Kookabuk Lends A Hand

At Benito Middle School, he’s known as Coach Howard, the boys’ basketball coach. He’s also the school’s resource teacher, taking care of computers and networking and setting up technology labs.

Kevin Howard also is now a published author, using his experiences as the parent of a child with autism, to help other people.

“My 15-year-old son, Seth, was diagnosed with autism before this third birthday,” explains Kevin. “At that time, a therapist suggested we create social stories to help him.”

Kevin  — who lives in Cory Lake Isles with his wife, Christina, Seth, and Seth’s younger brother, Joey — explains that the social stories would introduce Seth to typical life situations that could be intimidating for a kid who is autistic. The first book Kevin wrote for his son, for example, was about having his blood drawn.

Benito Middle School teacher and basketball coach Kevin Howard, shown with his wife Christina and their sons Joey and Seth, has written a book to help families with children who are autistic.

“We got pictures off the internet to make this book, and looked at the story over and over again,” he says. “We practiced having our blood drawn together with fake needles. So, when Seth went to have his blood drawn, we had no issues.”

He says it became a valuable tool in his household, so he began writing more stories for Seth, such as about going to the grocery store or the amusement park.

When the family was getting ready for a trip to visit family in New York, Kevin began working on a new social story. He collected pictures of all the things they would do — from packing to sitting on the plane — to the places they were going to go, including his father’s house. After reading the story over and over again, Kevin says, “We went to New York several times before we ever left (Florida).”

In the process of writing that book, Kevin was reminded of his favorite childhood toy, a stuffed monkey named Kookabuk.

“Kookabuk was given to me when I was a little boy and had an extended stay in the hospital,” Kevin says. “He took me on so many adventures. We played, we raced cars, we went on safaris, we had a band
 all these adventures to occupy my time while I was in the hospital.”

So, when he happened to Seth, “You’re going on an adventure,” when referencing the family’s trip to New York, Kevin says it was, “like a light bulb went off. It reminded me of my adventures with Kookabuk, and that’s when the creative juices started to flow.”

He partnered with his brother, Jesse, who lives in New York and is a special education teacher, teaching elementary and pre-kindergarten kids who have a variety of exceptionalities, including autism.

The two worked together to develop stories that would help families. They have self-published the first story in the series, called Kookabuk Shares His Shovel, and have several more stories written and planned for future publication.

“I just love the name,” says Kevin. “I can see the smile on your face when I say it. I want Kookabuk to help other children the way he helped me.”

The series has been thoughtfully developed with characters who are inspired by real life. Kookabuk — or “Kooky,” as Kevin calls him – is the character in the book who is on the autism spectrum. And, he says Kooky’s friend, Emily, was inspired by someone in real life, too. “Emily was the first little girl who became friends with my son,” although both Kooky and Emily are monkeys in the book.

About the character Emily, Kevin says, “She is the model for every typical child when it comes to awareness, acceptance and understanding,” says Kevin, “We want typical kids to see the model of Emily, where we’re showing them how they can have a rewarding relationship with a child with special needs.”

Kevin’s pet macaw, Trevor, appears in the series, too. Trevor became part of the Howard family 20 years ago when Christine convinced Kevin to adopt Trevor. In the book, Trevor shows up whenever the characters are using a strategy that can be helpful to parents and caregivers of children with autism.

“We call it our ‘Best of Help’ tips,” says Kevin. He explains that whenever a specific strategy is being used that parents, teachers and caregivers can emulate, a picture of Trevor indicates to go to the back of the book to learn about the strategy and how to use it.

The tips come from Jesse’s expertise as a special needs educator and what Kevin has learned as the parent of a child with autism.

“We tried to make these tips the things that are going to help you on a daily basis,” Kevin says. “It’s what’s going to help with my kid having a meltdown right now.”

He says the books can be enjoyed by children — both those with special needs and those who are typical — either together with their parents or on their own.

“The response has been very positive,” says Kevin, saying Kookabuk Shares His Shovel has received great reviews, and was recently chosen by the University of South Florida faculty as its “Book of the Month.”

In April, to celebrate Autism Awareness Month, Kevin worked with the Youth Basketball League of Florida to put on an event called, “It’s Kool to be Kooky.” He says the event brought in a lot of sponsorships — including from the Miami Heat and AND1 basketball footwear and clothing company.

The event raised $1,301, which was donated to Focus Academy, a Hillsborough County magnet school for students with special needs, where Seth currently attends.

Kookabuk Shares His Shovel is currently available at Amazon.com. For more info about Kookabuk, please visit Kookabuk.com.

New Start & End Times Coming, But Not Until Next Fall

 Note: This story has been updated since it was printed in our April 21 issue hitting mailboxes today and tomorrow. Superintendent Jeff Eakins made an announcement after we went to press that he will propose to the School Board that changes in the bell schedule be postponed to the 2018-19 school year.

Superintendent Jeff Eakins emailed parents April 17 saying that he will now recommend the proposed bell schedule be implemented in 2018-19, not next fall.
Superintendent Jeff Eakins emailed parents April 17 saying that he will now recommend the proposed bell schedule be implemented in 2018-19, not next fall.

Hillsborough County Public Schools has released a proposal that changes the times school will start and end, which will affect start and end times for all elementary, middle and high school students in New Tampa. While originally the plan called for changes to be made this fall, for the 2017-18 school year, school superintendent Jeff Eakins sent an email to parents on April 17 saying that he will now recommend these changes be implemented for the following school year, 2018-19.

“Currently, many students are consistently late to school because there’s not enough time for our buses to pick up and drop off students,” explains Eakins in a video emailed to parents and staff in late March. “This means our children are losing valuable instructional time. When students are late to class, it affects the learning environment for all children.”

The bell schedule originally proposed for 2017-18 adds instructional time at the elementary level in most schools, with one exception in New Tampa. Turner Bartels K-8 students would lose 5 minutes of a day that already is longer than most elementary schools. For middle schools, students would lose 20 minutes, and high schools lose 32. Middle and high school students will keep their seven-period day, but may see the elimination of homeroom, a shorter time for lunch, and class periods that may be reduced by a minute or two.

Eakins says additional benefits of changing school bell times are that the new times may allow for more time for music, art and physical education at the elementary level, and that “
 all students will benefit, due to an increase in quality planning time for teachers.”

Eakins wrote in his email to parents that he still feels the proposed plan is still the best option for meeting the school district’s goals. However, the proposal drew a large amount of public outcry, not only because of the time changes but also how the proposal was created. The plan, released on April 4 and available online at SDHC.k12.fl.us/doc/1855/administration/resources/belltimes/, proposes the following changes:

School Current Bell Schedule Proposed Bell Schedule for 2017-18
High (Freedom & Wharton) 7:33 a.m. – 3 p.m. 7:15 a.m. – 2:10 p.m.
Middle (Benito & Liberty) 9 a.m. – 4:15 p.m. 9:30 a.m. – 4:25 p.m.
Elementary (Chiles, Clark, Heritage, Hunter’s Green, Pride & Tampa Palms) 8 a.m. – 2:15 p.m. 8:35 a.m. – 3:05 p.m.
Turner Bartels K-8 8:45 a.m. – 3:35 p.m. 8:30 a.m. – 3:15 p.m.

The Board is still expected to consider the proposed recommendation — which may include revisions based on comments from the community — at a specially called meeting on Tuesday, April 25, 3:30 p.m.

To share your thoughts on the proposed changes, email bellschedule@sdhc.k12.fl.us.

Nearly 500 New Tampa Students To Lose ‘Courtesy Busing’ Next School Year

Starting next school year, Alex Evison, center, and the other kids in his Cross Creek neighborhood will no longer have a bus to ride to school. His mom, Lisa, says most of these kids’ parents can’t drive their kids to school because the hours fall within the work day and the walk isn’t safe.

In December, the Hillsborough County School Board voted to end what they call “courtesy busing” for middle and high school students who live within two miles of their respective schools.

In New Tampa, this will affect nearly 500 students, mostly at Louis Benito Middle School and Paul R. Wharton High School, where more than 400 students will no longer have bus transportation provided (see chart). At other New Tampa schools combined, including Freedom High, Liberty Middle, and Tuner/Bartels K-8, another 50 students are affected.

According to records made available by the School Board, Benito currently provides bus transportation to 629 of the 1,058 students who attend school there. Of those students, 265 will not have bus transportation starting with the 2017-18 school year, because they live within two miles of the school.

“Courtesy busing was not supposed to be a permanent thing,” explains school district spokesperson Tanya Arja. “It was designed for temporary uses, such as road hazards during construction, and there should have been a process to remove it when those factors were gone.”

She explains that the majority of students throughout Hillsborough County are responsible for their own transportation to and from school, saying that of 214,000 students countywide, only 90,000 are bused.

Arja also says the decision was made in December to give parents plenty of time to plan for next school year, such as by arranging carpools or their work schedules.

For some local parents, the decision is upsetting. Lisa Evison, who lives in Cross Creek, is trying to rally parents to object to the decision, as other communities — such as Lutz and FishHawk Ranch in south Hillsborough County — have done.

Evison says with the never ending traffic, potential child predators and other dangers, she doesn’t feel that it’s safe for her seventh grade son, Alex, to walk to Benito from her neighborhood in Cross Creek, nearly two miles away. “The Tampa Bay area as a whole has a horrendous — and deserved — reputation for pedestrian fatalities,” she says. “How many kids have to die walking to school before we say it’s enough?”

Statistics compiled by the Tampa Bay Times show that in 2016, there were 39 pedestrian fatalities in Hillsborough County, and another 12 bicycle fatalities. This is down from a record year in 2015, where there were a combined 59 fatalities.

In 2012, Evison says she was riding a bike in front of Benito and a car made a right turn on red and hit her.

“I’m an adult, I have a light on my bike, and he drove over me and didn’t see me. People are distracted, in a rush, and not paying attention. I see it all the time! I don’t know why I would expose my children to that — never mind the long walk with his 22-pound backpack.”

The principals at both Benito and Wharton say it remains to be seen exactly what the impact on schools will be.

“We already have families who have busing available to them who don’t take advantage of it because they would rather drop their kid off at 7:00 than have them catch the bus at 6:30,” says Wharton principal Brad Woods. He says he’s in close contact with the county transportation department to closely monitor the construction on Bruce B. Downs (BBD) Blvd., as the road is being expanded from four to six lanes.

“If Bruce B. Downs meets the state statutes for hazardous road conditions, they would have to put the transportation back,” he says.

Meanwhile, Benito principal John Sanders says the school is preparing for an increase in the number of students walking and biking to school.

“My primary concern is the intersection of Kinnan St. and Cross Creek Blvd.,” says Sanders. “We’ll do everything we can to make that intersection safer for our families. We’ve requested a crossing guard, we will ask our school resource officer to be at that intersection and we will educate our kids to cross the road safely.”

Affected students recently received a letter from the school board explaining the cuts and providing a “Parent/Guardian Hazardous Walking Concern Review Request” for any parent who feels that the walking path for their child is unsafe.

Arja says community meetings will be planned to help connect parents to resources for carpooling and safe walking and biking, including HART, TBARTA, Safe Routes to School, and St. Joseph’s Hospital. Woods says one such meeting is expected to be held at Wharton, but no date had been set at our press time.

Evison also has a child at Hunter’s Green Elementary and is concerned about the future, as the School Board is expected to cut courtesy busing to elementary schools for the following school year, 2018-19.

Evison says parents who want to ask the Board to reconsider their decision should join a Facebook group started by FishHawk-area parents called “Safe Bus For Us.” Evison was part of a group of parents who attended the last school board meeting to express their concerns about ending the program.

Additional information from Hillsborough County Public Schools can be found online at SDHC.k12.fl.us/doc/1787/courtesybusinformation.

‘Project Innovate’ Brings New Laptops & Ways To Learn To Chiles

chilesweb
L.-r.: Chiles fifth graders Drew Moose, Ava Campbell, De’Vantae Jackson and Paige Duffield.

Chiles Elementary fifth-grader Aaron Back has his notebook open, and his laptop charged up. Instead of doing his research by paging through a book — and good luck finding a book on sand boils, which he currently is studying — Back is able to peruse the web, scribbling his findings and ideas on paper.

“I like that you have more than one option,’’ says Back, who is 10 years old. “When you’re reading, you only have one option, but (on the computer) you have lots of options you can go to.”

Back is one of 146 fifth-graders at Chiles, which is located in Tampa Palms, taking part in Hillsborough County’s “Project Innovate,” which provides students with a Hewlett Packard x360 laptop for a completely different — and a little more advanced — learning experience.

“The concept is to prepare our students for the digital age they are growing up in and to increase engagement with their teachers, as well as meeting the needs of students by differentiating instruction in a more confidential way,’’ says Chiles assistant principal Ashley Galfond.

The county has provided 150 of the laptops to Chiles, with the hope of changing the learning landscape and getting kids comfortable with more high-tech means of taking notes and producing projects.

Schoolwork is done using Microsoft products, and the work is all held in OneNote, a digital note-taking app. If insurance issues can be worked out, the students may even be able to take those laptops home during the second semester, but for now, they can still access their work on their families’ home computers.

Back and the other students will be able to ultimately file their assignments to English Language Arts (ELA) teacher Nancy Erickson in many different media. “They can do their projects however they want,’’ Erickson says. “If you’re passionate and an artist and want to make posters, that’s a great thing. I can’t draw to save my life, so I might be more comfortable doing something digital-oriented. The nice part is, they can look at the info and say, ‘This is the best way I can present my information, so I’m going to present it in a brochure, make a poster or make a movie trailer.’”

Galfond is in her second year at Chiles, after coming over from Turner-Bartels, the grades K-8 school in Live Oak Preserve.

chiles_aaron
Chiles fifth-grader Aaron Back. 10, works on his project about sand boils.

At Turner-Bartels, Galfond was part of preparing the first “cohort,” or group of students working together, for Project Innovate, before coming to Chiles last year to prepare the students for being the second cohort, which started this new school year.

“We’ve been doing it on a small scale to learn as we go and to be able to support the students so there is a successful implementation,’’ Galfond says, adding that the intent is to include other grades in the near future.

The current laptops have keyboards, but also can be flipped to work as a tablet. But, Erickson said the goal is to get kids used to the more traditional laptop form. In fact, she says, so many kids have iPads and other tablets that this has been their first work, for many, on a regular laptop computer.

“They don’t have the basic computer skills that, I guess, I use every day,’’ Erickson says. “They are not users, they are players, if that makes sense. So, things like editing, and copying and pasting things like URLs (Uniform Resource Locators), or typing and moving the cursor up and down, they didn’t know that.”

Erickson adds, however, that she expected the transition to be a learning process — even for her, since she is primarily an Apple user.

The students are enjoying their new tools. Their class, part of a daily “Genius Hour” afforded to students to work independently and on whatever they choose, is quiet. The students seem more earnest in their work, and the only sound is the tappity-tap of a keyboard or students softly whispering as they share their work with one another.

As for Erickson, she likes the options the project gives her as a teacher.

Instead of collecting papers and taking them home to grade, she can look at quizzes and assignments immediately and provide feedback while the topic is still fresh in the students’ minds. She also can make suggestions and help privately instruct individuals who might have questions they wouldn’t normally ask in front of the whole class.

“I can post something and ask them, ‘Type in your reactions to this,’” Erickson says. “I can take polls, and I can do really quick, down-and-dirty assessments that way. We can do quiz-like games, and (the students) are having a blast doing that, too.”

Erickson’s group is currently studying Crystal Springs, which is located in the southeastern corner of Pasco County, since the class will take a field trip there Sept. 14-15. The students have been tasked with producing reports on various aspects of the springs, from why they exist to the wildlife that lives nearby, to, well, even sand boils (which, according to Wikipedia, occur when water under pressure wells up through a bed of sand. The water looks like it is “boiling” up from the sand, hence the name).

For other things they study where a field trip is not possible, the students will be able to use their laptops to Skype with experts on location.

“The great things about (the laptops) is they (students) can take this as far as they want,’’ Erickson says, adding that one student already has asked if he can do coding for a Nintendo game. “I think you’ll see a lot more great things as we go forward.”

Mural Spices Up Media Center At HG Elementary

The ribbon was cut by (left to right) Hillsborough Country Public Schools supervisor of library media services for K-5 John Milburn, Elliott, HGE PTA president Jamie Priest and principal Gaye Holt.
Hunter’s Green Elementary (HGE) media specialist Nancy Elliott celebrates the unveiling of a new mural in the school’s media center.
Hunter’s Green Elementary (HGE) media specialist Nancy Elliott celebrates the unveiling of a new mural in the school’s media center.

As students returned to school on August 10, they probably couldn’t help but notice that the media center at Hunter’s Green Elementary (HGE) had undergone a major transformation.

Previously, the walls were decorated with banners, representing books that had been enjoyed by students during the school’s 25-year history.

“They were nice, but they were kind of old and dated,” says PTA president Jamie Priest.

It was the vision of HGE principal Gaye Holt to transform the walls to come alive with pictures that would inspire students as they visit the media center.

“The media center is the hub of the school, and we want our kids in here,” said Holt during her remarks at the official ribbon-cutting ceremony for the school’s newly painted mural on Thursday, Aug. 25.

“The media center has been transformed into a warm and inviting area for students as they choose a book, learn new things and explore their world through technology,” said HGE media specialist Nancy Elliott during her remarks.

The ribbon was cut by (left to right) Hillsborough Country Public Schools supervisor of library media services for K-5 John Milburn, Elliott, HGE PTA president Jamie Priest and principal Gaye Holt.
The ribbon was cut by (left to right) Hillsborough Country Public Schools supervisor of library media services for K-5 John Milburn, Elliott, HGE PTA president Jamie Priest and principal Gaye Holt.

From fiction and fantasy to science and math, the mural represents many different genres of books that can be explored in the media center.

“Nonfiction is a big part of reading,” Elliott explained later. “Math and science are a big part of our curriculum and I felt that they should be represented in our mural.”

Priest added, “Every time I look at the mural, I feel like I see something new.”

“I love the variety of it,” agreed Elliott, pointing out a kid investigating, a dolphin that looks like it’s about to swim right off the wall, a space ship soaring through outer space and realistic-looking animals such as a giraffe, panda and elephant.

Elliott is just the second media specialist in the school’s history and has b
een in the position for 10 years. She helped to design the mural with local artists J.P. and Vanessa Parra of CAP Murals, who worked all summer on ladders and scaffolds to create it. It was finished the day before school started.

“It was the shortest summer,” said Holt, “but it was my favorite. I came up to the media center to visit three times a day because it amazed me.”

The process of painting the mural was commemorated in a media center display that shows the before, during and after of creating such a significant piece of art.

The mural was funded in part by the PTA, by the media center budget and by the school budget. The PTA contribution included a legacy gift from the class of 2015, and a large butterfly was painted in the mural as, “an extension of the memorial butterfly garden” planted outside in memory of Nick Wolf, a fifth grade HGE student who passed away shortly before he would have graduated from the school.

“Our school is taking big steps forward,” says Priest. “This is another step, and something I think the kids are going to remember, even after they leave this school.”