Patrick Henry Update: Tour, Teachers & 2nd Grade Enrollment & More
From Principal Boyd of the Patrick Henry School of Science and Arts;
Dear Parents,
We are busy trying to get everything in order for your children to be welcomed into the PHSSA family in August.
We have an upcoming tour of the Education Center at Woodland Heights Baptist Church scheduled for Monday, May 24th from 10-11 a.m. The EC-WHBC is located at: 611 W. 31st St., Richmond, Virginia 23225. Please park around back, where the largest parking lot is located and enter through the entrance off of that parking lot. Another tour of the building will be scheduled soon, so look for another email with that information.
Meals Committee: If you would like to get involved with planning and creating the meals plan for the cafeteria for PHSSA, please contact the head of PHSSA Meals Committee Sara Marunde at sara.marunde@patrickhenrycharter.org or 677-0469.
Status of teachers: Offers have been made to the teachers for the 2010-11 school year. These teacher will be on staff in early July and we will schedule an open house with the new teachers and the student during the month of July. More information will be available on that in the next couple weeks.
Board of Directors Schedule: The PHSSA Board of Directors meeting have been rescheduled to take place on the first and third Tuesdays of every month, beginning at 7:30 p.m. The next meeting is scheduled for June 1st. The meeting are held at the PHSSA building.
Reopening of 2nd grade enrollment. PHSSA is looking for a few more second graders for the 2010-11 school year. The student application will be posted on the PHSSA website on Monday, May 24th. Please share this information will friends who may be interested in PHSSA for the upcoming school year. The deadline for enrollment is Monday, June 7th.
Free/Reduced Lunch. If your family is currently using free/reduced lunch services, please complete this online questionnaire: http://patrickhenryschool.wufoo.com/forms/phssa-freereduced-lunch-questionnaire/ so we anticipate our needs for these services for the upcoming school year.
I’ll be in touch soon with more information!
Sincerely,
Principal Boyd
My child was an early PH applicant, but I declined to pursue the matter after discovering the school did not intend to have a faculty hired until this summer. What kind of organization expects you to entrust them with your children without knowing what kind of people to expect? Further, I don’t see any transportation update- since I don’t live or work near PH, my child was effectively ineligible to attend. But all that aside, I still wondered if I made the right choice by continuing to send my child to his regularly zoned school. Having read this poorly written, grammatical trainwreck of a memo (from a principal, no less), well, it’s clear to me that I made the right choice. I sincerely hope the rest of the staff is of higher quality, but I’m not optimistic.
The PH board was clear from the outset that they were not expecting to provide transportation to the pupils, so I’m not sure what you were expecting.
The faculty question is rather odd – if they’re teaching at a public school, they’re supposed to at least have a provisional certificate. I didn’t research the CVs of all the teachers at my son’s schools before I enrolled them.
The way PH is doing things is a bit on the last-minute side, but I don’t think the RPS administration is precisely leaping in to help them, either.
Oh my. I’m sure she is completely swamped with all of her responsibilities, but Ms Boyd should have had someone proofread her letter to parents. I often make mistakes if I am composing something quickly. However, important communication always gets careful consideration and revision.
The PH website clearly states they have a transportation plan in the works w/ To the Bottom and Back. And without a transportation plan for non-local and non-affluent students, this so-called “city-wide” school becomes a lot less city-wide. Waiting for students to enroll to finalize a plan upon which many students would rely in order to actually enroll in the school in the first place- how VERY RPS business as usual.
As for teachers, given the hype that PH is the antithesis to all of Richmond Schools’ ills, you’re damn straight I want to know who my kid’s teachers are. You can blame RPS and the school board all you want, but the evidence before my eyes suggests that PH is a slapdash affair with a questionable ability to educate my child.
That’s easy. Don’t enroll your child. But if PH kids outperform, don’t complain because of your decision. If PH works, it will be because of parental involement. But for the record, RPS is not guaranteeing any out of zone transportation, for any school.
My daughter is enrolled to attend PH. Why would the teachers have to be assigned months in advance of school opening? RPS teachers only start working a week before school begins and you don’t know who your teacher will be until your kid shows up.
I have heard that PH has plans for teacher training, especially since the curriculum is different than other school’s. The committee has been working on the curriculum for quite some time. That and the school’s philosophy is more important, I think, than the timing of the staff’s being hired.
I’m excited about the hand-picked teachers that are being selected for PH. I’m pretty sure that most principals don’t get to hire/select the teachers in their schools, I believe they’re assigned by RPS. This will provide accountability at a really tangible level.
As for transportation, most schools are assigned its own zone to which transportation is provided. PH doesn’t have a zone. I don’t understand the sour grapes, if you knew going into it that transportation wasn’t going to be provided to everyone. As Sundagger states, you can’t get transportation to out-of-zone schools anywhere in the city. They are working to provide transportation to those who really need it, which was not required by the charter school contract.
I’m also kinda sick of people nit-picking typographical errors. Look at the forest, not the trees. We all write hastily, but this is a memo, not a dissertation. Even private school principals make grammatical errors.
In all fairness folks, we don’t know for sure that this principal wrote this memo… she could have just as easily had a staffer knock it out.
This transportation issue sure raises a red flag though… could it be a way to circumvent the “city wide school” concept?
After all, they said they’d be providing “limited transportation” for the pre-school kids next year.
TV: It is an open enrollment school. Just like Fox or Mumford, If you live outside of its zone, as many families do, you have to provide your own transportation. There is no pre-school at PH. It is K-5.
Sure, but my point is if they can provide “limited transportation” to the pre-schoolers in order to give the less affluent kids a fair shot at a decent education, they darn well should do the same for this school.
To my knowledge, neither Fox nor Mary Munford claims to be a “city wide” school, so there is no reason to consider the transportation needs of deserving students from outside the zone.
Every school has a zone, but every school is open city wide to applicants. There are/have been Fox kids from Forest Hill, and there are East End kids at Fisher.
I am not a PH parent, and have no stake in it, beyond the stake that every resident has. But I would ask that they ben given an even playing field, the same support, or lack of support, from the administraion and parents city wide. If they fail, they fail, if they succeed, we all benefit. I promise you that in three years, if PH kids have high scores, are performing well at every level, every elected official, and every member of the school administration will claim credit.