How to Proceed
Assignment
Round 1: Review Recommendations
All Teams
Context |
Prior to this session we’ve gathered input and feedback from the high school students, the community, and the teachers. This round of work is focused on reviewing and becoming familiar with their feedback.
Around the room there are towers with information from the previous workshops - and there are some models the students developed.
You will start in a group of two people and visit each of these areas to review the work produced in the previous three workshops. |
Objective |
The objective of this activity is for your group of two to go around to each towers to review the input into the decisions the Boards need to make. You have 20 minutes to go to all towers and become familiar with what is there.
Remember from three years ago, the goals set out by the school boards for the four communities are:
- Maintain a school in every community
- Maintain a quality education program for all students
- Operate in the most cost efficient manner possible
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Process |
Pair up with someone from one of the other communities. Visit each towers and review the materials that are there.
You have approximately 20 minutes for this entire activity (visiting each board and synthesizing). |
Exchange |
Following this activity we will join together as a large group. |
Dan Hoesing
Yesterday we had 200 kids and asked them to help us come up with some solutions. We want to show the board that we’re doing our jobs by showing you how we can effective with the decisions that you make.
We have five sources of input here. The first are the surveys from each of the four communities. We ran the data as we got it. We as administers know that we have to tolerate the truth. We may not like what others are saying about us but we have to deal with that. We printed it and we cannot change the data.
The second piece comes from the kids. A lot of the things we did in our schools was not with their input. Now hopefully from yesterday they are going to be more involved in our future decisions.
Last night we had the parents come in. The weather was pretty bad so I’m sure that kept some of them home, but we got some good input from them. I think they understand the school system better than before.
This morning we had the staff show up and they looked at all the data that we had up to that point.
You’re the fifth piece of data that‘s coming into this system. This is no more or less but equal to the other four pieces of data.
We had some deficit spending in the first years making these changes. The revenue didn’t match, but this year it will. In some cases, like Wynot, we had to borrow money and we have to start thinking about how to get out of the hole we created by doing that. In other districts we have to see how to increase our cash reserves. We need to figure out how to generate more revenue and cut more costs.
In the elementaries, where we don’t do a lot of distance we combine classes in order to make some savings. We put an arbitrary age limit on distance ed, but we can look at that in a different way. We can expand our concept of distance learning and take field trips through these methods. We have outsourced or open-sourced resources on the internet and we can expand that with all of our children.
Our biggest concern is the junior high because there are not enough kids on the other side of the line to play sports and games. Our greatest concern is not the high school but the junior high to prepare them for high school. This is not just in athletics but in music and theatre as well.
This year we need to reduce the administrative staff by a half. Craig obliged us by stepping out at the semester break but we need to find more and he has to be a part of that. We need to find a way to control our administrative costs. We know we can’t do it the way we are structured right now. We’re limited by the jobs we create for ourselves. Our belief is that we ask kids to learn over distance and ask our administrators to do their jobs over distance. We put a security system in Coleridge and I can see what’s happening there while sitting in my office in Laurel.
My concern is that we’re too small. We’re bringing in people who are doing what we’re already doing. We want to offer our kids more. We want our kids to have a chance to succeed.
Our teachers had the conversation today and asked why we have 5 teachers teaching geometry. Why don’t we have one teacher to teach it really well and do it for all our students? We need to align ourselves to jobs rather than to kids or buildings. We can get better at doing fewer things but do them better.
I think being outside the box gives you no security, so how do we frame a bigger box that will support us until we create a better box? We had a quote from Darwin who says that those who survive are not the biggest or strongest, and I would expand that to the richest or most powerful, but those who survive are the most adaptable.
We need to create a box that explains what our box is. It’s about how to create the best of what we know and to not base them on the dollars we have but the best of what we need and find the dollars to serve that.
There are no grants that will sustain what we already have. They’re always for new. There are people who are out there watching us and seeing what we do and if it succeeds so they can follow our lead. We need your input as a board to help us do that.
Michael Kaufman
The last couple of days we’ve focused the groups on specific projects. Our expectation is about having the difficult conversations and some difficult decisions that have to be made. We want to engage you in these tasks in our short time together.
Do you have any other expectations for this time?
- Free doughnuts (laughter)
MK: We did have a conversation about the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations.
- We have to challenge the boxes we’re in. Are they the right boxes? I would love to do that today.
MK: I would love to do that, I don’t know if we have the framework to do that today however.
- I want to know if we’re going to the route of middle school changes or not.
- Co-oping
- If Wynot is having a pre-school program
- How do we better communicate the decisions to our patrons? We create problems for ourselves because we don’t explain the reason for why we do what we’re doing.
- Distance learning is always on the table. What’s the next level?
- What are we doing with the current 3rd graders next year?
- We have to improve distance learning. It’s not a question of whether we have it or not.
- The incentives for our group are about $340k. That’s state aid to us. Remember how ‘hot’ distance ed was last year? It’s hardly come up this year. But they’re happy with what we’ve delivered so it’s not so charged.
MK: A lot of the conversations over the last two days were focused through the lens of 12 projects. Some relate to the topics we’re going to deal with now and some you brought up but not exactly.
Here is the list of projects we discussed these last few days:
- Newcastle learning center
- Implementing the middle school concept
- Double free and autism
- Early childhood program in Wynot
- Expanded 3rd grade program in Laurel
- Olweus bully prevention program
- Cooperative junior high athletics and activities
- Alignment of curriculum
- Expanding technology and staff development
- Floating study hall
- School improvements
- Teacher incentives
There are 8 topics for decision making the teachers dealt with and 5 of them we gave to the students to weigh in on as well.
- Increasing staff and teachers, including academics subjects
- Expand distance education
- Offer more college credit courses
- Continue and co-opt more
- Consider combining junior high programs
- Expand the partnership with another district
You need to break into four groups and get to work on this. Each group will get two of the hot topics. Please make recommendations for the topics you look at.
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