Making Plans

Hello and happy belated Valentine’s Day!

When did the first two months of the year become a marathon strategy session? Are other families feeling this too? At EdInk, we’ve been working to grow our audience and map out our next original story. (If you missed our debut feature on the work of Integrated Schools Columbus, you can read it here). But we’re also trying to fill out our 2024 family calendar in our, um, “free” time, which definitely takes longer as the kids get older and want to do more stuff. We’re making the solar eclipse on April 8 a high priority, and keeping an eye on COSI’s eclipse web page to be ready for the action! Read on for additional dates to get on your calendar.

☑️ Actions to Take

🎲 Enter the CCS lottery. If you’re looking beyond your homeschool for the 2024-25 school year, be sure to get your lottery applications in on time. Middle and high school lottery applications are due on Feb. 29, and elementary applications are due one month later. Don’t forget to check our recent primer on CCS enrollment for a complete list of deadlines and breakdown of the process.

🩴 Set up your summer. Have you experienced a virtual camp signup stampede yet this year? There’s just nothing like it. We’ve got kids on two different waitlists already, which is a new personal record before February 15. But we digress. Whether you’re on a waitlist with us, or you waited until now to start signing up, the city’s staggered schedules mean there’s still plenty of time to make a fantastic summer plan. 

• CCS’ Summer Experience is now accepting applications for its free programs.
• Columbus Recreation and Parks has two registration dates: Feb. 22 for outdoor recreation camps, and Feb. 27 for community center-based camps.
• Thurber House offers summer writing camp for kids in grades 2-9, and registration opens March 1.
• Metro Parks Summer Camp registration opens on March 6 for Franklin County residents.

💅 Treat yourself. Students from Columbus Downtown High School are running a real nail salon on South 4th Street! Are you getting a manicure? Yes. But you’re also supporting student learning, so you can feel even better about it. Select your time and service here. 

📰 News to Know

🎤 Leadership. New CCS Board President Christina Vera was recently interviewed in the Columbus Dispatch, where she shared her long history with the district as a former CCS student and current CCS parent. She also addressed some of the challenges ahead—including rebuilding community trust—telling the Dispatch, “We need them to believe in Columbus City Schools again.”

🏫 Building closures. One of Vera’s first challenges will be managing the planning around building consolidations and closures, a process being repeated across the country in the wake of COVID. Last week, the Board appointed a facilities task force to provide community input on the process. This comes after the Board approved paying a consulting firm over $500,000 to assess the buildings in December, which seems like a lot given the assessments the teachers and local media did for free during the 2022 strike (Axios, Education Week & WBNS 10TV).

🏀 Sports Snafu. Superintendent Angela Chapman shared on Monday that a scheduling “oversight” led the Linden-McKinley Panthers to be disqualified from the boys basketball championship game, because the team already played too many games this season. Chapman apologized to the athletes and the community in a Facebook post, and the Dispatch provides some analysis of what went wrong.  

❓Finally, you may have noticed EdInk tends to show up in your inbox on select Thursdays. Since we get an extra Thursday in February (Leap Day!) we’d like to use it to do something a little different. Do you have a question you’d like us to answer? It can be personal or professional, AMA-style. Send it to Linda by 2/22, and she might answer it in the next issue. 

❤️ Be our Valentine all month long! Show us some love by sharing this newsletter or supporting our work through a donation. Did someone send this to you? Subscribe today!