School Notes

The Snoqualmie School District has invited Isabel Munoz-Colon, senior budget analyst from OSPI as this week’s guest speaker at the Snoqulamie Valley School Board work session on education funding.

The presentation will take place Thursday, Jan. 7 at 6:30 p.m. at Snoqualmie Middle School.

Munoz-Colon, will provide parents and the community an update on basic education funding and its potential impact on budget development for the 2010-2011 school year.

The presentation will provide an overview of the financial position of the State of Washington and K-12 education.

The regular school board meeting will follow.

The future of the Snoqualmie Valley School District could take place in an expanded Mount Si High School or satellite campus at Snoqualmie Middle School.

A district facilities committee spent last night in a long-term planning session, winnowing down the choices for the district’s financial future. Volunteers weighed financial and geographic considerations alongside what is best for students at all grade levels. The school board will make the final choice, following public meetings.

With bonds for a new high school failing time and again in the Valley, these choices show a whole new direction in local schools’ approach to solve overcrowding.

What do you think? E-mail your comments or thoughts to me at editor@valleyrecord.com

Look for a full story later.

Snoqualmie Elementary School’s PTSA has applied for one of Nike’s Back Your Block grants to help benefit the Wlak-a-thon and Cougar Trail programs at the school. The grant could be up to $2,500.

One of the ways grants are awarded is through online voting. To vote, go to Nike’s Back Your Block Web site. You must have a valid e-mail address to vote.

News outlets are reporting that Kent teachers voted Wednesday night to strike for smaller class sizes and more time to prepare course work. Several other districts still in negotiations could see strikes in the next few weeks as well.

Snoqualmie Valley and nearby school districts won’t see any strikes, though, said Stephen Miller, head of the Washington Education Association’s Sammamish Council, which includes Snoqualmie Valley to Mercer Island.

Snoqualmie teachers are going into the second year of a three-year contract and cannot strike, except over very specific items such as health care, which is renegotiated with the state every year. Mercer Island teachers settled with their district. Issaquah teachers will negotiate their contract next year. Bellevue teachers went on strike last year, but were able to negotiate a contract.

But class size is not an issue that is going away, Miller said.

“All our class sizes went way up. It just so happens Kent is in the middle of negotiations and could do something about it,” he said. “It’ll b a big issue next year.”

The WEA and local teacher unions will lobby the state legislature to increase tax money for public schools, he said.

“We’re going to go after them hard,” Miller said.

A report on online education for the U.S. Department of Education found that blending online and classroom education beats classroom learning. The report analyzed 99 comparative studies conducted between 1996 and 2008, and found that “on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.”

The report, conducted by SRI International, found that blending online and classroom elements produced the best results, but not because of online media. Instead, “blended conditions often included additional learning time and instructional elements not received by students” in face-to-face settings, the report found.

Students in classes with some or all course work online tested in the 59th percentile on average, while students in classroom-only settings landed in the 50th percentile on average. That is a statistically significant difference.

Of course, the report gave several caveats.

Most of the studies it found looked at college and adult continuing education classes. Only a handful of studies looked at students in K-12. Also, the report cautions that the studies “do not demonstrate that online learning is superior as a medium.” But online learning gave the course more flexibility in students’ individual learning experiences and allowed them to spend more time on the material. As the report states, “online learning is much more conducive to the expansion of learning time than is face-to-face
instruction.”

As many as one million K-12 students took online courses in the 2007-2008 school year, according to one study cited by the report.