On Monday, March 16, the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence will host a Facebook Live conversation at 6 p.m. EST about the education impact of COVID-19. Prichard Committee President and CEO Brigitte Blom Ramsey will facilitate a discussion on the impact of closures in all levels of education daycare, K-12 schools, colleges and universities. The event can be found at facebook.com/prichardcommittee.
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March 9, 2020FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEFor More Information Contact:Jessica Fletcher, Senior Director, Communications & External Affairs(cell) 859-539-0511jessica.fletcher@prichardcommittee.org Wade Mountz Wade Mountz, a leading citizen advocate in the effort to improve education in Kentucky over the past four decades, died at age 95 on Thursday in Louisville. …
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March 6, 2020FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEFor more information, contact:Jessica Fletcher, Senior Director, Communications & External Affairs(cell) 859-539-0511jessica.fletcher@prichardcommittee.org The following is a statement from Prichard Committee President & CEO Brigitte Blom Ramsey on the passage of the House budget. Visit our blog for a detailed analysis of …
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Yesterday, the Senate Education Committee approved a committee substitute version of Senate Bill 158, and sent it forward for consideration on the Senate floor. We’ve revised our two-page overview of how the bill compares to Kentucky’s current law and practice. The following are my thoughts on the bill as amended.
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Prior to joining the staff of the Prichard Committee, I worked for the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) as Chief Communications Officer. This provided me with a familiarity with the powerful work of the department’s education recovery team. I was surprised to learn that Senate Bill 158, filed two weeks ago, would remove KDE from school turnaround, as they are considered a national model in this space.
Within one year of being designated for Comprehensive Support and Improvement (CSI) under Kentucky’s new accountability system, Menifee Elementary School in Frenchburg, Ky., exited the status, and was designated a 3-star school. This progress would not have happened without KDE’s education recovery team.
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FEBRUARY 2020 \ JENKINS INDEPENDENT
“Y. Yellow. yuh.” These are the sounds of kindergarten students building the ground floor of becoming a reader. At a horseshoe-shaped table, Vonda Penley, kindergarten teacher at Jenkins Elementary School, reviews letters and sounds.
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Although organizations have existed in some form since the beginning of time, the study and labeling of organizations began during the Industrial Revolution to make people and processes, like machines, more efficient and effective. The evolution of the study theories of organization has continued, which has had an influence over many industries and professions. David Walonick (1993) succinctly stated that Classical Theory of Organization evolved in the early 1900’s and “represents the merger of scientific management, bureaucratic theory and administrative theory.” Major assumptions of classical theory include ideas such as: there is a head and a body of the organization; a formal role exist between the head of the organization and those who work for the head; due to the limit of energy, knowledge, and space, the head of the organization should have a limited number of people working for them, and this pattern is scaled through the organization until every person in the organization is accountable to someone.
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With the 2020 Kentucky General Assembly in full swing and budget discussions taking place, one theme is clear: Kentucky’s financial situation is dark. At the Prichard Committee, however, we are focusing on the light at the end of the tunnel as we have always done in our work to build a stronger future for Kentuckians and their communities. We see this light as one that will bring the state and its citizens out of financial distress and poverty, as one that will lessen the scourge of the drug epidemic and the overcrowding of our prisons. That light is education.
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FEBRUARY 2020 \ MONROE COUNTY
A clear handle on fractions is the goal for fourth-grade math students one January morning at Gamaliel Elementary, a small school perched near the Tennessee border in Monroe County. Teacher Shelly Buck asks her students to concentrate and visualize: “Make up one-fourth in your head,” she says. “If you were to visually picture one-fourth, is it more or less than one half?” She asks students to think and be prepared to take a position or to agree or disagree with classmates ...
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February 10, 2020FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEFor more information, contact:Jessica Fletcher, Senior Director, Communications & External Affairs(office) 859-233-9849(cell) 859-539-0511jessica.fletcher@prichardcommittee.org On Monday, the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence’s Groundswell Initiative will kick off a series of meetings aimed at helping Kentuckians explore how to pave the path to …
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