lemoult_brookside_web_130326<\/a><\/p>\nBrookside’s not a wealthy school. 61% of kids at the school get free or reduced price lunch based on their family incomes. About 60% of the students in the school are Hispanic, and many of their parents don\u2019t speak English. A lot of the kids don\u2019t have any pre-schooling before they show up for kindergarten. A recent test showed that about 38% of kids walking in the Brookside Kindergarten door didn\u2019t have the necessary basic skills \u2013 like knowing the alphabet and recognizing shapes.<\/p>\n
As a result of the budget crunch, the school has lost it’s full-time literacy specialist and the library is closed every other week. But Brookside Principal David Hay says it’s not an excuse.
\n\u201cThat\u2019s the first thing you\u2019ve got to accept, that you can\u2019t say \u2018because we don\u2019t have this, we won\u2019t be able to do something with the children,” says Hay. “You got to recognize it, it\u2019s not going to change. Income is probably the biggest thing, because kids don\u2019t have experiences, resources, that a lot of the wealthier kids have. So we have to try to get those for them any way we can.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Students around Connecticut have been busy taking standardized tests this month. Based on the results of those tests, some schools are labeled as failing. One of those, Brookside Elementary in Norwalk, is the subject of a new book, “Raising the Curve: A year inside one of America’s 45,000 failing public schools.” Listen to Craig LeMoult’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stateofdisparity.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stateofdisparity.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stateofdisparity.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stateofdisparity.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stateofdisparity.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=323"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.stateofdisparity.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":328,"href":"http:\/\/www.stateofdisparity.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323\/revisions\/328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stateofdisparity.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stateofdisparity.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stateofdisparity.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Brookside](\"http:\/\/www.stateofdisparity.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/keith_morey.jpg\")
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