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By Rena Havner The Mobile County Public School System will be featured in this weekend's Parade magazine cover story with the headline "Good Schools Can Happen," according to a news release from Parade. The school system is one of five nationally to be highlighted in the magazine, which according to magazine officials is distributed to about 79 million readers in 370 Sunday newspapers nationwide, including the Press-Register. "This recognition is wonderful for education, wonderful for our teachers, wonderful for our kids, wonderful for our community," said Mobile County schools Superintendent Harold Dodge. "What I really think it does is it points out all the good work we've been doing." The Parade article spotlights Mobile County's 2001 vote to increase property taxes for education and the involvement of local business leaders in passing the tax and supporting schools afterward. About 1,000 businesses have volunteered to be assigned to help individual schools through the Partners in Education Program. "We're not just talking about doughnuts and milk. We're talking about real reading and partnerships," Dodge said. "Every school has partners in education." The article mentions that Mobile County's test scores have improved over the last few years and that students are receiving a record number of college scholarships, at $54 million this year. The other school systems in the article are: Chattanooga, Tenn., for its efforts to improve the quality of teachers; Long Beach, Calif., for its implementation of an after-school program that encourages parental and community involvement; Cleveland Heights, Ohio, for its conversion of large schools into smaller ones; and Bridgeport, Conn., for its sponsoring of a mentor program to encourage students to go to college. Lyric Winik, the Washington, D.C., correspondent for Parade who wrote the story, said Mobile County schools came up several times as she was researching the different things that school systems across the country are doing to improve. "We hear the rhetoric a lot about 'get more involved,' and here's a case where that has happened, and there have been improvements as a result," Winik said. The article states that before the tax increase passed, Mobile County schools were scheduled to be taken over by the state. Dodge has said publicly many times that the former Alabama Department of Education's assistant superintendent over finance was in Mobile the night that the tax passed, ready to take financial control over schools the next morning if the referendum failed. |
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