Middle School

There was a snake in the auditorium Monday ? and a tarantula and a desert tortoise and a chinchilla, among several other critters. Bonnie McQuisten, who works for the Orange County Department of Education, held up a ball python longer than her arm and explained to about 20 youths how he can smell to the left and right with his tongue, swallow animals three times as large as his head, and slither out of a room at a moment?s notice. ?Ever been bit by a snake on the job?? one boy asked.

The principals of Costa Mesa High School and its associated middle school will be at Karl Strauss Brewing Company in Costa Mesa on Thursday night to spend some time talking with anyone who’s interested. For a $50 donation to the Costa Mesa High School Foundation, parents can come get to know the men responsible for running their kids’ schools. Fundraisers like this are important to the foundation, according to founding board member Bill Sneen, because the foundation has more flexibility on how it chooses to spend the funds.

Vicki Snell, a parent of two students in the Newport-Mesa Unified School District and a former PTA president at Adams Elementary School and TeWinkle Middle School, has been named president of the Harbor Council PTA. The Harbor Council PTA is a parents’ group that oversees all PTAs in the Newport-Mesa district, relays information from the state and offers training and guidance for PTA presidents. Snell, whose children attend the seventh grade at TeWinkle and the ninth grade at Estancia High School, served as PTA president at Adams and TeWinkle for two years each before taking the Harbor Council post.

TeWinkle Middle School has made exceptional progress in its quest to be removed from a federal watch list of lagging schools, Newport-Mesa school district officials said today. Nine district educators put in charge of reviewing TeWinkle after it was placed on the No Child Left Behind Act’s Program Improvement list gave high marks to the middle school’s progress and felt confident it would soon be removed from the watch list. The committee’s evaluation didn’t advocate any drastic changes except ending TeWinkle’s sixth-grade instruction, a move that has been in the works for a long time.

Cynics who think kids today have no interest in war stories ought to meet Christiana Crabbe. “We’re honoring all the soldiers that fought for us so we can be free,” Crabbe said. “If we didn’t learn about all the people that fought for us, we might not know what to do when we’re older and something happens to us.” The eighth-grade Mariner’s Christian School student read her award-winning essay, “Reflections on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier,” Friday to about 60 veterans and hundreds of parents, students and others at a Veterans Day assembly at the Costa Mesa school.

A school board in Maine last week decided to let King Middle School students get birth control at their student health center. The move provoked an outcry from some who cited religious and health reasons for their opposition. Principal Michael McCarthy defended the decision. “I think it makes people nervous to think middle school students are having sex. Frankly, it makes me nervous. But there’s a small population out there that needs protection,” he said. What do you think of the school board’s decision?

Starting at 6 a.m., Newport-Mesa Unified school buses drive 70 routes carrying about 5,000 kids — from 22 elementary schools, two middle schools and seven high schools — to school. “It is a logistical challenge,” said Pete Meslin, the district’s director of transportation. “There are a lot of students being moved safely and efficiently from home to school and school to home.” When that efficiency is tested, every stop on a particular route is affected for the rest of the morning.

Newport-Mesa Unified schools showed improvement across the board, according to state standards and federal benchmarks released Friday. “We’re quite pleased and very encouraged with the results,” said Peggy Anatol, district assessment director, referring to the state’s Academic Performance Index (API) and the federal 2007 Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) results. The Academic Performance Index is a culmination of the results of state standardized tests and graduation rates.