The New Hampshire Association of School Principals--with the support of some superintendents, the state education department, and faculty members from the University of New Hampshire and Dartmouth College--has begun preparations to establish a “Principals’ Academy.”
Although ideas are still in the preliminary stage, the planners say, the academy might start out as an intensive week-long summer program on a college campus with follow-up sessions for participants during the next academic year. Faculty for the academy would include scholars, senior-level school administrators, and guest lecturers from the private sector.
Still to be worked out, officials say, is a method of financing the concept within the means of of the principals’ association. Enthusiasm for the project, however, “is high,” they say.
Beginning this month, the National Committee for Citizens in Education is offering a new information service to parents and other citizens with questions about the public schools.
With a grant from the Aetna Life and Casualty Foundation, ncce has hired additional part-time staff members to answer such questions by phone. Callers may dial 800- NET-WORK for answers and assistance. If no one answers, the organization says, callers may leave a message on a tape-recording machine and their call will be returned as soon as possible.
“The telephone project has enormous potential and can be a model for developing more effective means for parent involvement in educational management and reform,” said an Aetna official in announcing the grant.
Questions may also be sent to ncce in writing. The address is Casework, ncce, 410 Wilde Lake Village Green, Columbia, Md. 21044.
“Hello out there! How are you? Or, we should rather ask, who are you?” That was the friendly question put last month to readers of the newsletter of the Teachers Clearinghouse for Science and Society Education, an interest group sponsored by the Association of Teachers in Independent Schools.
Editor John L. Roeder of the Calhoun School in New York City wants to know more about who receives his publication and how it can better serve them as it starts its second year in print. The typewritten, duplicated newsletter is designed to direct science teachers to curricular ideas of colleagues, as well as outside resources, that they can use to help students relate science to social issues.
Queries about the newsletter may be mailed to Mr. Roeder at the Calhoun School, 433 West End Ave., New York, N.Y. 10024.
Queries about the clearinghouse itself, which is housed at the New Lincoln School, may be sent to Irma S. Jarcho at the school, 210 East 77th St., New York, N.Y. 10021.
The Institute for Responsive Education, the Boston-based group that supports broader citizen participation in the public schools, has joined forces with the National Commission on Resources for Youth, a New York nonprofit group that has been working since 1967 to encourage young people to assume responsible social roles.
Among the commission’s main projects have been “Youth Tutoring Youth,” “Early Adolescents in Day Care,” which encourages so-called “latch-key” children to become helpers in day-care programs after school, and “Youth Participation in Health,” a program in which young people counsel each other.
According to Peter Kleinbart, the former director of the commission and now vice president of ire/ncry, the merger has saved his organization up to 40 percent of its current annual costs and will expand its constituency of professional educators to include ire’s audience of concerned citizens.
The combined mailing list for the merged organizations’ first newsletter, to be published this spring, will be about 53,000, said an ire spokesman. The founder of ire, Don Davies, will continue to serve as president of the organization.
The National Council of State Legislatures has received a one-year grant of $250,000 from the U.S. Department of Labor to help state lawmakers prepare to administer the Job Training Partnership Act, enacted late last year by the 97th Congress. The council will add two full-time staff members, including one on loan from the Labor Department, to augment its technical-assistance efforts.
The group is also planning a series of publications and seminars for legislators on administering the multi-billion training program.
The Maine Bar Association, in cooperation with the state’s Department of Educational and Cultural Services, has established a speakers’ bureau of lawyers available to make presentations in schools on how the American legal system works.
Mindful of their audience, the lawyers will be prepared to talk about such subjects as book banning and locker searches, as well as the issues surrounding the maintenance of life-support systems and capital punishment, an association spokesman says.
For additional information, write: Lawyer-Speaker Service, Maine State Bar Association, 124 State St., P.O. Box 788, Augusta, Me.
California teachers who wished to anonymously learn whether (or not) infinitives may be split could find out--and could go even further (farther) on matters of grammar--over the phone last weekend, during the annual conference of the California Association of Teachers of English.
The “Dial-a-Grammerian” effort, set up by John Williams, professor of English at California State University at Long Beach, enabled callers to ask any type of question about English usage. The phones were staffed by “expert grammarians,” including Mr. Williams.--mm
