CMS

Three months ago my family and I moved into our first home. Something about buying a house makes you feel like a bona fide adult, and with that come adult decisions. When my husband and I were deciding where in the city we wanted to live, like many young families we fell into the trap […]

The past year has been a tough one for Charlotteans. We witnessed the public firing of our county manager, the incarceration of our mayor, and the forced resignation of our public school superintendent. We’ve experienced leadership transitions at every level of government and in many of the nonprofits that serve the most vulnerable residents of […]

It’s a simple concept: Focus on fewer goals and bigger results. That’s the idea behind the Collective Impact approach United Way of Central Carolinas has adopted. For United Way, that goal for the next 10 years is to increase the graduation rate among the more than 13,000 at-risk children who receive services from 16 United […]

What should be the end goal of K-12 education? To prepare students for college, the workforce, military, trade school, life? I support Common Core standards because I believe including rigorous standards that require higher-order thinking skills prepare all students for a variety of career and educational paths. The Common Core is a set of standards […]

It is no small task to get the school bus to your neighborhood each day. Planning starts in March for most North Carolina school districts to open school in August. As buses begin their routes again this year, did you know: North Carolina’s public school districts operate 13,349 public school buses. Those buses travel 180,000,000 […]

Recycling containers sit in classrooms in every Charlotte-Mecklenburg public school, and students at nearly half of them make the extra effort to dump leftover liquid from milk and juice cartons before tossing them into bins. “The recycling systems are in place in the schools,” says Laurette Hall, environmental manager for Mecklenburg County Solid Waste Services, […]

Early in my career as a teacher and principal, I learned I should make all of my decisions based on what was in the best interest of the children we served, and not necessarily what the adults wanted. I am deeply concerned that the “Opportunity Scholarship Act,” or private school voucher bill, fails to meet […]

In North Carolina, the achievement gap between economically disadvantaged students and their wealthier peers is about 30 percentage points,[1] and the graduation gap between these two groups is more than 11 percentage points.[2] Before I was a lawyer or a legislator, I fought this reality firsthand as a Teach For America teacher. My experience working […]

Starting with the 2014-15 academic year, North Carolina’s Opportunity Scholarship Act will offer a $4,200 voucher to pay for low-income children in public schools to attend private schools. The legislation, which the N.C. General Assembly passed in July 2013, captures two contentious topics in the state: school choice and the idea of using public dollars […]

As summer vacation winds to an end, many families anxiously await the first day of school – the end of their struggle to provide babysitters, activities and camps to curb bored kids’ mischief. But from educators’ perspective, beginning a new school year can mean a daunting task of overcoming the “summer slide.” Educators and researchers […]