Stop Homework

Today’s guest blog­ger is Kerry Dick­in­son, 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, are actively work­ing to change home­work pol­icy in their community.

How We’re Orga­niz­ing in Danville, Cal­i­for­nia
by Kerry Dickinson

Julie, and I have been spear-heading a move­ment to get our dis­trict (San Ramon Val­ley Uni­fied Dis­trict — SRVUSD) to re-evaluate its out­dated home­work pol­icy, writ­ten in 1995.

We’ve started an email dis­tri­b­u­tion list (cur­rently at about 80 peo­ple) and have sent out a gen­eral sur­vey about home­work to col­lect ini­tial data to present to the dis­trict. We ended up with about 60 com­pleted sur­veys which I put into an Excel file.

Julie and I met with the Direc­tor of Instruc­tion, Stu­dent Ser­vices, at our dis­trict on Novem­ber 27. He seemed gen­uinely con­cerned with our issue. We gave him the results of our sur­vey and he agreed to study it and get back to us.

A week later, he called Julie and told her that he met with the Edu­ca­tional Ser­vices Cab­i­net in the SRVUSD and they dis­cussed home­work. He indi­cated the group shares our con­cern about home­work and the out­dated pol­icy we have. He stated after the win­ter break that a task force group would be devel­oped to address the home­work issue in our com­mu­nity as well as the home­work pol­icy. This task force would be com­prised of a wide vari­ety of stake­hold­ers who can fairly rep­re­sent the opin­ions that vary through­out the San Ramon Val­ley, includ­ing par­ents. They did not know who would be on it or how it would be devel­oped or even how large or small it would be. This is yet to be decided.

So, at this point, we are cau­tiously opti­mistic about meet­ing with the dis­trict after the break to begin to form a task force and move for­ward with rewrit­ing the out­dated home­work policy.

In the mean­time, we con­tinue to write edi­to­ri­als to the local paper and keep com­mu­ni­cat­ing with par­ents on our home­work email list about any rel­e­vant issues that per­tain to this home­work issue.

Posted in category Guest Bloggers, Moms (and Dads) on a Mission on December 10, 2007 at 1:25 pm
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