Visit the new website to view the ratings and details about the programs and services systematically reviewed by the Title IV-E Prevention Services Clearinghouse!
The Prevention Services Clearinghouse was established by the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to systematically review research and evaluation on programs and services intended to provide enhanced support to children and families and prevent foster care placements. The Prevention Services Clearinghouse rates programs and services as well-supported, supported, or promising practices, in accordance with statutory requirements. These practices include mental health services, substance abuse prevention and treatment services, in-home parent skill-based programs, and kinship navigator programs. The Prevention Services Clearinghouse is an objective, rigorous, and transparent source of information on evidence-based programs and services that may be eligible for funding under Title IV-E of the Social Security Act as amended by the Family First Prevention Services Act.
The Prevention Services Clearinghouse website allows users to:
Learn about programs and services rated as well-supported, supported, promising, or does not currently meet criteria.
Access information about the review process and ratings, including the Prevention Services Clearinghouse Handbook of Standards and Procedures.
Find answers to Frequently Asked Questions, including how to recommend programs and services for review.
Access information about program or service implementation and resources.
ROCKVILLE, Md. (ABC7) — A former assistant principal at Damascus High School who was charged with drunk driving twice in less than two years will become an assistant principal at Col. E. Brooke Lee Middle School in Silver Spring...
Handwritten notations and highlighting have been added.
The above page from a February Report on artificial turf infill was posted to the Board of Education's Agenda for the June 24, 2019, meeting (video of parent reporting on continuing injuries to athletes from Richard Montgomery HS artificial turf).
Also posted with this page of the Labosport Report was information from MCPS showing which field was referenced by each column of the chart. We have made notations on the above Report showing which MCPS field the data refers to and what type of infill was used at each field.
Pages 1 and 2 of the Labosport Report were not made public.
The Labosport Report shows that the Whitman High School artificial turf plastic grass is taller than the plastic grass installed at Richard Montgomery HS and Einstein HS. The Report also shows that the Richard Montgomery HS infill is highly abrasive. In addition, in the columns evaluating the ZEOFILL infill we see higher numbers for abrasiveness.
This Report shows that there is increased abrasiveness when ZEOFILL is used in the infill.
Why has the Board of Education been withholding this report from the public since February? Students continued to use these fields even when the Board of Education KNEW there was a hazardous situation causing injury to students.
When will the Richard Montgomery High School artificial turf infill be REMOVED and REPLACED with a less abrasive infill?
It was 10:30 a.m. on a Monday in April. Nine counselors, psychologists, and therapists sat around a table in a conference room at Cañon City High School in southern Colorado.
In classrooms around the building, the school’s ninth-graders whizzed through an online mental health survey that would soon deliver real-time data to the group in the conference room. They were a triage team of sorts — particularly interested in the answers to question 24, which asked how often students had had thoughts of hurting themselves within the past week.
By 10:35 a.m., most of the results were in. Over the next few hours, team members pulled students who had responded “very often” or “often” out of class for private one-on-one conversations.
The overarching message to students, said Jamie Murray, a district psychologist who helped coordinate the effort, was “It’s OK to not be OK.”
While many Colorado school districts have beefed up mental health supports in recent years, Cañon City’s decision to administer a mental health screening to high school students is rare. Many district leaders are wary of soliciting such sensitive information, fearing they won’t have the tools to help students in crisis or that they’ll be liable if tragedy strikes and they weren’t able to intervene.
“When they let me know they had been working on rolling out this universal screener in the high school, that was amazing to me,” said Brian Turner, CEO of Solvista Health, a community mental health center that embeds some staff members in Cañon City schools.
“We were hearing that no district would touch it because it felt so risky,” he said. “To hear that they weren’t fazed by that … was really refreshing.”..
On Richard Montgomery High School’s Artificial Turf
Good evening members of the Board of Education and Superintendent Smith. You may remember at the CIP hearings in November a student from Richard
Montgomery who plays on the soccer team as a goalie, Molly Winchenbach. She
testified about the unusual abrasiveness of RM’s new artificial turf field and the
resulting injuries suffered by student athletes. She is my daughter. She would be
here tonight to give you this update and make this plea herself, but she is at practice. High school athletes never seem to have a season off these days.
To MCPS’s credit, after Molly’s testimony, they sent out samples of RM’s and Whitman’s artificial turf for independent testing to a lab in Canada. Both
fields had been installed at the same time using the same organic Zeofill rock/sand mix but their effect on the athletes was drastically different with RM’s field causing substantially more serious abrasion injuries. That different experience of
the athletes was confirmed by the objective tests. Although in my meeting with the Director of Construction and Director of Athletics back in February to go over the results of the tests, I was not permitted to keep a copy, I wrote down the pertinent
results right after the meeting, so my numbers are within a few points. There was agreement in the room that the results were shocking. The abrasiveness of the field
was measured against FIFA’s standard of 30.
Old crumb rubber fields tested a 3.
Whitman’s field tested a 20. RM’s field tested 128! Four times the FIFA standard! The lab tests also figured out why – the volcanic rock particles used in the RM field Zeofill were much larger than those used at Whitman, and at RM, the rock was layered with the sand like a cake, rather than all mixed together, as it was at Whitman.
Now that MCPS has verified what we have been saying all along – there is
something very wrong with the RM turf – it is so abrasive, it is tearing the skin off the athletes, what are you going to do about it? MCPS thought that perhaps they
had solved the problem for this spring. They had removed some of the fill and
tried to mix up the layers more by deep tining it. The plan then was to just replace
the offending larger particle fill with the smaller particle fill gradually with regular
monthly maintenance. But, I’m here to tell you, on behalf of my daughter and the
other student athletes who are using and will be using this field in the fall
regularly, that MCPS’s remediation plan is not aggressive enough. I’ve provided
you with a picture of what happened to Molly’s leg the first time she slid on the
turf this spring to stop a ball coming into the goal. The RM turf scraped off the top layer of about 6 inches of her skin. This cannot be the conditions under which you
expect student athletes to play. While all athletes may not experience the
abrasiveness of the RM field the same, it is particularly damaging to the students,
like Molly in positions, like goalie, who have to slide on the turf all the time. She
plays on turf all over the county, both indoor and outdoor, and only receives
serious injuries like this from the RM turf.
I understand that MCPS is in the process of asking the manufacturer of the
turf how much it will cost to replace all or most of the fill in RM’s turf all at once
over the summer. I am asking you to ensure this remediation gets done
immediately. (And any cost should not come out of CIP funds already allocated
to capital expenditures for RM, which needs substantial expansion over the
summer just to keep up with its ever growing student population.) You owe it to
the students whose health and safety you say are your top priority. You now know this turf is 4x the standard for abrasiveness, you know the reasons why it is so abrasive, and you know what you need to do to fix it. Don’t waste anymore time while more students get hurt. Do it now.
Thank you.
Trial Begins in Sex Assault Case Where Liaisons Were Arranged Via Dating App
...Colin Sime Black, 35, was arrested in October 2017 and charged with second-degree rape, four counts of second-degree sexual offenses, two counts of second-degree assault and false imprisonment stemming from two interactions with women he met through the Tinder matchmaking service between December 2016 and March 2017.
Black was a guidance counselor at Albert Einstein High School in Kensington and was placed on administrative leave after his arrest...
It’s only two sentences, but says a lot. After nearly two years, following a judge’s orders, Baltimore City Public Schools has finally un-redacted portions of an internal grade changing investigation it didn’t want the public to read.
“What it tells me is that what you uncovered, what Project Baltimore uncovered, the rounding up of grades is something that has been going on for a while and they didn’t want you or anyone else to get into the details of it,” said Clarence Mitchell IV, or C4, who hosts one of the region’s most listened to radio talk shows.
Mitchell is a former state Senator and grandson of a civil rights icon. Baltimore’s courthouse has his name on it. And he’s been paying close attention to Fox45’s public records lawsuit against City Schools.
“It makes me mad. It should make all of us mad,” said Mitchell...
LOCKPORT, N.Y. — I have a 16-year-old daughter, and like every parent in the United States today, I worry about her safety when she’s in school. But here in Western New York’s Lockport City School District, those fears have led to a wasteful and dangerous experiment.
This week the district’s eight public schools began testing a system called Aegis, which includes facial recognition technology, that could eventually be used to track and map student movements in our schools. How that happened is a cautionary tale for other schools across the country.
In 2015, in the wake of Sandy Hook and other high-profile school shootings, our district was approached by Tony Olivo, a security consultant, who offered to do a free threat assessment of our schools. Later, he encouraged the school district to purchase and install a high-tech facial-recognition camera system developed by SN Technologies, a Canadian company whose sole surveillance experience was in the casino industry. But the software cost a fortune — $1.4 million for a district of a little over 4,400 students and an annual budget of just over $100 million.
Mr. Olivo identified a funding source the district could use to make the purchase — using money Lockport was set to receive for technology education under a 2014 Smart Schools Bond Act. Far from being an independent expert, however, he also stood to benefit financially from the deal. A proposed licensing agreement the school district was forced to disclose showed that Mr. Olivo’s company, CSI Risk Management, was negotiating a payment of $95,450 annually for five years. Neither he nor the school district would disclose what he was eventually paid...
ROCKVILLE – A consultant hired by Montgomery County Public Schools found that schools with elevated levels of poverty had fewer high-quality teachers despite spending more money per student than schools with low levels of poverty.
In a presentation in front of the Montgomery County Board of Education on “resource allocations analysis” June 11, the consultant – Education Resource Strategies Inc. (ERS) explained aspects of that equity gap.
During the presentation, ERS partner Johnathan Travers discussed teacher quality as well as “instructional time and attention,” both of which, he said, can be used to measure equity.
“What does access to high-teaching quality look like now, across the system?” asked Travers. “There are a lot of ways of being able to look at and measure this.”
MCPS hired Education Resource Strategies, Inc. to examine spending per student in all schools, which will be required next fiscal year under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). This act replaced the No Child Left Behind Act a few years ago.
“In accordance with the new regulations set forth in the Every Student Succeeds Act, school districts will be required to publish per-pupil spending by individual schools,” according to the request for proposal released in June 2018. “MCPS must prepare for the technical changes needed to report spending by individual schools.”
In the fall, per-pupil spending in schools will become public...
Among the nation’s 30 largest school districts, Montgomery County schools report the second-highest number of incidents where students are placed in isolation rooms for behavior problems, according to a new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
The report, examining the quality of the data the U.S. Department of Education collects on school systems’ use of seclusion and physical restraint, showed the Montgomery school system reported 120 incidents of seclusion in the 2015-2016 school year and 332 cases of physical restraint, both among largest totals reported by school systems with more than 100,000 students.
Baltimore County Public Schools, with about 45,000 fewer students than Montgomery’s, reported the largest number of seclusion incidents with 157.
The practice of isolating a student to a confined area has come under fire from education activists who say doing so impedes a student’s education and can pose physical and mental health dangers. School system leaders across the country argue seclusion is a last resort intervention reserved for situations where children pose serious safety threats to themselves or others.
The GAO report was prompted by concerns that school districts have been underreporting incidents of seclusion. The most recent data showed 70% of the more than 17,000 school districts nationwide reported zero incidents of restraint and seclusion, according to the report from the congressional watchdog office, but its analysis found the data does not “accurately capture all incidents of restraint and seclusion in schools.”
Nine of the 10 school districts with more than 100,000 students that reported zero incidents of restraint and seclusion in the 2015-2016 school year later confirmed they either did not collect the data or did not correctly report their totals. It is unclear how many instances of restraint or seclusion those schools had...
Vaping in Schools The E&C Committee and HHS Committee will meet jointly to hear from representatives from the County’s Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) on vaping in schools. The purpose of the discussion is because of the rise in the number of young people who are using e-cigarettes, vaping devices or electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS). Many of these devices are hard to detect as they tend to look like computer thumb drives (USB), pen, or an item that students would commonly and appropriately carry. Those expected to attend include Dr. Travis Gayles, County health officer and chief of Public Health Services, DHHS; Dr. Jonathan T. Brice [Note Brice is busy looking for a job in other communities.], associate superintendent, Office of Student and Family Support and Engagement, MCPS; and Dr. Cara Grant, supervisor, pre-K – 12 Health and Physical Education, MCPS.
At the May 8 Board of Education meeting, while discussing funding for dyslexia training and intervention in the budget, board President Brad Young expressed his belief that advocacy should focus on other areas and told those in the public meeting, “The two or three students that committed suicide last year ... they can’t read now, can they?”
It is unbelievable that Mr. Young, as president of the Board of Education, an elected official and appointed leader, would make such an egregious, insensitive and flippant remark in a public forum as a way to drive home his opinion. It shows lack of decorum and ignorance of the issues at hand.
Just moments before, parents gave heart-wrenching speeches about how their middle and high school students have suffered emotionally, and how they were just recently identified as dyslexic and reading at a second- or third-grade level.
People in the room were moved to tears at the students’ stories, and then Mr. Young comments about student suicides and how those children can’t read anymore?
It is beyond inappropriate and showed lack of compassion or understanding of the struggle...
Jonathan Brice, an associate superintendent for the Montgomery County Public School system in Maryland, was the first candidate to be interviewed.
There were about a dozen observers in the audience. Some who had pushed for the school board to hold interviews in public, confessed they didn’t expect them to do it so didn’t come the first night.
Brice described himself as an urban educator whose trajectory from a poor Baltimore, Md., neighborhood to a doctorate from Harvard University included a stint as as a deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education. The district where he now works serves 163,000 students.
He called the Bridgeport job a perfect fit for his skill set.
If hired in Bridgeport, Brice pledged not to be merely a caretaker but to move the district forward and set the table for the individual who comes after.
He said he would focus his year in the district on curriculum, enhancing the district’s work in social emotional learning and the district’s significant budget issues.
“I would walk in with an established game plan,” he said. “One year gives me opportunity to ... create conditions so that the next superintendent can hit ground running.”..
An after-school program facilitator at Bradley Hills Elementary School and Cabin John Middle School was arrested on six counts of indecent exposure on Friday, according to school officials.
In a letter to Bradley Hills families Friday afternoon, Principal Karen Caroscio told parents Ji-Ho No was arrested after “an incident” on May 21.
The principal did not elaborate on the circumstances, and school system officials and a police spokesman could not be reached for comment Friday evening.
The Run Club, led by No, is an after-school club offered at the school through Washington-based Flex Academies and Reston, Virginia-based Overtime Athletics. Overtime Athletics is a vendor for Flex Academies.
The Bradley Hills Parent-Teacher Association contracts with Flex Academies to run after-school programs at the school, according to a message sent Friday afternoon from the PTA leaders.
School officials became aware of the exposure incident the evening of May 21 and Caroscio immediately contacted police and placed No on administrative leave, according to the PTA message. A parent reported the incident to police...
The Parents' Coalition of Montgomery County, MD has repeatedly contacted the Maryland ACLU over the last 12 years to request assistance in eliminating illegal curricular fees in Montgomery County Public Schools. The response from the ACLU was that they did not have the time to address this issue. They believed the elected officials in Montgomery County would step up and do the right thing by our public school children. One ACLU representative termed illegal curricular fees charged by the Montgomery County Board of Education as:
"taxing the ignorant."
That implies that parents who know Maryland law will not pay illegal fees. And that is exactly what has happened in Montgomery County. Parents that know the law, don't pay the illegal curricular fees charged by MCPS. Parents that are ignorant of the Maryland Constitution's guarantee of a free public education for all have been paying the illegal fees.
Here is the lawsuit filed this week in Prince George's County regarding the fees the public school system charges for students to attend public school classes in the summer.
When Laurie Tucker’s family moved during her son’s senior year of high school, she was sorry to hear the last two classes he needed weren’t offered at his new school during spring semester. Instead of graduating, he has to finish up in summer school.
An even worse surprise: The family will have to pay for those classes.
On Thursday, students sued the suburban Maryland school system where Tucker’s son attends class in a bid to lift summer-school fees.
Students shouldn’t be able to graduate only if they can afford to, said Tucker, whose son is one of the plaintiffs arguing the right to a free public education is guaranteed under the Maryland Constitution.
Tucker was shocked by the price for summer school in Prince George’s County: $225 per class, which will be a burden for her family. Her husband works as a driver delivering donations to nonprofit agencies, she said, to support their three children; she stopped working two years ago to care for their youngest child, who is 4 years old and has a disability.
Prince George’s schools spokeswoman Raven Hill said it is policy to not comment on pending litigation. But she confirmed the fees: $100 per half credit, with a $25 registration fee, for county students. Those who qualify for free- or reduced-price meals because of their families’ income levels are required to pay only half of those amounts.
Students from outside the county are charged more, $645 for a full credit plus the $25 registration fee. Hill said the fees are mainly to cover the cost of paying employees who don’t normally work over the summer...
