Background: Lyme disease is a common tick-borne disease in the northeastern and midwestern United States. School-aged children aged 5-15 years are at high risk for contracting Lyme disease. Many school campuses in the mid-Atlantic United States are in areas that are near, or border with, wooded habitat. Methods: We surveyed school administrators…

Public school districts are locally controlled and funded through local property taxes. Funding schools this way perpetuates structural inequities in poorer school districts and as a result, students living in poverty have minimal access to critical resources that support student learning. Community schools are resurfacing in many of these urban…

Successful change in schools is planned, expected and managed with the objective focused on benefiting the students, not just converting the staff. This investigation is a case study of a public school district that opted to implement curricular change following an examination of the district's performance toward adequate yearly progress. This…

School reformers hope that converting comprehensive high schools into collections of small schools will produce results similar to those realized in freestanding small schools. Three themes--personalization, professional community, and shared decision making--exemplify the early successes in conversions. But the challenge of sustaining these gains…

"Between Public and Private" examines an innovative approach to school district management that has been adopted by a number of urban districts in recent years: a portfolio management model, in which "a central office oversees a portfolio of schools offering diverse organizational and curricular themes, including traditional public…

"Leading indicators"--indicators that provide early signals of progress toward academic achievement--enable education leaders, especially at the central office level in a school district, to make more strategic and less reactive decisions about services and supports to improve student learning. These indicators are a way of viewing and…

Central-office administrators might consider developing new volunteer policies to ensure students' health and safety. Suggestions for soliciting, selecting, and using school volunteers include using community resources, developing selection and evaluation guidelines, determining a volunteer's suitability, and publicizing good deeds. (MLH)