News
D.C. School Takes Pride in Welcoming Students with LGBT ParentsKudos to the Oyster-Adams Bilingual School, which was featured in a Washington Post article this weekend about work being done in D.C. public elementary schools to create more welcoming environments for children with LGBT parents. School officials interviewed for the story say it’s important to instill these lessons early on before teasing and bullying cloud [...] |
Supporting the Whole ChildASCD is petitioning the Obama administration to make whole child education a national priority through the creation of a President’s Council on the Whole Child. Such a council would focus national attention on children and would provide the President with expert counsel to better coordinate the education, health, and social service sectors serving our nation’s [...] |
National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers Co-Sponsor National Premiere of Welcoming Schools Film ‘What Do You Know?’On January 12th Welcoming Schools joined the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers for the national premier of the new Welcoming Schools film, “What Do You Know? Six to twelve year olds talk about gays and lesbians.” Created as a professional development tool for educators, What Do You Know? is a 13 [...] |
Welcoming Schools Co-Sponsoring 3rd Annual CESCaL LGBTQIA ConferenceWelcoming Schools is proud to sponsor and present featured sessions at the Center for Excellence in School Counseling and Leadership’s 3rd annual national educator conference focused on LGBTQIA youth. The conference will take place February 17th – 19th in San Diego, CA. Many diverse workshops will provide conference goers with the knowledge, attitudes and skills [...] |
Using Art to Celebrate DifferencesBlogging at Follow Your Bliss Gary, a first grade teacher who works with Deaf and Hard of Hearing students in New York, explains how he turned the art in Todd Parr’s book, It’s Okay to be Different, into a project that allowed students to celebrate their own differences. Parr has long used his art to [...] |
School Bullying Studies Released by OJJDPThis month the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention released the results of three studies on school bullying. The report included findings that support the importance of a systemic approach to school change, similar to the far-reaching approach recommended by Welcoming Schools. The report says that effective anti-bullying programs include: skill-building approaches with consistent school wide [...] |
Bullying and Alabama’s New Immigration LawThe AP reports on the effects of Arizona’s new immigration law on children: Spanish-speaking parents say their children are facing more bullying and taunts at school since Alabama’s tough crackdown on illegal immigration took effect last month. Many blame the name-calling on fallout from the law, which has been widely covered in the news, discussed [...] |
Teaching That Supports Gender-Variant ChildrenWriting in Rethinking Schools, 1st grade teacher Melissa Bollow Tempel describes why and how she addressed gender stereotyping in class: The next day when I corrected classmates and told them that Allie was a girl, they asked her a lot of questions that she wasn’t prepared for: “Why do you look like a boy?” “If [...] |
|
Welcoming Schools Becomes a Whole Child Initiative PartnerWelcoming Schools is proud to have signed on as a partner with the Whole Child Initiative, a project that brings together leading education, health, arts, and civic organizations to stand behind an approach to education very much in line with Welcoming Schools. The Whole Child Initiative states that: Each child, in each school, in each [...] |
|
Becoming an Upstander: What Presidential Candidates can Learn from KidsThis post comes from Kim Westheimer, the director of Welcoming Schools. It’s not just kids who bully. I thought about that while listening to President Obama take the Republican Presidential Candidates to task at the Human Rights Campaign national dinner. He chastised the candidates for not speaking up during a presidential debate when a few [...] |
