Tagged: Education

The Chapel Hill - Carrboro school district will get its first magnet school school in 2013. But not all parents are happy about it.

Dave DeWitt: The Chapel Hill - Carrboro School Board voted 5 to 1 to turn Frank Porter Graham Elementary into a magnet school. It will offer a Spanish-English Dual Language program.

Some parents at Frank Porter Graham had opposed the change. Parents at other schools that will lose their dual language programs also fought the decision.

WUNC is a part of the American Graduate Project. It's a public media initiative looking at the drop out crisis across the country. As a part of this project we commissioned slam poets Kane Smego and Will McInnerney to teach a writing workshop at Northern High School in Durham. Over the last 10 weeks, Kane and Will taught a group of students how to use poetry to tell their own stories. Today is graduation day at Northern and three of the students from our workshop will be receiving their diplomas.

Eleven colleges and universities, big and small, public and private, are teaming up today to form the Eastern North Carolina Consortium for Higher Education.

Asma Khalid: There's a saying that "collaboration is king."

And Jim Gray believes it. He uses that phrase a lot when talking about this new plan.

Gray is the president of North Carolina Wesleyan College. He's also leading the consortium.

Tens of thousands of high school seniors will graduate this week across North Carolina. In a few months, many will start college. Not only will that be the next step in their educational lives, but also the end of a college search process that, for some, took years. It’s a process that has gotten more and more complicated, both for students and for the people who read the college applications. The rapid expansion in the number of high schools in the state is having unintended consequences in college admissions.

The State Legislature has reversed course on how many low-income four-year olds are eligible for pre-kindergarten programs.

Dave DeWitt: As part of its effort to cut costs and streamline pre-k programs in the state, the Legislature last year appeared to cap the number of low-income kids at 20 percent. Proponents of Pre-K programs brought the case before Judge Howard Manning, who ruled that the law was unconstitutional. He ordered the state to admit all eligible at-risk four-year olds.

A Chapel Hill non-profit has been recognized nationally for developing a program that targets childhood obesity while helping students learn.  The program is called “The Walking Classroom.”

Leoneda Inge:  The Walking Classroom Institute is about one year old and was started by former 5th grade teacher Laura Fenn.

Laura Fenn:  What I did is one day, when I was home after school, I went out for a walk and I was listening to a podcast while I was walking and I thought to myself, my students can do this.