High School News

The Hudson City School District will begin on-line payment of student fees in the fall of 2011. The original plan included piloting the program this year with “General Fees” only; however, additional development work and training is needed to ensure success. The district will instead begin a pilot program in the second semester of this year with a small number of fee-based programs. It is anticipated that starting in the fall of 2011 most student fees will be payable on-line.

The Boys of Style have grown up.

It is substance, they now say, that matters.

The men, who formed a fraternity in the Birmingham schools nearly three decades ago as a way to give young black men a chance to succeed in school and in life, now walk the streets trying to change a world that has changed more than they can fathom since their own adventures in middle school.

They see young men with no respect for authority, who dress like thugs and don’t value an education.

Now, after two decades of inactivity, the group is reuniting to make a difference.

“Our purpose was to be a brotherhood that represented style and unity,” said LV Meadows, one of the fraternity’s founding members.”Proper etiquette with our young black boys is gone. They don’t wear belts. They don’t wear the proper clothes. They have no respect or honor for their teachers, their parents or themselves.”

The fraternity, which began in 1983 and changed its name from Boys of Style to Brothers of Style in 1985 as the members reached high school, grew to 60 members with chapters in just about every Birmingham high school. About 35 of them have reunited to launch a mentoring partnership with Hemphill and Lee elementary schools.

While they are starting small, by adopting just two of Birmingham’s 57 schools, they hope to continue to expand to other city schools in years to come.

Today, the group will hold a “Reunion in the Park” back-to-school rally at Woodward Park in West End, where they will give out school supplies, food and, likely, a little advice.

“We need to give them a sense of belonging, with purpose,” Meadows said. “These are the same streets we walked on as kids, and it’s changed so much.”

The fraternity, which the men refer to simply as B.O.S., began as a way to encourage each other to maintain good grades, dress well and dedicate themselves to receiving an education.

“B.O.S. became the family to many young men that didn’t have fathers or big brothers in their lives,” Meadows said.

Each week, the members would meet at the library to help each other study. They networked to help each other find jobs.

Scared straight

It would have been just as easy to join a gang, group members say.

That’s exactly what’s happening to young children in Birmingham now, says Derrick Brewer, 38, a member of B.O.S.

“There’s a lot of gang activity, and they’re starting at 11 or 12 years old,” he said.

Now older with real jobs and many with families and children of their own, the members say they want to be positive influences in children’s lives.

That could include scaring the children straight.

Jerome McMullin, a 1989 West End High School graduate and member of B.O.S., introduced a new person to the group he thought would be perfect to mentor the kids.

That man is Robert Malone, an ex-gang member from South Central Los Angeles who served nearly two decades in prison for drugs and murder.

During his time at Pelican Bay State Prison, Malone earned his GED and began mentoring his fellow inmates. He took up religion.

Malone is now a motivational speaker who has talked to students around the country about why gangs are dangerous. He ended up in Birmingham, where he will bring his message to Hemphill and Lee elementary students.

“I’m all about bringing a positive attitude to these children,” he said. “No violence.”

Join the conversation by clicking to comment or e-mail Leech at mleech@bhamnews.com.

The 2011 Best Colleges rankings go live on August 17. How does U.S. News ensure the integrity of the data and the rankings that we publish?

We have a five-step process we use before the rankings are published.

Step 1: U.S. News uses standardized and accepted definitions of the college data that have been developed by experts in higher education to achieve data reporting comparability among schools. . As in the previous years, the ranking data questions contained in the statistical questionnaires we sent to colleges in the spring and early summer of 2010 either follow the standardized format in the Common Data Set or conform to definitions used by the U.S. Department of Education or other higher-education organizations.

Step 2: After each school submits its statistical data online via a password-protected U.S. News website, we analyze the data for factual errors and inconsistencies with other information on that school’s survey. In addition, we check to see whether any large changes had occurred from what the school had reported to us in the prior year. We do this by sending each school a “data assessment” report that flags potential errors or problems with its data. If schools have errors or big changes in their data, they have to sign off on those big changes or correct the errors before U.S. News uses their information in the rankings or publishes it.

Step 3: After each school clears up all possible problems, we send them a final “data verification” report and asked for each college to do a final check on all its information and for an official at the school to sign a verification form indicating that the data are accurate according to the definitions and are ready for U.S. News to use.

Step 4: We also cross-check data that the schools submitted to U.S. News with other official sources. Faculty salaries are cross-checked with data from the American Association of University Professors; six-year graduation rates are compared with data from the National Collegiate Athletic Association and the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics; and admissions, tuition, financial aid, and financial resources data is checked against information from the National Center for Education Statistics. In cases of a mismatch between the data a school submits to us and another official source, we will use the data from the official source and footnote the difference. We also obtained annual alumni-giving data from the Council for Aid to Education and used it in the rankings, if schools failed to report alumni giving.

Step 5: As the final but highly important last step, in mid-summer when we start crunching the numbers to produce the final Best Colleges school rankings, we do many preliminary runs of the data calculations. This lets us carefully analyze which schools’ overall rankings had changed significantly (up or down) from the previous year, figure out why that happened, and make sure it wasn’t because there was a mistake in the data.

After these steps are complete, we are ready to publish the rankings.