment has returned to near-normal levels.
The Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant chain is helping to raise money for a national drug-prevention program.
The program, Drug Abuse Resistance Education (dare) America, began in the Los Angeles schools in 1983 and is now used in 780 communities in 41 states. Under the program, uniformed local police officers give anti-drug lessons in 5th- and 6th-grade classrooms.
The restaurant chain will collect money for the program through the end of this month.
