Insufficient parental involvement with kids plagues all school systems

Opinion: March 1, 2015 at 12:00a.m.

I read with interest Bertram de Souza’s Feb. 22 column regarding the need for family involvement to ensure student success. I felt he was brave to take on this “elephant in the room.” Sadly, this “elephant” exists in school systems and homes of many races and colors; thus it is not a “race issue” but a cultural issue that needs to be addressed across party, class, and color lines.

Children’s education begins the day they are born. Is their home environment a safe and happy one? Is the primary caregiver loving and stable? Will this child be read to, played with, exposed to the world around them, spoken to in a kind and gentle way? For the most part, children reared in this manner, regardless of ethnicity, will show up at the classroom door ready to learn.

For those children who live their lives in a state of “high alert” — with poverty, abuse, family addictions, parental incarceration, or mental illness in the home — their mental faculties are consumed by stress and fear, not academic concerns. Children have a difficult time concentrating and learning when their minds are consumed with the daily survival issues

What child is concerned about a collegiate future, much less high-school graduation, when he or she is concerned for personal welfare and safety? A scan of the brain can show how it shuts down areas of activity under perceived threat. For example, a chronically depressed person will show markedly reduced brain function. And yet, we expect children coming from highly-stressful environments to come to school ready to learn and at the same level as their peers in loving and stable environments across town.

No number of “blue ribbon panels,” or additional rungs in the “high stakes test” debacle, will remedy the environmental or academic struggles of students from families that cannot or will not take responsibility for their child’s well-being, let alone their academic progress.

We cannot continue to make the public schools the whipping boy for the ills of society. Forgive me this over-used and much-debated expression, but it really does “take a village,” and many of us in the “village” need to “step up”. In my “perfect world,” public schools would become quasi-community centers from 3 to 6 each afternoon. Retirees would arrive at 3 with after-school snacks and “read-aloud” books under their arms. College students would receive credits for tutoring and organizing enrichment activities. A church choir might organize a school choir or daily song-fests. This list could go on and on.

There is only so much your classroom teacher and school administrators can do, without the full support of each and every community member, most especially the parents of those students whom they have been entrusted to teach.

Jackie Cessna, Canfield

Circus continues to hurt elephants

Regarding the article in The Vindicator on the return of the Ringling Bros. Circus to the Covelli Centre this May, even P.T. Barnum couldn’t convince today’s public that using animals in circuses is still acceptable. Ringling has been known to stoop to any level to try to make the public forget that elephants are hit with bullhooks, tigers are whipped, and horses and other animals are hauled around like freight in trucks and boxcars.

Ringling routinely pulls unweaned elephants from their mothers to break and train them, even though it is traumatizing and cruel. Elephants spend most of their time in chains and live in fear of getting smacked with bullhooks — heavy batons with a sharp steel hook on the end.

Parents, grandparents, don’t let kids believe that beating animals and keeping them in chains and cramped cages is acceptable.

Jennifer O’Connor, Norfolk, Va.

O’Connor is a member of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals Foundation.

Ohio House Bill 2 offers real hope for true reform of charter schools

Gov. John Kasich and the Ohio Republican Caucus have proposed strengthening the accountability of charter schools to improve their performance. House Bill 2 is pending at the Ohio House Education Committee and would reform the oversight of charter schools for the better. (I testified in support of the bill Feb. 18 as a member of StudentsFirst Ohio.)

While I graduated from Canfield High School, I have seen how well charter schools can perform. A few weeks ago, I was given an extraordinary opportunity to see first-hand the transformational potential that charter schools have if established in the correct way. The story of Milwaukee Collegiate Academy is well known. The school’s charter mission is to “get students to and through college.” This unique strategy has actually produced results: the school boasts a 60 percent graduation rate (quite high for the inner city), where 97 percent of those graduates end up going to four-year universities. I’m not at all saying that all charter schools are effectively implemented and run; rather, I’m attempting to highlight what can be for our state.

Ohio has historically had issues with maintaining high quality charter schools. Results have been mixed, as is noted in a December 2014 Stanford CREDO study, which states that “an average Ohio charter student would have completed 14 fewer days of learning in reading and 36 fewer days in math.” At the same time, however, “students in urban charter schools in Ohio post superior yearly gains compared to the statewide average student performance.” Based upon this data, in some areas, charter schools are actually doing what they should be doing.

But up until now, Ohio charter schools have been subject to strict closure laws, but sponsors and operators haven’t been subject to the same level of scrutiny. The result is that due to loopholes in the closure law, operators and sponsors essentially have been able to keep failing schools open.

HB2 would eliminate the practice of sponsor-hopping (i.e. switching sponsors to keep failing schools open). Additionally, dropout recovery charter schools will at last be held accountable. The bill further holds the potential to maximize transparency of charter school budgets, eliminate potential conflicts of interests on governing boards and hold operators generally accountable with ODE reports.

HB2 makes clear and direct attempts to address the current issues and provides long-term remedies. With the enactment of this legislation, Ohio charter schools actually will have potential to fill in the gaps of traditional public schools.

Arjun Subramanyam, Columbus

Subramanyam is a Canfield High School graduate and member of StudentsFirst Ohio at Ohio State University.

Obama fuels the fire under ISIS

Whose side is the president on? Why does he bother even to try comforting the Christians in Iraq and Syria when he fueled the fire under ISIS by bringing up the Crusades from a thousand years ago?

It’s no secret that the president and his administration seem to only see freedom in the context of sex and health-care law. It’s most unlikely that the president would ever back down and put such things as “following one’s conscience and practicing one’s faith” ahead of his own liberal ideology. He thus instigates his own modern day “persecution” of religion.

Sylvia Koczwara, Youngstown