NEWSEDUCATION & TECHNOLOGY

Right now, schools across the country are facing budget shortfalls caused by the foreclosure crisis.  As kids and families lose their homes and move away, schools lose their students and the funding goes with them.

Is the foreclosure crisis having an impact on your school district?  It’s easy to do something about it by asking your school district to take its money out of Wall Street banks that led to the foreclosure crisis and into a community bank that invests in the local community.

1. Call your School District accounting office to ask them what bank they use and who has the power to change banks.

Google search for “School District, your City/County/Town Name and Accounting” to find the phone number. If there isn't a number for accounting specifically, just call the general number and ask for the accounting office or in some cases the treasurer. When you call, be nice.  Accountants don’t usually hear from the public.

What to say when you call:
Hi, this might seem like a strange question, but I am wondering what bank the school district uses?
If they ask, tell them why you’re calling: I just read about a school district that might move its money to a community bank, and I wondered if my school district uses a community bank.
Thank them for that information, then ask them: If the school district wanted to change banks, who would make that decision?

2. Start a petition at Change.org

Chose your target. It should be the individual or group who can make this decision, as identified in your call. Or, when in doubt, target the school board. Most school boards are responsible for the financial health of a school district, so they should be able to make recommendations on the district's banking.

Tell the decisionmaker what you’re asking them to do (for example: "Move Ridgewood School District’s accounts to a community bank.")

Briefly explain why this issue is important to you -- did your school close after the foreclosure crisis, or have you seen the negative impact that the foreclosure crisis has had on your schools?  Include that information. (For example: "Big banks like Wells Fargo are responsible for the foreclosure crisis that has hurt our schools. My child's school closed because so many kids moved away after their homes were foreclosed. The school district should move its accounts to a responsible community bank.")

3. Build your campaign.  Email the petition to your friends, classmates, neighbors, and family to spread the word, and post it on your Facebook page. And, contact katie@change.org to let her know that you've started your petition and want help promoting it to the larger Change.org community.

4. Connect with local groups. You might also connect with organizations working on this issue.  Look for groups like the organization that started the first one of these campaigns, Minnesota Neighborhoods Organizing for Change and New Bottom Line, which is supporting individuals all over the country who want to change banks.

In response to pressure from parents, educators and grassroots advocates, Scholastic Inc. will drastically limit its practice of partnering with corporations to produce classroom material, the company announced last week.

The publisher had been under fire since May, when it was forced to stop distributing a fourth-grade curriculum called “The United States of Energy” that had been paid for by the coal industry and distributed to classrooms across the country. Boston nonprofit Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood had called on Scholastic to drop the curriculum, and after achieving success, expanded its campaign -- in concert with online social action platform Change.org -- to lobby for sweeping reforms to Scholastic’s controversial “InSchool Marketing” division.

So you're the next kid in line at the library to check out a classic like The Great Gilly Hopkins, by Katherine Paterson. Old Yeller, by Fred Gipson. Ramona Quimby, Age 8, by Beverly Cleary.

If you're trying to check out those children's classics in e-book form, however, you may discover that the book's not there anymore -- because it just self-destructed.

That's the scenario HarperCollins is laying out with its new e-book policy for libraries, which limits the number of times an electronic book can be checked out to just 26. After that, the library would be forced to re-purchase the book - every time the book hits 26 checkouts.

Librarian Andy Woodworth has started a Change.org petition to tell HarperCollins that this policy is bad for readers everywhere.

When Kristin Larsen began teaching, she wanted to stay up to speed with education news by reading education news articles in the New York Times. But she found it very difficult to actually locate the education section online. She instead found herself typing “education” into the page’s search engine. "Is education not news?" she wondered.

Located under the same section as the classifieds, corrections, and crosswords, Kristin felt increasingly frustrated that education was not being afforded the platform it deserved. “The New York Times has placed education in a very bizarre non-news like pace on their website,” Kristin said in an interview with Change.org.

Now a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education, Kristin has become increasingly curious about the New York Times’ choice of locale for education. She sent an email to their customer service department asking for an explanation of its placement and received a generic response. So she decided to take matters into her own hands by creating a Change.org petition to formally request that education be elevated in the New York Times to the same status as business, technology, style, and travel.

In the early 1900s, poor black sharecroppers couldn't attend school - so Booker T. Washington, president of the Tuskegee Institute, brought the proverbial mountain to them.

The Jessup Wagon was a school-on-wheels that engaged sharecroppers in the South without the need for desks, walls or windows.

Now, Dr. William Patterson, a professor of educational policy at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, is using the same idea with the N Search of Hip Hop Express, a way to educate black youth in their own neighborhoods.

Weaving hip hop into history, social activism and community-building, Patterson has produced more than 60 educational and social enrichment programs that infuse elements of hip hop culture into public schools. He's using Facebook and blogging as well to spread the message.

Need any more proof that Fox News is actually making its viewers dumber? Look no further than the latest study out of the University of Maryland.

Fox’s fake news program has actually managed to convince 49 percent of viewers that income taxes have gone up since Obama became president. 56 percent of viewers believe Obama initiated the GM/Chrysler bailout. And 63 percent of Fox News viewers continue to believe Obama  may not have been born in the United States.

All of these things are false. What else is false? The idea that climate change isn't real. But that's exactly the idea Fox News reporters are required to spread, Media Matters revealed late last month with a shocking leaked memo.

Change.org's Environment blog has the rundown on the environmentalist response here. In the education community, professors are speaking out against Fox News and calling them on their falsehoods.

Why are some preschoolers wearing T-shirts with trackable ID technology? Why did a law school student ask for a tuition refund? It's Friday afternoon, which means it's a great time to catch up on all of the school and education news you may have missed on Change.org's blogs. Here's just a sampling of popular stories this week focusing on students and schools. Read, take action, spread the word!

It's a blackout. In a can! Change.org health editor Brie Cadman covers the controversy on Four Loko, the caffeine-plus-booze combination that's sending college students to emergency rooms. Students who might pass out due to heavy drinking can continue to stay awake because of Four Loko's upper effects. She's pushing them to put a warning on the label of their caffeine-fueled booze.

Is Big Brother watching? Over in our Criminal Justice blog, Kelly Vlahos writes about controversial ID technology being used on public school students. Administrators say lunchroom fingerprint checks, identity badges and even trackable T-shirts worn by preschoolers make kids safer. But is it an invasion of privacy?

They went to bat for their children, fought for a library and won. After more than a month of camping out in a field house next to the neighborhood elementary school, a group of South Side mothers have reached a preliminary compromise with Chicago Public Schools.

The school system will build a library inside Whittier Elementary School in Pilsen, a largely Hispanic Chicago neighborhood. And instead of demolishing the field house the moms are using as an informal community center, the school district will leave it intact and lease it to the moms' group.

The sit-in isn't over yet, though; the moms say they'll stay until the School Board officially votes on the plan, on October 27.

Since September 15, moms have been camping out in the old field house to demand a library for their children. Chicago Public Schools had planned to demolish the field house to create green space, but moms and their children wanted a library of their own. They named the little building "La Casita," and as word spread of their fight with Chicago's school district, donations of books poured in. Now more than 1,000 titles are on the shelves of the makeshift library.

Would you friend a teacher on Facebook for extra credit? That's what one New York City teacher asked his students to do, the New York Post reports.

That ethically sketchy scenario is nothing compared to a creepy Bronx teacher who friended female students and then left comments saying their photos were "sexy," and posted on Facebook for all to see, "I'm not a gynecologist, but I'll take a look inside." He lost his job due to his Facebook dealings with students, as did another New York educator fired after posting on the site a photo of her kissing an 18-year-old former student on the lips.

These teachers were all disciplined by the school district. But around the country, teachers and students are getting caught up in confusion over what is, and isn't, appropriate in the world of social networking. In 2009, a Georgia teacher was fired for posting photos of her European vacation on Facebook - including a handful of photos where she was drinking alcohol. Earlier this year, a Pennsylvania teacher was suspended after someone posted racy photos from a bachelorette party hosted at her house. (She later settled with the school district, with help from the American Civil Liberties Union.)

How's this for a chilling thought? Only about two-thirds of U.S. teens are taught about birth control in school, according to a recent government study. Even though almost all students take sex ed, they're much more likely to learn about STDs and how to say no than they are to learn about all of the different ways to prevent pregnancy.

That leaves one out of three young men and women whose only education about birth control comes from their family, their friends and that episode of Glee where Quinn gets pregnant.

Here's some context about the need for birth control: Although the teen pregnancy rate in the U.S. has been slowly declining over the last few decades, we still have the highest rates of teen pregnancy and birth among comparable countries, according to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. That's two times higher than teens in the United Kingdom, and ten times higher than teens in Switzerland. If you're looking for an even closer comparison, a U.S. teen is more than three times more likely to become pregnant than a teen living in Canada, our neighbor to the north.

This speaks to a need for more birth control education, ay? Programs that go by "sex ed" but stress only STDs and how to delay sex aren't equipping teens to be sexually responsible adults. Just like anything else taught in schools, sex ed should be geared toward a student's whole life. Even if teens aren't planning on having sex in high school (i.e. abstinence), exposure to information about birth control is vital as they go on to having sex later.