Classrooms for all

While looking for something else on the web, I stumbled across an article from last week in one of the little local free newspapers that cover the region. It seems that one of the three Middle Schools in town had an incident last Monday where someone found some sort of note in a bathroom threatening [...]

Yesterday, Maine voters narrowly repealed our recent law allowing same-sex marriage.
It is a travesty of human rights for some people to define how other families should live, and I am suffering an election hangover this morning. Lots of us are. But, according to poll data, not quite enough of us. It is heart breaking and [...]

Macon, over at Stuff White People Do, picked up on the ABC show “What Would You Do?“, specifically an episode on racism in public settings and how people respond. It is in some ways reminiscent of some early ‘instigation research’ where researchers purposefully instigated some conflict to see how people would respond.

Macon tackles the issues [...]

The Rand Corporation, subcontracted to the California Endowment, has released a big study of inequities for boys and young men of color in California. Much of it is statistical evidence of what we already know: compared to white boys, boys of color have much lower educational attainment, grow up around more violence (exposure to violence [...]

Last night I woke to use the bathroom at about 1:30 and had some trouble falling back to sleep because one of the fire alarms in the hall was emiting periodic chirps to announce a dead battery. This was frustrating because I didn’t want to change the battery then, but also because the chirps were [...]

I spent Monday and Tuesday at the FertileGround conference. The conference is about sustainability of funding and programs across the state: how do social service organizations sustain their programs and services when funding sources disappear or change? There were a hundred people there connecting with each other to talk about the challenges and successes they [...]

These things happen daily at schools everywhere: Boys inappropriately touching girls in the hallway. Often it’s bumping or brushing up against unexpecting and unwilling recipients, but sometimes it’s more overt. In class, a student who gets frustrated by another, might angrily blurt out “you’re a fag!”. Other students might exclaim “don’t be gay!” Any [...]