We’ve had a lot of discussion on these pages about the quality of education in our state and many of our communities. Now a new survey says that public assessment of schools has fallen to its lowest level in nearly three decades.

According to a recently released Education Next poll put out by the Hoover Institution, public assessment of schools has fallen to the lowest level recorded since Americans were first asked to grade schools in 1981. Just 18 percent of those surveyed gave schools a grade of an A or a B, down from 30 percent reported by a Gallup poll as recently as 2005.

No less than 25 percent of those polled by Education Next gave the schools either an F or a D. (In 2005, only 20 percent gave schools such low marks.)

For the full story, click HERE.

More Sleep Equals Better Grades, Healthier Students

What is the best time to start school for a high school student? Opinions vary but early school start times are a medically proven detriment to health and education.

Dearborn school leaders appear to have finally come to that realization and are now asking parents and students to take part in an online survey to determine the merits of changing the high school start time from the current 7:20 a.m. to something later. A time change could be implemented as soon as the 2010/2011 school year.

Now we all know changing school start times can be very challenging for school districts because of busing schedules, kids missing more classes because of early release for sports activities and to parents. Some students also are concerned that being in school later would cut into after-school jobs and extra-curricular activities.

Later start times might also impact teachers, who as adults do not need more sleep to function better. Will these longer days mean less efficient teachers at the end of the day simply because of fatigue?

While difficult to determine, there are many studies that have been done over the past decade that show pushing back start times to allow teenagers to get the sleep they need yields positive results. In no particular order, studies have shown these advantages to students who get more sleep:

• Better grades;

• Less likelihood of experiencing depressed moods;

• Reduced likelihood for tardiness;

• Reduced absenteeism;

• Reduced risk of fall asleep car crashes; and

• Reduced risk of metabolic and nutritional deficits associated with insufficient sleep, including obesity.

We don’t have the exact number of schools or districts that have pushed back there start times over the past five years but the figure is in the hundreds. Clearly, those school districts have deemed it a positive priority to add sleep to the school curriculum at all grade levels.

As there are advantages and some disadvantages to starting later, the online survey by the Dearborn school district is a good way to get input from the community to attempt to tailor a solution that can work for all.

To take part in the survey, which ends Sept. 30, click HERE.

Dearborn High School will hold a ribbon cutting ceremony this Friday at 6:30 p.m. for the school’s $2.9 million athletic complex renovation. The ceremony will take place on the school’s new synthetic turf football field prior to the start of the Sept. 18 football matchup with cross town rival Fordson High School.

Dearborn High School will celebrate its new football field and athletic complex this Friday, Sept. 18. This earlier photograph shows the synthetic turf being installed.

As a Dearborn High graduate, I’m still having a hard time adjusting to the relocation of the football field from the valley to alongside busy Outer Drive. Don’t get me wrong, the field looks great and so do the new stands. It’s just the wrong place for a football field and the home seats are actually constructed on the wrong side of the new stadium (the sun is supposed to shine in the faces of the visiting team, not the home team sideline). In addition, noise complaints from nearby residents have forced the school to turn down the volume of the loudspeakers at the new football field.

We can’t help but wonder what the field would have looked like if the School Board had taken up the City of Dearborn’s offer to pay for the costs of moving clay and dirt from the holes being dug for the combined sewer overflow basins and used it to raise the grass field in the valley.

A Dearborn Schools spokesman confirms the city did indeed make such an offer but it wasn’t as simple as filling the valley up with dirt to raise the field out of the flood plain. The quality of the soil that would have been trucked from holes along the Rouge River to the school was unknown and would have needed testing. In addition, the school district would have had to create a new flood plain in another location to match the exact size of whatever was changed in the valley of Dearborn High. While an interesting idea, those obstacles stopped the plan before it could ever get traction.

For those wondering, the $2.9 million price tag at Dearborn High covered the complete renovation of all athletic property at the school. The athletic complex renovation project began with the west complex in the spring of 2008. The complex includes a new synthetic turf football field, grandstands, press box, concession stand, new tennis courts, new softball field, renovated baseball field and renovated track.

The Dearborn High project is the final piece of a three year district-wide program to renovate the athletic facilities at all three high schools. A great deal of work was accomplished at Dearborn High over the summer. The school held their first gridiron match-up on their new synthetic turf field on Sept. 4, 2009.

Costs associated with general maintenance, wear from regular use and complaints about noise from some nearby residents has forced Dearborn schools to limit the number of tennis courts it now keeps open to the public.

Costs have forced Dearborn Schools to lock some of the tennis courts at Edsel, Fordson and Dearborn High's new courts, pictured here. Residents behind these courts have complained recently about noise.

 The move has upset some residents who contend that as taxpayers they should have unfettered use of a school’s tennis facilities. We have received several emails from upset tennis players in recent weeks saying as much.

One such reader had this to say in an email to us:

“Either courts have been demolished, a la at Henry Ford and UM Dearborn, or they are all locked up at Dearborn High or at Ford Field. We pay our school taxes and are funding the new football stadium, which the jury is still out if it is completely necessary.

“They have built some lovely new courts at the high school, but no one can use them. What is going on here? Who do you have to know to get keys?”

With shrinking school budgets, school officials tell us they had to lock some tennis courts at Dearborn, Edsel and Fordson for simple cost reasons. They also wanted to be sure students had good surfaces to play on when the school year began.

If people are simply “hanging out” late into the night at the new courts behind Dearborn High, as some residents are complaining about, closing off some courts was the right move.

Now we know some will disagree but as a tennis player myself, the question I have is why some of our city parks don’t have more tennis courts. Our guess is that there simply isn’t the tennis traffic needed to warrant such a move. Another, no doubt, is the cost to maintain and keep the courts lighted at night.

This of course begs this question: if the hard-surface tennis courts are being closed for maintenance concerns and wear does that mean the new football fields with their fancy artificial field will also be closed to those hoping to play on when the football or soccer team isn’t using them?

Here are the new tennis court operations at Dearborn High School: 

The (2) courts near Outer Drive to be open all of the time

The (3) courts in the back of the building to be opened as follows:

· From 7:30am – 3:30pm every day that the school building is open.

· For DHS tennis team use (practice and matches) – must be coach/staff supervised

· For all permit use (limited)

Dearborn School Supt. Superintendent Brian J. Whiston is making some personnel changes at Dearborn’s middle and elementary schools.

Whiston appointed three new principals at the middle school level last week. His selections must now be approved by the School Board, whose next meeting is in July. The moves at the middle school come as a result of recent retirements.

The changes at the middle schools look like this:

1. Shannon Peterson is named Bryant Middle School principal. She previously was assistant principal at the school.
2. Scott Casebolt is named O.L. Smith Middle School principal. He was an assistant principal at Fordson High School and a former O.L. Smith assistant principal.
3. Majed Fadlallah is named Salina Intermediate School principal. He was assistant principal at Salina and a former assistant principal at Fordson.

The changes at the elementary school level look like this:

1. Radewin Awada, previously DuVall Elementary principal, is named Oakman Elementary principal.
2. Veronica Jakubus, previously Long Elementary principal, is named DuVall Elementary principal.
3. Kathleen Klee, previously Snow Elementary principal, is named Long Elementary principal.
4. Glenn Maleyko, previously Salina Intermediate principal, is named Snow Elementary principal.

Talk about a student going above and beyond.

Edsel Ford High School senior Danielle Boettger designed and built a kayak in her high school woodshop class.

Boettger spent 100 hours on her kayak, working toward her special launch day, which took place last Friday in Edsel’s pool, where friends, family, school administrators watched and cheered as she demonstrated her “rolling” techniques.

Boettger’s headed to Michigan Tech University on a full ride scholarship. We say well done and good luck at university. Below is the video story:

Turf for the new football field is scheduled to be installed by month's end.

The artificial turf for Dearborn High School’s new million dollar football field is expected to be installed by month’s end.

Below are some images of the current state of the new field that is being installed along Outer Drive. For those wondering, the home team’s bleachers will be on the east side of the field. The visiting team bleachers will back up to Outer Drive.

We aren’t thrilled with the location of the new field, which we have said before HERE.  But we are told this is progress and the field will be ready for Pioneer football this fall.

Looking toward Dearborn High School from behind the yet-to-be installed scoreboard.

Nowlin nearly lands starring role in upcoming Hollywood movie.

Dearborn schools nearly landed a starring role in an upcoming film being directed by Rob Reiner, aka “meathead” from his days in the sitcom “All in the Family”.

The G-rated movie called “Flipped” is about second grade friends growing up together who then struggle trying to understand the awkwardness they begin to experience as feelings for each other grows stronger. Filming for the movie begins this summer in Michigan.

Production teams were in town last week looking at Nowlin Elementary and O.L. Smith Middle School. After looking at several Dearborn schools on three separate occasions, the production team fell in love with Nowlin, located near Grindley Park and O.L. Smith, immediately adjacent to the elementary school, because the schools so perfectly fit the time period for the movie.

Smith was built in the early 1950s, Nowlin in the 1940s.

But when Reiner came to town to make the final decisions on locations last week, he chose a school in Saline because it was closer to another location in Ann Arbor where a good portion of the movie will be filmed. Production crews simply did not want to make the drive between a movie set in Ann Arbor and one in Dearborn, school officials were told. (Now we know why he was called “meathead” for all those years.)

The good news is that the production team said they would keep Dearborn schools at the top of their list of potential future movie locations because the buildings are so well maintained.

Corporal punishment has long been banned from Michigan schools but it apparently is having some impact on more than just the rear ends of some elementary school students in South Carolina. A reader sent this article to us from a recent issue of Newsweek.

For those of you in your late 30s, you may recall or perhaps experienced first hand similar treatment in Dearborn schools. At Dearborn’s Adams Junior High it was the “Shader Persuader”, a wooden paddle that science teacher Shader wasn’t afraid to use on his 7th grade students. Another gym teacher at Adams would use the cord of his whistle on a wet bathing suit to get students inline. We can’t recall how effective it was but we do know that students acting up in class were rare events.

But would a crack on the behind today bring about discipline or a lawsuit?

Below is the Newsweek article:

The Principal And The Paddle 

 Eric Adelson
NEWSWEEK
May 4, 2009

The wooden paddle on principal David Nixon’s desk is two feet long, with a handle wrapped in duct tape that has been worn down by age and use. He found it in a dusty cabinet in his predecessor’s office at John C. Calhoun Elementary in Calhoun Hills, S.C., where Nixon has been the principal since 2006. He has no idea if the old principal ever used it, but now it sits in plain view for all visitors to see, including children who have been dismissed to his office. As punishment for a “major offense,” such as fighting or stealing, students are told to place both hands on the seat of a leather chair and brace for what Nixon calls “a whippin’.” Before he begins, though, he sits the child down for a quiet talk about why he, or she, is in trouble. He tries to determine if a deeper issue, such as a problem at home, might warrant a meeting with a counselor. If the child shows remorse, Nixon will often send him or her back to class without a spanking. Otherwise, he makes sure he is calm, and he makes sure his elbow is still. Then he delivers “three licks” to the child’s rear end. If the child is a girl, then a female administrator does it. Some of the kids cry. Some are silent. Some want a hug. And after the child is sent back to class, still stinging, Nixon sits alone in his office and thinks about what the child has done, and what he has done. “If I could burn that paddle in my stove,” Nixon says, “I would. This is the worst part of my job.”

Before Nixon took over “John C,” student behavior had gotten so bad that one teacher described it as “chaos.” She eventually quit in disgust, pulled her own child from the school, and moved to a different one 45 minutes away. John C is located in a rural stretch of South Carolina near the Georgia border where all but one of the major textile plants have closed, and where the leading local employer is the school system. Nearly 90 percent of the kids at John C live below the poverty line. When Nixon went to his first PTO meeting, only about a dozen parents showed up at a school with 226 students. He still has trouble reaching many families by phone because they can’t afford to put down a deposit on a landline. And yet Nixon has managed to turn John C around. It recently earned three statewide Palmetto awards, one for academic performance and two for overall improvement-the school’s first such honors in its 35-year history. Not everyone agrees with his methods, but most parents and teachers will tell you he couldn’t have pulled off such a turnaround without his wooden paddle.

Still, the mere fact that it works hasn’t made spanking kids any easier for Nixon, who’s no fire-breathing traditionalist. He’s 31, a brownish-haired beanpole with a soft-spoken but determined manner. Married, with an 8-month-old daughter, he taught agriculture to high-school students for six years but had no prior administrative experience. He studied animal science at Clemson, served as state president of the Future Farmers of America, and raised 50 head of beef cattle on his ranch. In 2006, a family friend called about an opening at John C. The school, he heard, was “kind of in bad shape,” but he took the job anyway.

For the rest of the story, click HERE.

If you’re looking for a slightly different place to dine in Dearborn, you might want to consider dropping in on Henry Ford Community College’s Fifty-One O One restaurant.

Located in the Student & Culinary Arts Center on HFCC’s main campus at 5101 Evergreen Road in Dearborn, the restaurant is run by students in the college’s culinary arts program who get practical experience in the kitchen, preparing food for dinners, waiting tables and also take classes in sanitation, food preparation, nutrition, baking, food purchasing and cost control.

Students in the HFCC program can earn an associate’s degrees in culinary arts or hotel-restaurant management or receive certification in a different culinary, baking or hospitality areas. And these two year degrees can be applied towards a bachelor’s degree at other institutions without losing credits.

Dearborn Councilman George Darany takes a closer look at the Fifty-One O One restaurant in this video interview done by the CDTV team.

The restaurant is open for lunch on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. On Wednesdays, Fifty-One O One also is open for dinner. To dine at Fifty-One O One, reservations are recommended. For reservations, please call (313) 206-5101.