School News, Kids Restauarant Week, New Nonchalant Parenting Trend, and Cool Raffles

6/8/09 - By Anna Fader

First, I gotta thank all you great people who voted for us for best NYC local blog over the weekend. We got some real momentum going. I hope you will all keep voting for us every day. If you were not online over the weekend, please take a moment to catch up on how you can help Mommy Poppins get dubbed number one NYC local blog and vote for us.

And now for the news: we haven't done one of these for a while now so there's lots of school news to catch up on, especially with budget cuts, mayoral control and test scores all hanging in the balance. Also find out about a really cool fundraiser, the new parenting trend, and great deals on eating out during kids' restaurant week. Dig in:

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Win/Win: Some people sign up for a 5K run to raise money and call it a day. Not our friend Jodi from Pistols and Popcorn. When she decided to help her brother raise money for the Lance Armstrong Foundation that has been helping them struggle through his wife's breast cancer, she didn't stop with a 5K, she went the extra mile (or ten miles in this case).

Jodi has created an amazing fundraising event on her site. For a mere $5 raffle ticket you can win cool kids duds, an oil painting portrait of your kid, event tickets and more exotic prizes. Plus the grand prize is tickets and the possibility to meet Michelle Williams at her red carpet premier. Thanks, Jodi, for humbling us all in our piddling efforts. PS, can I win the Appaman clothes? Click here to learn donate/enter.

The end of over-parenting? Lisa Belkin writes in last week's NY Times Magazine about a perceived shift from overbearing "helicopter" parenting to the new trend toward nonchalance in parenting and questions what this really means.

Cookie and Gourmet Magazine's Kid's Restaurant Week is June 20-28. Participating restaurants in NYC will be offering early seatings where parents pay $29 and kids under 11 pay their age. It's a great way to introduce your kids to eating out in nice restaurants and get a great meal at a great value.

Mayoral control of the public schools sometimes seems like one of those issues that is so complicated I feel like I can't understand it well enough to take a stance, but it's an important issue that affects all parents in New York City. Downtown Express had a great editorial which explains why it supports mayoral control, with some refinements, predominantly more input from parents. I think this is a good approach to support because, while overall I do think Bloomberg has done a good job running the schools, my one main gripe is that he behaves like such an autocrat.

In other NYC school news, school budgets are being cut by 5% next year, one big effect I'm hearing about is that teaching aides and assistants are going to be much harder to have in the classroom, a major minus. The GothamSchools blog has an interactive comment map where individuals can describe what their school will be losing due to budget cuts. Interesting.

Math scores continued to rise this year, but some question the results.

Also, the DOE sent a letter home saying that students who have stayed home due to swine flu will forgiven their absences if the parents send a note stating they were absent because of swine flu. I think it'd be hilarious to send in a note asking for our recent spat of latenesses to be forgiven due to swine flu, but, honestly, it's probably a different ailment, namely, Spring Fever.

Thanks for reading all the way down here. Later, Gator!