Enrollment up in Abilene, area schools

Nellie Doneva/Reporter-News Courtney Gann shows lab equipment to students in the pre-AP chemistry class at ATEMS Friday.

Nellie Doneva/Reporter-News The Academy of Technology, Engineering, Math and Science has enrolled more students this year overall. Students move between classes or go to lunch Friday.

Nellie Doneva/Reporter-News Students wait for the bell at end of the digital interactive media class at ATEMS Friday.

The first week of school has wrapped up for Abilene and surrounding towns, giving school officials a chance to look at preliminary attendance numbers.

In Abilene and surrounding cities, most school districts reported higher enrollment at the end of the first week compared to the end of one week a year ago.

Day five enrollment in the Abilene Independent School District this year totaled 16,925, compared to 16,819 last year.

The district reported increases in elementary students, middle school students and special programs, with a small dip in high school enrollment. Special programs include pre-K, early childhood centers and some special education alternative programs.

District officials expect numbers to fluctuate in the first few weeks with more accurate numbers available in a couple months.

On Oct. 28, a snapshot enrollment number will be recorded for UIL classifications. AISD spokesman Phil Ashby said the snapshot number will be the official enrollment for the biennial UIL high school reclassification.

Mark Gabehart, AISD chief technology officer, said the Texas Education Agency collects more than 90 pieces of information from the Oct. 28 snapshot, including number of campuses, number of students, dropout rates, TAKS scores, college admission testing and dropout rates.

Although the snapshot number is used for UIL classification, it is average daily attendance that is used to determine state funding. Each district uses an average that is updated and reported throughout the year for funding purposes.

Abilene’s Academy of Technology, Engineering, Math and Science was one of the AISD campuses to see an increase in students. The academy opened two years ago. Although enrollment for upperclassmen has remained constant, the number of ninth-graders at the academy jumped from 80 to 100 between this year and last, said Director John Martinez.

“Our goal is to continue to put kids in seats and we would be happy to have between 100 and 125 per grade level,” Martinez said. “Our classes are not as full as others in the district and we definitely want to alleviate that problem that parents are worried about having too many students in a class.”

Wylie ISD saw little change between the end of this week and the end of the first week last year. Enrollment Friday was 3,346, three students more than this time last year, according to Superintendent Joey Light.

Merkel ISD Superintendent Bill Hood said enrollment is up in his district — 1,171 this year, compared to 1,099 a year ago.

The Clyde CISD administrative office confirmed Friday that its attendance numbers are slightly down — 1,436 this year, compared to 1,488 on the fifth day of class a year ago.

Superintendent Glenn Coles said Hawley ISD enrollment numbers are down now — 696 students this year, compared to 733 a year ago.

Jim Ned CISD, which is currently working with an interim superintendent, will not have numbers to release until the end of next week.

Diet Essay: Is It about Keeping Fit or Starving to Death?

• how the notion of dieting appeared and developed into various dieting practices;
• national cuisines and religious fasts as a special type of diet;
• various personal motivation for dieting;
• the dangers of spontaneous dieting; etc.

Diet Essay: Drawing Information Together
 
When you know the topic for your diet essay, you still need to develop it. For this purpose you need to complete the following procedures:

1. Select specific ideas and controversial issues of dieting you would focus upon;
2. Select supporting information from credible research on dieting;
3. Organize all the ideas and information in a neat outline.

Diet Essay: Writing the Paper
 
Fully prepared to write your diet essay, proceed doing it according to the scheme provided below:

• Introduction: bring in the topic and highlight the controversial points; state your position in a thesis;
• Body: in separate paragraphs discuss one supporting idea per paragraph; back up your arguments with examples and quotations;
• Conclusion: summarize your diet essay and emphasize the convincingness of your arguments.

Buying a custom written paper at OvernightEssay.com is as easy as it can get! We accept virtually all payment methods including PayPal, Credit Cards, Wire Transfer. Purchase a custom written essay now to get timely help!
 
OvernightEssay.com has years of experience in custom writing industry – order your custom papers with certainty! Your papers are but a few clicks away – buy now!

Harvard expert on closing the achievement gap to speak at Grand Rapids Community College

GRAND RAPIDS – An expert in closing the academic achievement gap will speak Monday night at Grand Rapids Community College about “Excellence with equity: a social movement for the 21st century.”

On Tuesday, Ronald Ferguson, senior lecturer in education and public policy at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Harvard Kennedy School, will speak to school administrators, teachers and other staff at the Grand Rapids Public Schools Summer Leadership Institute.

Ferguson’s research and writing has focused on the racial achievement gap, how to improve schools and identifying effective teachers. He is faculty co-chair and director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard.

The initiative is a university-wide effort established by the Harvard Graduate School of Education to focus on eliminating achievement gaps through academic research, public education, and innovative outreach activities.

The ground-breaking findings that have come from Dr. Ferguson and his colleagues have made an impact across the U.S., and are so relevant right here, right now, in our own community, said Dr. Gilda Gely, GRCC provost and executive vice president for academic and student affairs.

This is information the residents of West Michigan need to hear, from local funders, policy makers and business leadersparticularly those interested in workforce developmentto teachers, administrators and, certainly, parents.

Fergusonm who was recently profiled in The New York Times, is also the creator of the Tripod Project for School Improvement.

“Every setting matters,” Ferguson told the Cleveland Plain Dealer earlier this year about everything in students lives needing to support professional development – home, schools and neighborhood.

The GRCC lecture will be held at 7 p.m. in the Applied Technology Center Auditorium, room 168. It is open to the public.

Ferguson, who is also an economist and Senior Research Associate at the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy, most recent book is “Toward Excellence with Equity: An emerging vision for closing the achievement gap.”

Were very pleased to be welcoming Dr. Ferguson to Grand Rapids, said Senita Lenear, president of the Grand Rapids Board of Education. His work is at the forefront of research around closing the achievement gap, one of the most pressing issues in public education today.

Ex-Hollywood Christian volunteer coach Tillman pleads guilty to sex with student

FORT LAUDERDALE — A one-time volunteer coach at Hollywood Christian Academy pleaded guilty on Tuesday to a reduced charge of child abuse for having sex with a 15-year-old student last year.

David Tillman was accused along with his uncle, Raymond Holmes, of bringing two female students to Tillman’s home to have sex with them. Holmes, 30, and Tillman, 21, were each charged with unlawful sexual activity with a minor.

By pleading guilty Tuesday, Tillman had his charge reduced to child abuse and avoided a prison term. Broward Circuit Judge Barbara McCarthy sentenced him to a year of community control — an intensive form of house arrest — followed by four years of probation.

Testifying against his uncle was not part of the deal.

Tillman was 19 and a volunteer track coach at the academy when he had sex with the 15-year-old girl he brought to his home on March 19, 2010, according to the arrest report by Fort Lauderdale police. Holmes was 29 when he allegedly had sex with a 16-year-old the same day.

The 16-year-old girl’s mother found explicit text messages between Holmes and her daughter, according to police.

The next scheduled court date for Holmes is in September.

A message left with the headmaster of Hollywood Christian Academy was not returned Tuesday.

A college reunion reveals the truth about my old student friends

Friends reunited: today’s CEOs could well have looked like Nirvana in the 1990s

Last Friday I flew to Toulouse for the wedding of an old friend from university and faced the prospect of seeing a bunch of people I last encountered in the early 1990s. Back then the boys in the groom’s circle tended to look as if they were auditioning for Nirvana, while the girls wore tight black Lycra and had coltish legs like supermodels. It was a period of my life when I was plump, neurotic and relentlessly underachieving; I slept 14 hours a day, lived on cottage cheese and whisky and scraped a third in English literature, but couldn’t graduate owing to outstanding library fines (I still haven’t). So I was a little nervous about seeing some of the golden lads and lasses again.

Your rational brain may tell you that everyone’s in their forties now, that things have ironed out, but your irrational one is frozen at 19. I spent ludicrous amounts of time planning my outfit in an attempt to redress the lunatic-aunt look of my student days and then, inevitably, felt overdressed. In the event, the fates cackled at my vanity by delivering, on the eve of the nuptials, a red cyst that rose like Vesuvius on the corner of my right eye.

At the reception it soon became refreshingly clear that, back in the day, all my student contemporaries had had their own insecurities. One man I always thought of as effortlessly handsome and funny confessed that he was worried that everyone thought he was stupid because he read geography. Another revealed that he often found me supercilious and hadn’t realised my sharpness was fuelled by my own fear that he was being condescending. Funnier still was the realisation that all these students now had big, responsible jobs.

“How can you be a CEO?” I asked one of them. “I know,” he said, “it’s simply not credible. I think that every day.” By the end of the evening we all felt 20 again, dancing to Mr Blue Sky – but, thankfully, lacking the paranoia of actually being that age.

I flew back from Toulouse late on Saturday night, only to drive straight back to the South of France on Monday with my husband and boys. This confused some friends. “Why don’t you just mosey straight across to the house you’re renting,” asked one, “and get the family to join you there?”

This question shows scant understanding of “family holiday misery syndrome”. The first law of this condition states: “Everyone must suffer together.” There is no way that one parent can take a short and delightful train journey across France, when the other parent will have to rise at five to drive for 14 hours, with two small children penned in the back of the Ford Focus yelling: “I don’t like France.” It was only right and proper that at 6.30am, with a hangover and two hours’ sleep under my belt, I found myself sitting in a static jam on the M11 contemplating the unparalleled joys of missing our shuttle through the Channel Tunnel.

If you, too, have the purgatory of a long car journey to suffer this summer, may I recommend a ray of light in the enveloping darkness: the audiobook of Johnny Depp reading Keith Richards’s autobiography, Life.

Richards’s recollections of his post-war childhood in Dartford were particularly amusing. Who would have guessed that the notorious hell-raiser had been a devoted Beaver Scout and admirer of Baden-Powell, with a zillion badges to prove it? Although the time a young Keith and schoolmates pinned down and stripped the swaggering head prefect and chased him up a tree seems more prophetic. My only caveat is that Depp is a little too affected and monotonous in his delivery. Had Bill Nighy been in his shoes, the recording would have been a masterpiece.

Several local teams advance to VHSL state finals

baseball, softball and tennis highlights  

Lancaster vs J.J. Kelly

Appomattox vs Honaker

Mathews vs Virginia high

Rappahannock vs JJ Kelly