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Schools

Healthy School Lunch Can Be Hard to Find

by NYC Private Schools on February 4, 2010

Healthy and nutritious foods for children are absolutely vital to maintaining their health and their alert, positive energy throughout the day. When students have the right healthy foods they also have the essential building blocks that their bodies need to fight off infections, enrich cognitive function and memory and stay physically and mentally healthy. As parents, most do their best to enable children to experience and learn about new foods and make better dietary choices. However, there is little control over school time lunches.

Many NYC Private Schools have brought in world class chefs in order to help students make real and lasting changes in their diets. When there is a variety of healthy choices, students will find their own favorites. Not all schools are so lucky, however.

The Daily News recently posted an article about the reality of school lunches in some NYC Public School programs.

Sky-high salt levels aren’t the only problems on the menu in city public schools.
The health-crazed Bloomberg administration often touts how it has overhauled school lunches and slashed calories – but critics charge the standard cafeteria fare is still far from healthy

A Daily News survey found lunchrooms routinely serve highly processed foods such as mozzarella sticks and pizza, which critics charge are loaded with preservatives and other unhealthy ingredients.

Nutritionists said processing foods, such as turning chicken into nuggets, removes nutrients while adding possibly unhealthy preservatives and fillers. Processed foods also pack more sugar, fat and salt to make up for flavors lost in processing.

One of the best ways to find out what kind of lunch program is being offered in your child’s school is, of course, to actually get a taste of it. Ideally, see if you can get permission to have lunch with your child for a day. While this may not be feasible, another solution is try to get a copy of the week’s lunch menu to look at the choices available to your child. If the menu is full of unhealthy choices and ingredients, perhaps it is time to instill a new NYC Healthy Lunch Program by packing your child’s lunch from home.


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NYC Teachers and Potential Layoffs

by NYC Private Schools on January 31, 2010

The overall picture of Education in NYC Schools was laid out as bleak at the beginning of last year. Economic concerns, increases in Private School Tuition, more competition for Financial Aid, all of these items that factor into Private Schools were coupled with the loss of thousands of Public School teachers and massive budget cuts in those public schools which had the complicated result in larger class sizes, less benefits and more difficult learning environments. Public School increasingly became a non-option and Private School was more difficult to gain admittance to and afford once admitted.

In the latest news, the outlook for Public Schools is even more dire, as potentially devastating cuts in budgets may include mass layoffs of Public School teachers. The NY Times reported on the NYC Teachers Union developments and how the budget cuts may affect them all.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has said that if the city does not wring pay concessions from the teachers’ union and all of Gov. David A. Paterson’s proposed budget cuts are approved — a worst case — the city may have to get rid of 11,000 of its 79,000 teachers. Last year, about 3,800 were lost through attrition, mostly retirement, so if similar numbers are recorded this year, several thousand could receive pink slips.

“We’re going to have to make some personnel decisions because that is where the bulk of the money is.”

When teachers are let go, class sizes increase dramatically and individual ability to gain support and assistance becomes very difficult. The loss of teachers in any educational environment is devastating to the educational system as a whole.


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NAIS Principles for Parents and Schools

December 20, 2009

NYC Private Schools are so successful because they have a longstanding tradition of working with their families and students to create the best educational environment for each individual student. There is so much focus on finding the right school for your child that many forget the simple fact that schools are trying to find [...]

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NYC Independent Schools

September 12, 2009

The NYSAIS is a voluntary association of independent schools in the state of New York. Many of the NYC Private Schools that we reference and discuss are a part of the NYSAIS association, and the association itself has a huge impact in the Private School community.
With so many private schools and their own, sometimes [...]

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Educational Reform Through TV

September 10, 2009

The model of NYC Private Schools’ competition for top students was mentioned in a NY Post article that heralded the arrival of the Gates Foundation/Viacom educational venture.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is partnering with Viacom Inc.’s television networks, education leaders and celebrities to launch an awareness campaign to reduce the number of dropouts.[in American [...]

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AP Access in Schools and Rankings

July 14, 2009

A Washington Post article on Advanced Placement in Schools introduced some interesting facts and arguments onto the already volatile point of school rankings. The author, Jay Matthews, pens a yearly ranking of Public Schools for Newsweek Magazine, which derives its figures by the amount of students a school sits for the AP exams.
Fifteen [...]

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