Education

A proposal to drop football at one New Hampshire school district has surprised and upset many residents.

As school districts continue to face budget cuts, administrators look for creative ways to fill in the gaps.  And that means that some schools are warming up to a concept that public educators used to reject: advertising.

In Nashua, the district wants to place electronic billboards at its stadium.  While many welcome the funding, some say commercialism doesn’t belong at public schools.

Concerned parents, teachers, and children held a rally in Manchester Saturday to protest the state of the Manchester school district. At least 200 people showed up to the rally at Veterans Memorial Park.

The event was organized by Citizens for Manchester Schools, a group formed in response to a budget shortfall that prompted the school district to lay off close to 150 teachers.

One of the group’s chief concerns is the burgeoning average class size in Manchester, with some classes reaching over 40 students.

Farm-to-School programs are expanding across New Hampshire, according to a new report, but the cost of local food is still a barrier for many schools.

Stacey Purslow of New Hampshire Farm-to-School says the number of farms selling food to schools has tripled to 60 over the last three years. She says schools are buying a wider variety of products.

Purslow: We started out with apples in New Hampshire but now they get tomatoes, and cucumbers and lettuce, and corn and broccoli, and cabbage and potatoes and eggs and maple syrup and beef.

In the last budget, one of lawmakers’ most controversial decisions was to cut the state’s contribution to New Hampshire’s public universities by 48 percent. Restoring those cuts has emerged as a big issue in the governor’s campaign. But how that will happen is a question politicians have yet to answer.

The people who don’t approve of the cuts that the New Hampshire legislature made to the university system – like UNH president Mark Huddleston – describe those them in a certain way.

As expected the state Department of Education today formally asked the federal government for a waiver from the No Child Left Behind law. The state's request is 96 pages long, it's a full document, but NHPR's Brady Carlson sat down with reporter Sam Evans-Brown talk about what it contains.

Brady Carlson: What does getting a waiver from No Child Left Behind actually mean?

The New Hampshire Department of Education is finalizing a waiver from the rules imposed on New Hampshire by No Child Left Behind. While pieces of the proposal have been in the works for some time, it’s unclear how much of what’s in the waiver will actually end up in local schools.

It’s back to school week.  And for about 2 to 3 percent of New Hampshire students, learning will begin or continue in the home.

Two laws that went into effect this summer give families who home-school a lot more independence than they’ve had in the past.

This week the Department of Education says it will release details of New Hampshire’s application for a waiver for flexibility from the controversial federal education law, No Child Left Behind. The DOE will release a draft on Thursday, and submit the final waiver application to the federal department of education the following week.

For most New Hampshire students Tuesday or Wednesday is the first day of school. For some New Hampshire schools “day-one” really is day-one.

For those kids headed starting classes tomorrow, like Andrew Pollak, emotions are mixed.

"It’s gonna be scary but fun," says Pollock, "because who knows what’s gonna happen tomorrow, it could be anything!"

This week we’ve been hearing about Summer-Learning Loss – the tendency to forget things over summer vacation – and what it means for the learning of low-income students. Today NHPR reports during the summer many kids lose access to the free-and-reduced lunch program, and that can have very real implications for how they learn.

This week NHPR is taking a look at the impacts of summer learning loss: the things that students forget during summer vacation. Yesterday we heard about how this hits low-income students harder than others, and today we look at what schools and parents are doing to tackle learning loss.

In just a few short weeks, summer vacation will come to a close, and when it does teachers will start the school year off with a familiar routine: review.

It may sound like no big deal, but over the summer students forget so much of their schooling over vacation that it’s come to be called “summer learning loss.” In the first of a three part series about the summer slide, NHPR’s Sam Evans-Brown tells us why summer activities have a lot to do with how students fare during the rest of the year.

Here’s a sentence you don’t hear much: today is August 7th... the first day of school.

Rochester’s Maple Street Elementary School is reopening this year as the state’s first Magnet School: an experiment in school reform that involves a longer school year and a specialized curriculum.