Word: mahar
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...That sounds nice, but it means nothing to folks like Dick Mahar. The superintendent in a small rural school district in Pine Plains, N.Y., Mahar is preparing to tell parents that this year's New York State budget will prevent the district from offering a pre-K program in the fall that parents and community members had lobbied for and the school board has approved. Nor will it help Head Start, the mother of all preschool programs, which under Bush's budget received just a $125 million increase, which is not even enough to pay for the cost-of-living...
...Mahar, for one, is disappointed, largely because he's seen the benefits of a preschool program firsthand while serving as principal at a private Catholic school in the 1980s. When standardized test results came in for the school's two kindergarten classes in Mahar's first year on the job, he was surprised to see that one class performed markedly better than the other, despite the two sections having equally good teachers. "I asked the one teacher why her kids were doing so well, and she told me that it was because she got all the students who went through...
...tenure four years later, Mahar had quadrupled the size of the school's pre-K program, and made sure that there were equal numbers of its graduates in the kindergarten classes. Now he's hoping to bring the same benefit to public school children in his district, where about one-quarter of pupils are poor enough to qualify for a free- or reduced-price lunch. "I'm telling the parents who signed up it will hopefully go forward in the future," Mahar says. "But unfortunately it's not going to help your children, not this year...