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I apologize to viewers for the 15 minutes of bulletin board while we waited for subcommittee members to arrive, and I want to thank the students and staff from Lowell Educational Television who broadcast the meeting on channel 22.  I won’t go into everything we covered, but I feel compelled to relate some of the discussion regarding the impact of attendance initiatives (see LHS report) and the subsequent action, which I found particularly disturbing: that is, the motion by Regina Faticanti, seconded by Dave Conway, to suspend ONE Lowell activities at the high school. The motion passed on a 2-1 vote and will be brought before the entire committee at next Wednesday’s meeting (UPDATE: meeting postponed until March 19). ONE Lowell is an organization that serves the city’s immigrant families in a number of areas. For the last few years, the nonprofit agency has worked with the school district regarding student attendance (they are currently involved with truant students and their families from all but one of our middle schools as well as the high school). Funded completely by grants, the group improves student attendance at no cost to the district on a referral basis—schools refer severely truant students, parents sign waivers to allow the agency’s involvement, and ONE Lowell’s bilingual staff visit with families and refer them to other programs and services as needed to get their children to attend school. In many cases, attendance does improve for these individuals as this report demonstrates. My colleagues and some administrators at the high school are not happy with the group’s lack of providing narrative reports on individual students, which apparently prompted the motion to suspend their activities—an extreme reaction to a communication issue that does not appear to be in the best interest of these students. Despite all our budget problems and our struggles with student attendance, dropout, and retention rates, apparently some folks feel we don’t need ONE Lowell’s help. I respectfully disagree.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 at 11:52 pm and is filed under Education, Local Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.