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Magnet school gets rolling

 
Published Nov. 26, 2014

After months spent talking about it, parents finally will be able to apply for Pasco County's first magnet school on Monday.

Sanders Memorial Elementary STEAM Magnet School, combining sciences and the arts, will be open to children in kindergarten through fifth grade who live anywhere in the county. Admission to the school will be based on a lottery, although preference will be given to children who live within the Connerton and Oakstead elementary school boundaries, and children of Sanders employees.

Students do not have to provide a portfolio, meet any performance or grade requirements, or otherwise provide qualifications to win admission. Once children are accepted and enrolled, they won't have to apply again.

To address families' concerns about access to Sanders, district officials decided to offer bus routes to children living within 5 miles of the school, located at 5126 School Road in Land O'Lakes. Students outside the zone would need to get a ride to Trinity, Moon Lake or Veterans elementary schools, where a bus would pick them up for the morning ride to Sanders and then drop them off at the end of the day.

Sanders will have a PLACE program before and after classes, but parents also can enroll their children in PLACE at Trinity, Moon Lake or Veterans if that is more convenient.

The application period will run through Jan. 15 and take place online only. Families will find the forms by clicking on the Sanders banner on the front of the school district website at pasco.k12.fl.us.

District spokeswoman Linda Cobbe said the lottery results will be available the first week of February, so that families who are not selected may still participate in the district's other school choice process, which begins Feb. 1.

MORE THAN A SHINY BOX: Pasco schoolteachers need to get in tune with the computer age, and it's the school district's obligation to provide them the training to get there, superintendent Kurt Browning said at a recent symposium on digital classrooms.

"Oftentimes, we think of technology integration into the classroom as just the shiny box," Browning told the gathering during a panel discussion.

But professional development is required. Otherwise, he said, the devices and software that the district have purchased "may as well just sit in the box."

Plenty of teachers are tech savvy, Browning acknowledged. Yet "we still have teachers that like the closed doors, straight rows and working out of textbooks. We are telling them that is not the way."

He said the district's effort in this area remains a work in progress, and that the administration is aiming to support teachers in their instructional technology efforts as much as possible. That includes slowly returning technology specialists to schools, which lost them about a year ago because of budget cuts.

STILL NO DEAL: Representatives for the School Board and teachers union met last week hoping to strike a contract agreement before the Thanksgiving break. They walked away without a resolution.

The key issues remaining are the district's local early retirement plan, which the board wants to end; the frequency of employee paychecks, which the union wants to keep unchanged, and the amount of pay raises.

The sides took this week off to let tensions dissipate. They're scheduled to be back at the table on Dec. 3.

Contact Jeffrey S. Solochek at jsolochek@tampabay.com or (813) 909-4614. Follow @jeffsolochek.