Lady Wildcats’ softball season ends in district final loss

Cheri Ritz and her young Lady Wildcats.

It’s been said in sports conventional wisdom that it’s extremely difficult for a team to beat another three times in one season

Middleville Thornapple Kellogg’s softball squad, however, beat Wayland for the third time this spring, this time in the final round of the Division 2 district tournament at Hopkins, 11-5.

It’s been quite a season thus far for TK, which ended Wayland’s 14-year streak of winning or sharing the O-K Gold Conference and halting the Lady Wildcats’ string of 10 consecutive district titles.

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Gardens for Grand Rapids partners with Steepletown and continues providing raised garden beds for families experiencing food insecurity in 2019

But Jeff Smith

On Friday, the last of the raised garden beds were delivered for 2019. This was the fourth year that Gardens for Grand Rapids has built and delivered raised garden beds, soil and plants for families experiencing food insecurity. Over the four year period, Gardens for Grand Rapids has provided 135 families with raised garden beds.

On Friday, the last of the raised garden beds were delivered for 2019. This was the fourth year that Gardens for Grand Rapids has built and delivered raised garden beds, soil and plants for families experiencing food insecurity. Over the four year period, Gardens for Grand Rapids has provided 135 families with raised garden beds.

However, this year was somewhat different, in a good way. This year, Gardens for Grand Rapids partnered with Steepletown Neighborhood Services, specifically their JobStart program. Steepletown applied for a Neighborhood Match Fund grant and was selected to receive the grant in April. The idea that Steepletown had in mind for the Neighborhood Match Fund was to partner with Gardens for Grand Rapids to not only provide 25 families with a raised garden bed, soil and plants, but to provide an opportunity to the young men in the JobStart program to learn some new skills and maybe develop an interest in gardening.

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State School Rankings and School Report Cards Drive Racial and Economic Segregation

janresseger

The federal Every Student Succeeds Act, passed in 2015 to replace No Child Left Behind, requires states to provide school report cards as an accountability tool.  The promotional materials from the U.S. Department of Education describe state report cards as a resource for parents—a way to help them know the quality of their child’s school. The report cards must include at least the school’s aggregate standardized test scores, and if the school is a secondary school, its graduation rate. Overall grades are not federally required, but many states now assign overall summative ratings. But instead of a valuable resource about the quality of particular public schools, the report cards and the rankings and ratings that frequently accompany them have become racist dog whistles telling parents just which schools serve homogeneous, privileged student populations. Websites like Zillow publish the school ratings as part of real estate advertising.

Even though they are…

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