Harbor Days

Recently, a team from my new district, Northport-East Northport, located on Long Island, had the privilege of presenting at the Future-Focused Schools Conference in Washington, D.C.  The presentation was entitled When Schools Have No Walls:  Building Life Ready Graduates through a Culture of Service to Others .  I started as the district's superintendent in January 2024.  I was looking forward to taking a team to the conference to build a foundation for our future work together.  Being new, I had no intention of submitting a proposal to present.  However, as I learned more about the district, I could not believe how deeply rooted the ethos of service is in the culture of Northport-East Northport.  It was on display everywhere I turned.  It is truly part of the district's DNA, and I wanted to celebrate this commitment with my team.  In doing so, I had hoped that their story might also inspire others. It Starts Young, and It Starts with Tier I Most districts participate in variou

  "Why do we never get an answer when we're knocking at the door?" "Question",  The Moody Blues --From 1970's  A Question of Balance One simple answer to the question, "Why do we never get an answer when we're knocking at the door?" posed by The Moody Blues is likely that the person isn't asking the right question in the first place.  The quality of the answer one gets to any question directly correlates to the quality or nature of the question being asked, and it is not that difficult for a person to get the answer they are looking for by strategically wording a question a certain way. While Charlotte Danielson asserts that her framework is supposed to be about professional growth, many states and local districts have adopted it as their teacher evaluation instrument.  Districts that use the framework as an evaluation tool largely construct their instruments around Domains Two and Three of the Framework.  Domain 3:  Learning Experi

In October of 2010, the fall after I accepted my first superintendent position, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed Act 10 into law.  The residual effect of that led to the need for our district to cut $2.2M out of a $37M budget. In my second superintendent position, my CFO told me in May when I was visiting the district shortly after I was appointed, that we had a $2.4M budget deficit going into the next school year, but not to worry, because in June, the Board planned to cut $1M, and we had enough fund balance to manage until we could take further budget measures.  For whatever reason, that didn't happen, and a week later, when the calendar turned to July, I walked through the door and into a situation where we had a $3.4M deficit on a $120M budget. In the first instance we balance the budget by the next budget cycle.  In the second instance, it took two budget cycles.  In either case, it is not exactly the way a new superintendent would prefer to come into a new situation--at