by NNPA ESSA | Jun 4, 2018 | K12 Education, Pennsylvania, resources
By Elizabeth Behrman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Students at Pittsburgh King K-8 got a reminder from a local celebrity that wearing glasses can be cool.
Steelers wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster said he wore glasses as a kid, and that they helped him in school, while playing sports and while playing video games.
“I think it’s very, very cool,” he said.
King students gathered in the gymnasium Friday morning to celebrate the launch of a new program that will provide free eye exams and glasses to Pittsburgh students who need them. Twenty-one King students got the first pairs through the partnership between Pittsburgh Public Schools and Vision to Learn, a Los Angeles-based non-profit that aims to provide vision care to low-income children across the country.
Mr. Smith-Schuster helped make sure the new glasses fit, and posed for a photo with each student.
“Everything’s closer now,” said 11-year-old Dion McCoy, who selected a new pair of black and blue frames.
Vision to Learn was founded in 2012 and now serves low-income communities in 256 cities in 13 states. Pittsburgh Public is the first district the organization has partnered with in Pennsylvania, and eventually its leaders plan to take their services to schools in the surrounding districts and counties.
School nurses will continue to give each Pittsburgh student annual vision screenings, and the students who fail will be referred to the Vision to Learn mobile clinic, which will move from school to school. There the students will receive an eye exam, and if they need glasses, they get to choose a pair they like and receive them for free…
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by NNPA ESSA | Jun 4, 2018 | K12 Education, Kindergarten, Pennsylvania
By Elizabeth Behrman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
The students in Stacy Mazak’s kindergarten class couldn’t stand still as they waited their turn at the dunk tank.
They had already spent 15 minutes hula-hooping and decorating the street in front of their school with chalk and 15 minutes in the inflatable bounce houses the Wilkinsburg School District gets for the annual field day events. Now, they were anxious to knock one of Turner Elementary School’s other teachers into the water.
One student, 6-year-old Breonna Pollard, said she didn’t feel the same excitement about moving on to first grade next year.
“I want to stay with Ms. Mazak,” she said, scooting out of the way of the splash when one of her classmates hit the dunk target with a softball.
But under the district’s reorganization plan for next school year, Ms. Mazak and Breonna will be moving to a new school together.
With the district’s middle- and high-school students now attending Pittsburgh Westinghouse Academy in Homewood, Wilkinsburg administrators are re-focusing their efforts on the district’s younger students. After years of program cuts and an exodus of families who opted to enroll their children in private or charter schools, district leaders are embarking on an ambitious plan to boost enrollment and re-vamp Wilkinsburg’s two elementary schools.
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by Pennsylvania Principals Association Updates | May 15, 2017 | ESSA, Every Student Succeeds Act, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), National, Pennsylvania
The bill passed by the U.S. House to repeal the Affordable Care Act, now being considered by the Senate, would make deep cuts to Medicaid — which threatens millions in special education dollars for local school districts.
The money pays for items such as therapy equipment, portable stair climbers, or a device that might help visually impaired students do their schoolwork, as well as certain aides.
Medicaid, the health insurance coverage for low-income and disabled individuals that is jointly paid for by states and the federal government, reimburses schools for health-related services for special education students.
In Pennsylvania, schools receive about $143 million annually for these services.
Federal law requires schools to have individualized education plans for each special needs child and to provide appropriate services.
In other words, said Steve Robinson, spokesman for the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, schools are mandated to meet the needs of special education students. The federal cuts would push costs to either the state or local communities.
“The state is going to be challenged to come up with those dollars,” he said.
“Under the proposed change, there could be restrictions to: hearing-impaired services, nursing services, occupational therapy services, personal care and physical therapy services, psychological and social work services, speech and language and specialized transportation services, among many other critical support systems,” said Casey Smith, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Education.
In a letter opposing the bill, the School Superintendents Association and a host of other organizations in the Save Medicaid in the Schools Coalition noted to congressional leaders that “school-based health services are mandated on the [s]tates and those mandates do not cease simply because Medicaid funds are capped by the [American Health Care Act]. As with many other unfunded mandates, capping Medicaid merely shifts the financial burden of providing services to the [s]tates.”
Pittsburgh Public Schools uses some of these funds to pay for things like care assistants for medically fragile students who might need one-on-one support and for programs such as the district’s CITY Connections, which helps students with disabilities ages 18-21, said Amy Filipowski, executive director of the program for students with execeptionalities at the district.
“We would lose that reimbursement as a district and have to fund that … on our own,” she said.
ACA is working well in Pennsylvania, state insurance commissioner tells U.S. senators
The bill, which cuts Medicaid spending by more than $800 billion, passed the House earlier this month in a narrow 217-213 vote.
Source: Pittsburgh Post Gazette
