Stop Homework

Today’s guest blog­ger, Kerry Dick­in­son, gives an update on her orga­niz­ing efforts in Danville, Cal­i­for­nia. Kerry is the mother of two mid­dle school age boys, a for­mer mid­dle and high school teacher, a cur­rent part-time sub­sti­tute teacher, and a stay at home mother. She, and Julie Kurtz, the mother of two teens, a Men­tal Health Direc­tor, and a licensed mar­riage and fam­ily ther­a­pist in the San Fran­cisco East Bay as well as teacher at a local Junior Col­lege, have been actively work­ing to change home­work pol­icy in their com­mu­nity. Kerry wrote about their ini­tial orga­niz­ing attempts in a Novem­ber guest blog entry and she also wrote an op-ed in her local news­pa­per.

Update from Danville, Cal­i­for­nia
by Kerry Dickinson

In Novem­ber, 2007, Julie Kurtz and I took an infor­mal, email sur­vey about home­work among par­ents in our school dis­trict and received 60 responses. The sur­vey asked ques­tions like, “What per­cent of your child’s home­work do you feel is of a high qual­ity and what per­cent­age is of a low qual­ity? How much time do your chil­dren spend on home­work? How do you define mean­ing­ful home­work?” We com­piled the results and pre­sented them to the Direc­tor of Instruc­tion for Stu­dent Ser­vices in our school dis­trict in the San Ramon Val­ley. We also gave the Direc­tor of Instruc­tion research arti­cles on home­work and other infor­ma­tion related to homework.

Not long after, the Direc­tor of Instruc­tion informed us that the SRVUSD (San Ramon Val­ley Uni­fied School Dis­trict) would be form­ing a home­work task force to reeval­u­ate the cur­rent home­work pol­icy. And, I was invited to par­tic­i­pate on the task force. I accepted the invi­ta­tion because Julie’s full-time job pre­vented her from par­tic­i­pat­ing. The task force includes 19 peo­ple – a sam­ple of par­ents, teach­ers, & admin­is­tra­tors. It has met sev­eral times since the begin­ning of the year and will con­tinue to meet until May, most likely, when a new pol­icy will be pre­sented to the pub­lic and to the Board for approval.

In the mean­time, one of the local news­pa­pers, the Danville Weekly, has writ­ten two pieces on home­work to keep this issue in the public’s eye. You can read them here and here.

Julie and I are very hope­ful that the new pol­icy will be bet­ter than the old one and that steps will be taken to insure imple­men­ta­tion of the new pol­icy, hope­fully begin­ning next fall.

Posted in category Guest Bloggers, Moms (and Dads) on a Mission on March 6, 2008 at 10:07 am
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