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THE IOLA REGISTER Locally owned since 1867
Monday, August 15, 2016
Teachers favor new class schedules By JASON TIDD The Iola Register
Editor note: This is the first half of a story written by summer intern Jason Tidd about how Iola High School has changed its class schedule format. When Iola High School students and teachers return to school this week, they will find a new type of daily schedule. The so-called “block” scheduling, which has been used for over a decade, will be replaced with an hourly schedule. In block scheduling, four classes meet every other day for 87-minute periods. Classes alternate between meeting Monday, Wednesday and Friday one week and switching to Tuesday and Thursday the following week. This means teachers only see their students every other day during the school week with block scheduling, and that was a problem, said Dana Daugharthy, a high school chemistry and physics teacher. With the new hour schedule, the same seven 50-minute periods will meet every day of the school week, which Daugharthy said will be better for students. “The repetition of every single day, getting exposed to the same content, I think will be good for the kids,” Daugharthy said. Another flaw with block scheduling, said Matt Kleopfer, the band director for the high school and middle school, is the extended length of time spent in a block class is too much for most students. “A lot of them are just not able to concentrate at an extremely high level for an hour and a half,” Kleopfer said. “You might get them that way for about 40-50 minutes, but after that they’re just fried.”
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Ruling has little effect on turnout By ROXANA HEGEMEN The Associated Press
him to create a consistent weekly schedule for the first time since teaching at Iola. “The amount of time we have to spend on warming up (and) the pacing of the rehearsal is going to change pretty drastically,” Kleopfer said. “It mainly has to do with just the simple thought and comfort of knowing that you’re going to get to see (the students) the next day. So you’re still able to attack the big thing that you were be-
WICHITA, Kan. (AP) — Few of the 17,600 Kansas voters at the center of legal fights over the state’s proof of citizenship requirements actually cast ballots in the Aug. 2 primary. Voting rights advocates won temporary court rulings in federal and state courts affirming the right to vote for people who registered at motor vehicle offices but never submitted citizenship documents. Overall, statewide turnout was 23.1 percent, with 403,532 votes cast. The unofficial count for the primary shows 9,032 provisional ballots were cast; provisional ballots are typically given out when there is a question about voter eligibility, such as someone who voted in the wrong precinct. And the Associated Press surveyed the state’s five biggest counties — Johnson, Sedgwick, Shawnee, Wyandotte and Douglas — that together accounted for 4,287 of those provisional ballots. The AP found just 37 voters in those counties who cast ballots because of the court decisions. But the Kansas Secretary of State’s office notes there won’t be a statewide number for how many of those were cast by voters affected by the rulings for another week or more because counties had until Thursday to canvass their provisional votes. Kansas is embroiled in at least four lawsuits over a state law pushed by Secretary of State Kris Kobach, requiring people to provide documenta-
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Iola High School teachers Matt Kleopfer, top, Dianne Kauth and Dana Daugharthy favor the move away from “block” scheduling and toward a more traditional school day. ing the 12 major scales this past school year. The middle schoolers, including beginning-level 6th-graders, learned the scales better than the high schoolers. The reason, Kleopfer said, was because the middle schoolers had better retention due to the repetition of practicing the scales every single day, whereas the high schoolers were stuck with rehearsing every other day in the block schedule. Now, the change will allow
RETENTION becomes an issue when teachers don’t see their students every day, Kleopfer said. “You waste a lot of time in block scheduling reviewing what you went over the class before because if you don’t have day-to-day, you don’t have that retention level as high as it should be,” Kleopfer said. “The kids forget.” Kleopfer said his middle school and high school band students worked on learn-
Iola instructors return from Grand Tour ‘recharged’ By RICK DANLEY The Iola Register
Jeff Fehr worked it out when he got back. “We went through seven countries on three tanks of gas.” France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland. “Everything’s so close,” he explained. “Going to the Netherlands is like popping into Missouri and back. The [European Union] has opened up the continent. You can see where the checkpoints used to be; now, they’re rest stops. Bill? He kept pushing for Liechtenstein.” “Would have made it eight,” said Peeper. “Liechtenstein.” Last spring, the Iola High School teachers — Peeper, history; Fehr, special education — earned a $10,000 travel grant through the Rural School and Community Trust’s Global Teacher program. Given three days’ notice, the instructors scrambled to satisfy all of the program requirements before deadline. “It was a pretty big ask,” said Peeper. “No one from Kansas had ever won one before. But we just kept thinking: ‘What’s it going to hurt? Somebody’s got to win
Teachers Jeff Fehr, left, and Bill Peeper on their two-week tour of Europe, wearing shirts designed by Iola student Jordan Anderson. The design is a play on a popular 1980s movie and reads: “Bill and Jeff’s Excellent Adventure.” COURTESY PHOTO this thing.’ And I’ll be darned if we didn’t get it.” Peeper and Fehr recalled their trip in an interview with the Register last week. UPON LANDING in Paris, the teachers settled on a 6-speed Audi A3 for their journey. After some fumbling with the foreign auto (“It only took two days to
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learn how to turn the lights on,” said Fehr), they were off. First stop: the Palace of Versailles. The travelers had made a promise to their wives not to linger long in Paris, and so, their senses still blurry with jet lag, the pair headed straight from the airport to the suburban chateau for their first taste of old-world pomp.
From eastern France, the duo charted a course that would take them, in time, to Peeper’s ancestral home of Beckum, a small town in northwest Germany, before delivering them, toward trip’s end, to Hilzingen, the Swiss-border town from which Fehr’s clan hails. Their goal was to hit as many of the marvels of European history along the way as they could manage. “It was a cram-packed nine days of travel,” said Peeper, who, with Fehr, designed the itinerary to span the topics they teach at IHS. “It was French Revolution one day. Then World War I, then World War II. Then you’re back to Christianity’s rise in Europe,” remembered Fehr. “You’re at a castle one day, then later in the afternoon you’re looking at the first things that were ever printed on a printing press.” Peeper had never been out of the country before. Fehr had only ever ventured into Canada and Mexico. They’d read the tourist guides before their departure and imbibed their fill of Rick Steves, the excitable everyman from the PBS travel show. But it took actually being in Europe to
“A two-year-old is kind of like having a blender, but you don’t have a top for it.”
convince Fehr and Peeper that they’d made it. “Rick Steves says: At some point you’re going to have that oh-crap-I’m-in-Europe moment,” said Fehr, who had his own oh-crap moment early one morning in France. After waking, Fehr threw open the window of his hotel and saw this: “A French lady, wearing a skirt, on a bicycle, with a loaf of bread, riding past. I’m like” — Fehr grasps his head with both hands — “I’m in France!” “But then there were also things that connected you to back home,” said Peeper. “For instance, it was wheat harvest time in Germany.” “And the fields there are just gigantic, rolling,” said Fehr. “The day we went into Luxembourg, there was a kid outdoors throwing hay.” PEEPER AND FEHR’S jag through middle Europe brought them into contact with three of the world’s great cathedral cities: Reims, Cologne and Aachen, whose eighth-century church is home to the famous gold-encrusted bust of Charlemagne, the “Father of Europe,” and marks that emperor’s final restSee EUROPEAN | Page A4
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