staging.rockymountainvoice.com

Menu

Chalkbeat Colorado

New chancellor of CU a proponent of diversity, equity, and inclusion policy
No Comments
Chalkbeat Colorado, State

New chancellor of CU a proponent of diversity, equity, and inclusion policy

By Jason Gonzales | Chalkbeat Colorado Just six weeks into the job, University of Colorado Boulder Chancellor Justin Schwartz has jumped in with both feet embracing his school spirit. As he took meetings on Tuesday, he wore a black, gold, and white pair of custom Nikes with his initials on them. While he has embraced representing the state’s flagship institution, he’s taking a slower approach to putting his own stamp on Colorado’s largest university. He said he’s committed to ensuring that CU Boulder’s student body better represents the state, helping more students graduate, and furthering diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Schwartz said that before he makes decisions he asks many questions and has numerous conversations — and that means he’s still evaluating. READ THE F...
Read More
Report: Four-day week doesn’t increase student performance, staff retention
No Comments
Chalkbeat Colorado, State

Report: Four-day week doesn’t increase student performance, staff retention

By Ann Schimke | Chalkbeat Colorado Colorado school districts with four-day weeks have slightly lower student achievement on average than those with five-day weeks and see little improvement in teacher turnover after shifting from five to four days. That’s according to a new report from the Keystone Policy Center that argues for stricter guardrails on four-day school weeks and the creation of an expert panel to study the issue. The report, “Doing Less With Less,” comes at a time when nearly two-thirds of Colorado’s 185 districts — enrolling about 14% of the state’s students — operate on four-day-a-week schedules. In the last five years, about two dozen districts across the state, most small and rural, made the switch. This year, the 1,200-student Strasburg district, about 30 miles...
Read More
The University of Denver is joining the STARS College Network to recruit more rural students
No Comments
Chalkbeat Colorado, State

The University of Denver is joining the STARS College Network to recruit more rural students

By Jason Gonzales | Chalkbeat Colorado Rural students may graduate high school at higher rates than their peers, but they’re also less likely to end up on a college campus. The University of Denver wants to change that statistic through a partnership that’s brought together 32 prominent public and private universities to help rural students learn about their college options, help them enroll, and support them to graduation. Last week, the Denver private university announced its participation in the Small Town and Rural Students College Network, or the STARS College Network, now in its second year. Participating schools include private institutions like Yale, Vanderbilt, and Duke, historically Black university Spelman College, and public flagships such as the University o...
Read More
Students on Colorado’s Youth Advisory Council come with ideas for state lawmakers
No Comments
Chalkbeat Colorado, State

Students on Colorado’s Youth Advisory Council come with ideas for state lawmakers

By Ann Schimke | Chalkbeat Colorado Help schools install solar panels to cut fossil fuel use. Reduce cafeteria food waste by creating “share” tables and composting programs. Stock opioid overdose remedies in school AED cabinets. These are a few of ideas that Colorado teens proposed to state lawmakers on Thursday as part of a program that seeks to include young people in the legislative process. It’s possible some of the ideas could eventually become law. Most of the eight proposals presented Thursday by students on the Colorado Youth Advisory Council touched on environmental or health issues. Others addressed the shortage of school bus transportation and the difficulty that students with disabilities face in navigating school buildings. The advisory council consists of 40 students...
Read More
COVID set back 8th graders an entire school year compared with pre-pandemic peers, study finds
No Comments
Chalkbeat Colorado, National

COVID set back 8th graders an entire school year compared with pre-pandemic peers, study finds

By Erica Meltzer | Chalkbeat Colorado COVID disruptions continue to cast a long shadow over student learning, with middle school students in particular suffering the cumulative effects of years of missed lessons, new research shows. The analysis from the testing group NWEA released Tuesday estimates that eighth graders would need an additional nine months of schooling — an entire school year, essentially — to do as well as their counterparts before the pandemic. Third graders, meanwhile, would need a little more than two months of extra schooling to match their counterparts, according to results from the group’s MAP Growth tests that it administers several times a year. Across grades and subjects, students continue to perform worse on these tests than similar students did bef...
Read More
A look inside a dyslexia screening program for some of Colorado’s rural students
No Comments
Chalkbeat Colorado, State

A look inside a dyslexia screening program for some of Colorado’s rural students

By Ann Schimke | Chalkbeat Colorado When teacher Cindy Haralson would point at her preschool class with a stuffed owl named Baby Echo, most children quickly repeated the letter, word, and sound they’d just heard her say. Think “B, bat, b.” But one little girl — a good listener and natural problem-solver — stared blankly at her teacher day after day last year, unable to reproduce what she was hearing and seeing. Haralson recalled the girl looking at her classmates, as if to say, “How do you guys do that? How do you know that?” The girl’s struggle with alphabet lessons was the kind of red flag that can signal problems learning to read, problems that Haralson believes too often go unaddressed for years. “It seems like we always wait till kindergarten or first grade, and somet...
Read More
Jeffco will pilot new programs, including a welcome center bus, to better serve immigrant students
No Comments
Chalkbeat Colorado, Local

Jeffco will pilot new programs, including a welcome center bus, to better serve immigrant students

By Yesenia Robles | Chalkbeat Colorado An influx of immigrant students last year left the Jeffco school district scrambling to meet their needs. So this fall, officials are piloting new programs and support to help students. The school district is piloting a series of changes, including new staff, resources, and curriculum materials, as well as a new welcome center bus, after hundreds of immigrant students arrived throughout the past school year. The district is planning for the surge to continue into next school year. “Our schools have been incredibly autonomous in how they meet the needs of our special populations and especially our multilingual language learners,” Jeffco Superintendent Tracy Dorland told the district’s school board this spring. “Our student achievement data tel...
Read More
Classroom ‘churn’ has negative effect on third grade reading scores, study finds
No Comments
Chalkbeat Colorado, State

Classroom ‘churn’ has negative effect on third grade reading scores, study finds

By Melanie Asmar | Chalkbeat Colorado Classroom “churn” — when students leave a classroom midyear or new students join — can have a negative effect on third grade reading scores, according to a new study that examined Colorado census and state standardized test data. The study, by researchers at the Colorado Futures Center at Colorado State University, found that higher classroom churn was correlated with lower third grade reading scores, based on data from 2019. It’s a trend that the center’s executive director and lead economist, Phyllis Resnick, suspects has ramped up since that year, as schools experience higher levels of chronic absenteeism after the pandemic and struggle to make up for lost learning. After the study revealed that finding, Resnick said she spok...
Read More
Many Colorado schools will split $11.4M in Juul lawsuit settlement funds for vaping education, prevention
No Comments
Chalkbeat Colorado, State

Many Colorado schools will split $11.4M in Juul lawsuit settlement funds for vaping education, prevention

By Melanie Asmar | Chalkbeat Colorado Twenty-one Colorado school districts, seven charter schools, one cooperative education services board, and one youth residential treatment center have been awarded $11.4 million in funding over the next three years for vaping education and prevention programs. The money comes from a $31.7 million settlement between the state of Colorado and e-cigarette manufacturer Juul Labs Inc. Colorado sued Juul in 2020, alleging that it targeted youth with deceptive marketing and played down the health risks of vaping. In settling the lawsuit, Juul did not admit any wrongdoing. Colorado is poised to spend the bulk of the settlement money on a $20 million grant program aimed at improving children’s mental health. But the state is also giving smaller grants ...
Read More