Day: 31 Aug 2016

HCPSS meeting on the Chinese AP language teaching

1 Comment

Dear all,

In order for us to have a better understanding how the Chinese Language teaching at the River Hill High School has been changed, I have coordinated a meeting between HCPSS, RHHS and the community.

We are looking forward to seeing you there.

The following individuals from Central Office will be attending the meeting on Tuesday, September 6th at 7:30pm at RHHS in the Media Center:

  • Gina Massella, Administrative Director of High Schools
  • Robert Cole, Coordinator of Digital Education
  • Leslie Grahn, Coordinator of World Languages

River Hill High School Principal Mrs. McKinley will also be present.

Thanks.

Dr. Chao Wu, Vice President of Chinese American Parent Association of HoCo

US Senate gets older and older

I heard the news that Senate John McCain won his primary and he is more than  80 years old. My impression for John McCain is that there is no war he does not like.

Then I checked around and found the average age for US senators is becoming older and older. The trend starts from 1979. What is happening in the society?

http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-CONGRESS_AGES_1009.html

US senate gets older and older

For the current US senate age, please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_United_States_senators_by_age.

Some statistics:

There are eight senators who are over 80 years old, six from Republican and two from Democrat. Even they are old, either Republic or Democratic parties seems worried at all about this aging issue. Since the governors from those states probably belongs to the same party as the senators. If the senate position vacant suddenly, those governors can assign a new senator from the same party.

There are 5% senators served more than 30 years. There are 20% senators who have served more that 18 years, another 10% severs more than 12 years. That is 30% serves more than three terms.

There are 13% senators who just served over a year and half.

US senators more than 18 years

Two senators from Maryland are:

7 Barbara Mikulski Maryland July 20, 1936 January 3, 1987 50 years, 167 days 29 years, 241 days 80 years, 42 days Democratic
19 Ben Cardin Maryland October 5, 1943 January 3, 2007 63 years, 90 days 9 years, 241 days 72 years, 331 days Democratic

#HoCoPolitics

 

HCPSS six-year spending review (prologue)

Thank Cindy Vaillancourt for pointing me to this website http://www.hcpss.org/f/vendors/index.html to have a look at HCPSS’s spending.

Unfortunately, the data was not easy to be downloaded. It is non-trivial at all. With my background, I used Python programming language and wrote a script to download all six year’s data from 2010-2015.

A quick glance at 2015 spending, over 5 million items are:

2015 HCPSS Over 5 Million Spending

I will do some basic analysis. In order to help others who are interested in this data, I saved them in spreadsheet format. If you would like a copy, please let me know. The website does not allow me to upload Excel document for the moment.

Please let me know which kind of analysis or which area you are interested.