Ridgewood NJ, The Village of Ridgewood is seeking an Assistant Water Superintendent for the Water Distribution Facility. Qualified individual must minimally have current NJDEP W-2, and the ability to advance to W-3 or higher licenses in the future. Strong leadership skills required, as well as at least 5 years’ experience in water distribution maintenance, repair, upkeep, and operation, and at least 2 years’ supervisory experience. Please send resume and salary requirements to Sharyn Matthews, HR Director, 131 N. Maple Ave., Ridgewood, NJ 07450 [email protected]
These people purporting to having their children make “their own” statements need to better consider the long term impact of having their children make public fools of themselves. Remember how awkward we all felt when that kid stood up at the council meeting and stammered and fumbled his way through his parents speech for him as he told the adults on the dais that they were on the take? Where were his parents?? That will require years of deep therapy to overcome for sure.
Redshirting is the practice of postponing entrance into kindergarten of age-eligible children in order to allow extra time for socioemotional, intellectual, or physical growth. This occurs most frequently where children’s birthdays are so close to the cut-off dates that they are very likely to be among the youngest in their kindergarten class. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshirting_(academic) )
A gifted athlete will always shine. Parents hold back because they think that one more year will make their kid a gifted athlete. Doesn’t work that way.
A ridgewood parent held his son back because the boy was small. Got news for them, dad is small too. One year won’t make him taller.
I have heard of parents holding back in 8th grade. Manipulating the system. And yes, taxpayers pay for the red shirting. One year 2 eighth grade best friends were magically held back at the expense of taxpayers. I don’t know if the gamble paid off. Never saw the names in the sports pages.
Do you think all day K will stop this problem? It is just another gift for a minority of taxpayers. Taxes are the gift that keep on giving.
Lilith Starr, a devil’s advocate in every sense, is in a rush to get her After School Satan Club started.
As founder of the Satanic Temple of Seattle, she’s under pressure from national satanic headquarters — located in the Colonial witch trials city of Salem, Mass. — to launch a counter-strike strike against grade school Christianity by opening an after-school Satan Club.
“I think many people have the misunderstanding that we are some kind of tongue-in-cheek troll group,” said Starr, 44, a Harvard grad who sometimes dresses in church robes and, when circumstances demand, paints her lips and part of her face black.
“But in reality we are a very serious religion, with our own shared narrative, culture and symbols, a code of ethics — our Seven Tenets — and worship in the form of activism.”
They don’t hold their kids back because they are young, small or not ready.
They hold them back because they want their kid to be the oldest, largest, and most socially and athletically dominant child in their class. They want to make sure their kid is always the Louisville Slugger, and never the ball.
Nothing like setting your kid up to hit their peak in life sometime in middle school!
The teachers are pushing for it because their union sees full-day K as a boondoggle and a chance to have more full-time REA members who will push for above 2% wage increases, and additional cuts to healthcare and pension contributions in 2018 when the new contract expires. It’s all a REA/NJEA plot. Has NOTHING to do with our kids. Also remember, it’s not just extra salaries for all-day K… its pensions, platinum healthcare, tenure, etc. It’s a bit like how the police union vehemently defends the RPD’s “extra duty” practice for PSE&G and Verizon as no added cost to rate payers and taxpayers… of course it shows up in your monthly statement and in the RPD budget for both fueling and depreciating their vehicles. Really folks, when the union wants it, it’s BAD for taxpayers.
There’s a reason kids are more anxious and depressed than ever.
Posted Jan 26, 2010
Rates of depression and anxiety among young people in America have been increasing steadily for the past 50 to 70 years. Today, by at least some estimates, five to eight times as many high school and college students meet the criteria for diagnosis of major depression and/or anxiety disorder as was true half a century or more ago. This increased psychopathology is not the result of changed diagnostic criteria; it holds even when the measures and criteria are constant.
The most recent evidence for the sharp generational rise in young people’s depression, anxiety, and other mental disorders comes from a just-released study headed by Jean Twenge at San Diego State University.[1] Twenge and her colleagues took advantage of the fact that the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), a questionnaire used to assess a variety of mental disorders, has been given to large samples of college students throughout the United States going as far back as 1938, and the MMPI-A (the version used with younger adolescents) has been given to samples of high school students going as far back as 1951. The results are consistent with other studies, using a variety of indices, which also point to dramatic increases in anxiety and depression—in children as well as adolescents and young adults—over the last five or more decades.
So many people hold their kids back that they are ready for all day K because they are six years old.
Can’t have it both ways, hold them back and then demand full day K.
Lets be honest about this. Too many parents hold their kids back because they are “young”, “small” or “not ready”. I do not want all day K because it rewards this type of behavior. Some delusional parents see their kids as geniuses when they are really 6 year olds in kindergarten. Not gifted just at a different developmental stage. It used to be over aged boys, but now the parents og girls are getting into it.
Stop letting parents hold their kids back. When they come for registeation place them in the grade according to their cut off birthdate. No more gaming the system.
Let the 5 year olds have developmentally appropriate half day kindergarten and put the 6 year olds in first grade where they belong.
Posted: 09/25/2013 12:29 pm EDT Updated: 11/25/2013 5:12 am EST
Does six hours of school a day instil a love of learning in four-year-olds?
Most people would probably scoff at a parent who forces their young child to practise piano or dance for six hours a day. Ditto when it comes to gymnastics or swimming or even Canada’s sentimental favourite, hockey. Thankfully, most moms and dads realize that for little kids, an hour or so is more than enough for most activities and any longer will only result in your child loathing the sport or hobby you hoped they would love.
So why the push for full-day kindergarten?
As a mother to three small children, one would think that I would be an ardent cheerleader for full-day kindergarten. In reality, I’m actually booing from the sidelines.
We are fooling ourselves if we think that full-day kindergarten is anything more than a glorified babysitting service. A four- or five-year-old child may benefit from a few hours of schooling each day, but six hours straight? Most kids that age have trouble staying focused more than 20 minutes. And this doesn’t even take into account the before and after school programs. Some of these kids are spending eight or 10 hours per day at school.
Ridgewood NJ, in his study on Full day vs Half day Kindergarten Philip DeCicca from the Department of Economics at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont. concludes ,”Academic gains for children who attend full-day kindergarten programs compared to those who attend half-day programs are so short-lived that policymakers should take a hard look at whether the additional cost of full-day programs is worthwhile,
DeCicca explained ,“My findings suggest that, on average, the academic returns associated with full-day kindergarten are quite low or non-existent,”
In the study, DeCicca analyzed kindergarten and 1st grade reading and math test scores for children from 714 schools who attended half-day or full day kindergarten programs.
While children in full-day programs did score higher in reading and math than their half-day counterparts at the end of kindergarten, those gains had evaporated by the end of 1st grade, the researcher reports. This was true for both girls and boys and black and Hispanic children. In fact, Hispanic children who attended full-day kindergarten programs performed worse at the end of 1st grade than children who attended half-day kindergarten.
“The estimated pattern of results suggests that full-day kindergarten substantially raises the math and reading achievement of children of all races,” DeCicca writes. “However, these gains are much smaller in magnitude when measured via similar tests just one year later. In other words, the short-run impact of full-day kindergarten has depreciated considerably by the end of first grade.”
RIDGEWOOD — A Superior Court judge will decide Wednesday the future of a lawsuit claiming several conflicts of interest tainted both the Planning Board’s and Village Council’s review and approval of several contentious master plan changes this year.
The suit, filed in May by attorney Kevin Mattessich on behalf of the grassroots group Ridgewood Citizens for Reasonable Development, seeks an order from Superior Court Judge William Meehan voiding four ordinances.
Ridgewood NJ, how will the new teacher’s contract affect the voting on November 8th for Full-day Kindergarten? The long negotiation process between the REA and the BOE still put growth in the Ridgewood School budget over the 2% cap forcing program cuts to get the budget back in line .
Full-Day Kindergarten: Public Vote is Election Day, November 8
Next Public Presentation is October 27 at 7 p.m.
Click here for a PDF of the public presentation. Click here for answers to Frequently Asked Questions. Click here to view all full-day Kindergarten documents.
Ridgewood Nj, Ridgewood has made some dramatic changes in how grass clippings are disposed of . The new rules sat that grass clippings must be segregated from other yard waste and cannot be placed in the street with leaves.
The Ridgewood blog has put together some suggestions on reducing the grass clippings and alternatives for disposing of them. Many municipalities have already begun to refuse to pick up grass clippings and leaves because of reduced landfill availability. In fact, some states have banned yard waste in landfills.
In the Village many homeowners are bagging clippings to be picked up and sent to a local composting facility , particularly with leaves this seems a bit impractical. Another option is using mulching lawn mowers. A mulching mower reduces the size of clippings and spreads them back on the grass, where they rapidly decompose and return to the soil.
Grass clippings are a valuable organic source of nutrients, especially nitrogen. Some mulching-mower users have found that yearly nitrogen applications may be reduced by one-fourth when grass is returned to the turf.
Although mulching mowers and mulching attachments for existing mowers can reduce clipping size, thus increasing the rate that grass clippings decompose, you can get the same effect with a normal rotary mower. Mowing on a regular basis with a sharp blade usually produces clippings that decompose fairly quickly.
In the city of Forth Worth, Texas, participants in the “Don’t Bag It” program said, on average, they felt that their lawns looked 30 percent better when they let the clippings remain than when they previously had collected the clippings. Cities with similar programs report reduced garbage loads and healthier lawns, trees and shrubs.
Leaving clippings on the lawns does not necessarily cause problems with thatch buildup. You may encounter problems with thatch whether you use a mulching mower or not. Thatch can be controlled with vertical mowing, core aerification, and proper watering and fertilization.
If you prefer not to leave clippings on the lawn,consider using collected clippings as mulch or as a component in a compost pile (which in turn will produce nutrient-rich soil conditioners).
If you have recently treated your lawn with herbicides, you will want to wait for three mowings before using grass clippings as mulch. It is possible for herbicide residues to damage garden crops if you use recently treated clippings as mulch. If you put clippings in a compost, on the other hand, pesticides rapidly degrade.
It’s clear Lots of catching up to do from the previous gang of neglect
Re-line the Dangerous Pedestrian Crossing in front of the Library before daylight savings dark afternoons and early winter Sunsets.
Could the Maple Ave. crosswalk between Kings and the library be painted in fluorescent or reflective paint? It’s very dangerous–anything that could be done to mitigate that would be a good idea.
Wait one minute! Why can’t you paint the crosswalks that need attention, which is basically all of them? Do pedestrian lives not matter?
Please paint more visible crosswalks at the corner of S. Irving and Ridgewood Ave. Also, the crosswalks across Ridgewood Ave in front of the High School – 2 of them. Also, the crosswalks at the corner of Ridgewood Ave and Maple. Pedestrian lives matter, too.
