Check In
Dan Hoesing
Yesterday we spent the day with the kids and they understand that the world is changing for them. This video is as much for the people in this room as for anyone else. Change will happen. We can’t stop it.
We’re interested in doing the right thing. There are some papers we want to hand out to you. This is an exercise in thinking and action. We have to take actions now and next year and we need to make progress so our students can’t help but make progress. I think when you look at the sheets and when we discuss the progress we’ve made from last year to this year, though we’re not going into great detail, you’ll see that the promises we’ve made are things we’ve actually made happen.
Click here to open the handout (word document)
Next year we’re going to start an early childhood program in Wynot. We've coordinated K through 4 programs, and the changes to the high school of the 4-day week have helped make great strides in bringing consistency. We coordinated our curriculums. We continue to spend no tax dollars on technology. Anything spent on technology is from grants that we’ve written. We have the ability to video chat and the ability to make the classroom more interactive. We have the hardware in the rooms, it’s just a matter of finding inventive ways to use them.
Our schools were just spotlighted in a national publication. For us to have that kind of impact on the country is amazing. This is due to some of the work we’ve been doing these last couple of years with InnovationLabs.
With the initiation of a bullying program, we’ve made great strides. We know that some kids are afraid of going into the locker rooms. They spoke of that yesterday. We want to reduce the administrative staff by half a person this year and another half next year. This will help reduce our costs even further. We have to restructure our administration in order to support our faculty.
We can look at our facilities. We're looking at an addition in Newcastle. We would have an elevator system and a place for where the community can meet. We had a setback in this project when we tested our soil and we had to dig down to see what was at the bottom of that hole.
We had a challenge of cutting budgets but couldn’t do it just by cutting. We can’t drop $300k out of the Newcastle budget. This is the first year where our revenue should balance our expenditures. But we still have a $500k hole from deficit spending over the last few years - and this is not small. We asked that this year our kids be part of the process. They stepped up to the plate and it’s exciting to see what they’ve come up with. We’re looking at five sources of information. First we had the surveys to all four communities. Then we had the students yesterday afternoon and a small group of parents last night who learned a lot about our school system. Today we have you and then the board later this afternoon. We’re not just making our recommendations to the boards but we're making your recommendations.
The evolution of what we do is essential. We have to make sure that what we do is sustainable. It’s not forever; it lasts just until we change again. It’s not about the smartest or strongest but about the most adaptable.
Many schools across the country contact us because they’re worried about extinction. If you focus on extinction it will probably happen. If you focus on sickness it will probably happen. But if you focus on solutions and health then those will happen too.
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Michael Kaufman
Good morning. Do you have any questions for Dan? Any questions about what you saw around the room?
Q: Why are we talking about China so much?
A: I don’t know if we’re talking about it so much but after having been there and hearing from my colleague, Langdon, who goes there a lot, I can tell you that the U.S. knows nothing about what’s happening there. Even when I was there I couldn’t get my mouth off the ground. It’s more modern than most places in the world. Their roads are clean and wide, their cars are new. The number of Chinese people is 3 to 4 times the number of the people in the U.S. It used to be that people would come here to get educated here and go back to their country. Now it might be the reverse. We may be sending our kids over to China to get educated and for jobs. I don’t know. India is now starting to outsource their jobs to us. They’ve grown so big so fast.
The dollar has been the basis for all oil trading since the beginning but now people want to use euros. If that changes, then the status of the dollar and the American people will change immediately, overnight. When the bailout conversations were taking place there was talk about borrowing money from China. In our lifetimes we are used to countries borrowing from us. This is a huge reversal. China is a serious consideration and will influence our futures.
Our school system has a 50% high school graduation rate. The rest of the world is starting to question their emulating the United States. It might turn out that the only way our young people can get ahead is by sending them somewhere else. Things may reverse themselves from what they were.
The towers with the concept cards are topics that influence our lives.
Any other questions?
One of my mentors was Dr. Deming, best known for his work introducing quality to Japan. I learned from him that he or she who learns fastest wins. The faster you can learn as an entity or an organization, the better. How do people learn?
- Exposure
- Trial and error
- Seeing/Visual
- Hearing/Auditory
- Kinesthetic
- Teaching
- Failure/making mistakes
- Doing something
There is no learning doing the same thing over and over again. Is there any learning when you get the right answer? No.
What if there is no right answer? I do believe there is a right answer for this second and another one for the next second. So you do the best you can in this moment and then again in the next. It’s possible there is more than one way to get to the right answer and it is possible that there is more than one right answer.
If that’s true, why have a curriculum? This is a rhetorical question. How could you possibly know what you should be learning? The top jobs today did not exist in 2004. Do you think the pace of change is going to slow down in the future? Unlikely. The graduates in 2010 in just one year from now will take jobs that did not exist within the last five years. The kindergarteners today will take jobs do not exist today. How can we know what we should be teaching?
I was talking to Dan a month ago and we talked about why change was so hard to make, so I made a PowerPoint presentation last night with some thoughts about that. We can talk more but let’s get you to work and talking with each other. Part of what you’re going to do now is to make some recommendations to the board who are meeting this afternoon. All of this will be synthesized into some cohesive report so we can understand what’s going to be happening next.
This next activity is focused on projects that are already happening or will be happening. Go to the breakout area according to your interest. The assignments are in the breakout area and we’ll come around with the next activity.
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