Help me catch up

Well. I certainly picked an interesting time to go on medical leave.

In the four weeks I was gone, local philanthropies launched a huge push to boost student achievement through private giving. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools rolled out two lists of schools under scrutiny for big changes, including possible closing. The effects of classroom budget cuts and magnet shuttle stops started playing out. CMS produced a 65-page report on increasing graduation rates. There are rumblings about fees for AP and IB exams, drug dogs in schools and possible changes paying for campus security.

Anyway, I'm back, feeling fine and trying to catch up. It's a bit overwhelming, so give me a hand: What are people talking about? What are the big questions and issues on your mind as 2010-11 gears up?

A very articulate correspondent from Mint Hill e-mailed yesterday about his quest to wrest meaning from the latest developments in the school board's student assignment review: "Emails are flying all around our end of the county and, quite honestly, many of them are either misinformed or uninformed, and in either case an absence of actual facts never stopped anyone from making up their own," he wrote. "For CMS’s part, I appreciate their attempt at transparency, but their communications have been less than entirely clear. A review of their website discloses a lot of information (I think) bound up inside ill-defined acronyms and opaque metrics."

I know what he means. For the past month, I've been reading the paper and clicking on the CMS Web site like the rest of you. The latest report on magnet schools is a real head-scratcher without having been in the meetings. I agree with the writer than CMS is trying hard to share information, but those reports seldom make sense without a lot of added context. The public information office has taken hits during budget cuts; they, too, are scrambling to keep up with all the breaking news (and Tahira Stalberte, a strong player in that department, just left to head the public information department for Durham County schools).

So let me know what you're thinking. And if you tried to e-mail me with anything important this month, please try again. The company e-mail system declared me temporarily terminated, and I have yet to retrieve any messages from that stretch. I'm not even sure my autoreply directing people to other reporters kicked in; I'm sorry for any inconvenience. But I'm back in the land of the electronically living: ahelms@charlotteobserver.com