* Spring Playground Clean Up Day (and Pancake Breakfast!) are THIS SATURDAY at Mary Munford *

If you use the playground, why not stop by and help make it prettier?

Saturday, April 26 from 8am-noon. Volunteers are needed to help weed, prune and mulch both playgrounds. You do not need to stay the entire 4 hours. Any time that you can give would be appreciated. Feel free to bring any gardening tools that you may have. When you arrive, look for the sign up list of jobs by the doors to the cafeteria.

Also, the same morning, the Compass Club with Paula Katz is hosting a Pancake Breakfast in the cafeteria. Families can come for a great pancake breakfast, then work off all the calories helping with the playground work! The breakfast is $5 for adults and $3 for children. Proceeds will go towards the club’s charitable giving to the children of Southeast Asia.

Style Weekly’s cover story this week is carefully timed to come out just a few weeks before the long awaited and stressful process of the open enrollment lottery for Richmond City Schools on March 31st.
In the article, Richmond Council of PTAs President, Tichi Pinkney-Eppes, takes issue with the open enrollment policy, saying that it is rooted in segregationist policy.
Below, School Board member (and Munford parent) Kim Bridges, explanation of why Pinkney-Eppes may have approached the issue in a way that caused controversy:

Bridges says she takes no personal issue with the sort of advocacy in which Pinkney-Eppes has engaged — to a point. Bridges took umbrage when Pinkney-Eppes lashed out in Style Weekly in February that the city’s much-heralded “open enrollment” — which allows parents to send their children to schools outside their designated school zones — was rooted in segregationist policy. Bridges started working the phones, calling fellow PTA chapter presidents to express concern about their leader.

Pinkney-Eppes says she believes “wholeheartedly” that Bridges has acted against her because she called for change during the January selection of the School Board chairman and opposed the school system’s open-enrollment policy.

“We can’t get [school PTAs] to the table because [Bridges] caused the division on an issue that doesn’t even necessarily impact them,” Pinkney-Eppes says.

Bridges says her calls to local PTA chapter presidents were aimed at reconciling concerned parents at Mary Munford Elementary and other, more active PTAs that benefit from the open-enrollment process with Pinkney-Eppes and her core leadership group.

“The concerns that I have heard from the PTA in my district is just wanting to be part of the process — not about the content of what’s being said — just being part of the process,” Bridges says. “I tried to put those folks in touch with Council of PTA members — with Tichi and other board members.”

Bridges says she was concerned that Pinkney-Eppes chose a newspaper as her first outlet for voicing her concerns about open enrollment. She says she wishes Pinkney-Eppes have waited for the School Board to conclude its re-examination of the program.

That re-examination began when School Board member Keith West, a critic of a system that he says intentionally makes some schools better than others, asked last year that open enrollment be eliminated.

Bridges says Pinkney-Eppes’ public statements were the first she heard of the PTA board’s apparent concern.

“I guess everyone has a right to feel the way they want to about the process,” Bridges says. “But my big suggestion was just to be part of the process.”

By speaking out, Pinkney-Eppes believes she’s angered the constituencies of the school system’s most prominent PTAs that represent schools where parents don’t want the boat rocked. As a result, she says she’s a marked woman politically, a leader with a fast-approaching expiration date. In June, she fully expects forces within the citywide PTA to vote her out.

But more than that, she’s rocked the boat at the School Board, which, Pinkney-Eppes says, is sowing seeds of distrust with the PTA boards at Munford and William Fox elementary schools.

She says the School Board and superintendent “are purporting that it’s us against them amongst us to cause that division,” she says, stressing that PTA advocacy — parent advocacy — is the right of parents.

“If you follow the model that PTA has designed,” she says, “Mary Munford parents could get more. Parents over at Blackwell could get more. By a lot of parents not turning up at the table, you’re dismissed that way. Ultimately, it is your child being victimized by this.”

Rather than taking away from West End schools, she says, any advocacy for less-affluent schools would serve to raise the entire district.

The article continues with Pinkney-Eppes criticizing Richmond’s “zero-tolerance” discipline policies, after her own son was suspended for insubordination.

Suspensions were frequent for “insubordination,” a charge Pinkney-Eppes says amounted to teachers being intimidated by her son’s size and occasional obstinacy and refusal to sit at his desk.

Personally, I think if he is in high school and he won’t sit down when a teacher asks him too, then he should be asked to leave the classroom. Teachers in Richmond have a hard enough time teaching the kids who want to be there and who do listen. I’m not sure why Pinkney-Eppes thinks standing up for her son for this behavor is noble. If my son was insubordinate to a teacher, especially at the high school level, and was suspended, I can’t say that I’d parade it around as a flawed policy. How can you take away what little power the teachers have? The article continues with her saying that keeping her son home alone for 3 days (while she can’t supervise him) is not a fair punishment. Perhaps she’s right. He should be forced into an in-school suspension, not one at home where he can do as he pleases. I wouldn’t call that a “trigger-happy suspension rate”, as Style does. I’d call that fair.

What’s not fair is comparing Henrico and Chesterfield statistics when the school systems populations are so different. Also, what’s not fair is quoting statistic for absences over 6 days in each of the school systems and somehow connecting that to a suspension rate. Plenty of kids don’t come to school in the city for many other reasons, including health issues, custody issues, parent’s substance abuse or incarceration issues and survival (rather than school) being the number one priority.

The article tackles many other issues — it’s worth a read in its entirety.

The Near West End’s Mary Munford Elementary School is hosting an auction to raise funds for its student foreign language program on March 1st at 7 p.m. at the Jewish Community Center.
Highlights of the even include MC and auctioning performed by juggler Jonathan Austin, paintings by Ed Trask, and Laura Loe, framed and signed one-of-a-kind print from Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker singer David Lowery, a twilight flight, event tickets and vacation home rentals.
The cost is $10 and includes food and drink from Andrea Huntjens of the Flying Chef and cakes by Caroline Pascual the Bake Cakery.

The Near West End’s Mary Munford is among those schools honored by the Governor’s Award for Educational Excellence.

The award is the highest honor under a new incentive program for schools and school divisions created by the Board of Education to advance Governor Timothy M. Kaine’s “competence to excellence” agenda.

“Students in these schools are soaring far beyond the minimum requirements of the Standards of Learning and No Child Left Behind,” Kaine said in a release this morning. “It speaks to the strength of public education in the commonwealth that the 89 schools that have earned this distinction include schools in rural, suburban and urban communities and schools in every part of the state.”

Other local schools honored were:

Henrico County: Glen Allen Elementary, Nuckols Farm Elementary, Pemberton Elementary, Rivers Edge Elementary, Shady Grove Elementary, Short Pump Elementary, Springfield Park Elementary and Twin Hickory Elementary.

Richmond: A.V. Norrell Elementary, Fairfield Court Elementary,George Mason Elementary and Mary Munford Elementary.

Chesterfield County: Grange Hall Elementary, Midlothian Middle, Swift Creek Elementary and W.W. Gordon Elementary

Reminder: No school on Friday (parent teacher conferences).

Kid Art Orders Due Thursday. October 18.

Spooky Saturday is October 27; Need Help Promoting
There is a fun, color Spooky Saturday poster that is being used to promote the event to the community. The posters are in the front hallway on the PTA table. Please consider taking a few and asking local vendors that you do business with if they will consider putting one in their window or bulletin board. Thanks so much!

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We have a lot happening at Munford! Please take time to look over the following announcements:

PLAYGROUND CLEAN UP DAY & EXTERIOR BEAUTIFICATION
Join us Saturday, October 6th from 8:00-noon for PLAYGROUND CLEAN UP DAY. If you’ve got an hour (or more) this Saturday morning, you can really help improve the school’s appearance for the remainder of the year. Please contact Robert and Katie Baughan at flyingsquirrel1@verizon.net if you have any questions.

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