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Authentic Community Engagement Essential for Today's Schools

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While it has always been true that authentic community engagement is essential for school districts, it has arguably never been truer than it is today. Declining enrollment across the country, teacher shortages in many areas of the country, a bifurcated public, uncertainty at the Federal level, and the increasingly complex learning needs of our children are just some of the contemporary challenges facing schools. Having come off of two recent comprehensive and successful community engagement efforts in previous districts, resulting in the successful passage of $168.5 and $179.6M referenda, I was asked to facilitate a roundtable discussion this past fall at the RTM Conference in Baltimore. I titled the presentation Comprehensive Community Engagement Strategies to Support Long-Range Planning and Systematic Decision-Making . My current district, Northport-East Northport on Long Island, has partnered with the St. Louis firm Discovery Works for this purpose. Northport-East Northport has fou...
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Seven Helpful Constructs for Building a Coherent Future-Focused School System

Whether it is the World Economic Forum's Top 10 Job Skills, the McKinsey White Paper Defining the Skills Citizens Need in the Future World of Work (Dondi, et. al., 2021), Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation , or the explosion of generative AI, it is clear that schools must redesign their systems to ensure that they support whole child growth and development and prioritize learning experiences that foster the development of transferable skills in addition to mastery of traditional academic standards. My first Superintendent's Conference Day Keynote Address in the Northport-East Northport School District Union Free School District last April was titled Caring for the Present, Enabling the Future . The point of the presentation was to acknowledge and honor the outstanding opportunities available to our students due to the hard work of our staff and the tremendous support of our community. It also introduced some concepts for future-focused thinking that I believed we need...
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Personalized Learning the Focus of Eric Sheninger's Latest Book with Nicki Slaugh

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Personalize:  Meeting the Needs of ALL Learners by Eric Sheninger and Nicki Slaugh is a fitting follow up to Sheninger's excellent 2021 book, Disruptive Thinking in Our Classrooms .  Disruptive Thinking in Our Classrooms dedicates Chapter Five to the topic, which introduces a model based on student voice, choice, path, pace, and place.   Personalize  builds on Sheninger's experience working with teachers in thousands of classrooms around the world and Slaugh's innovative leadership as a secondary principal and award-winning teacher in Utah to move from theory to action and provide teachers with practical strategies to support them in making the shift from traditional instruction to true personalized learning. To this superintendent, Personalize is a welcome resource.  For years educators have talked about personalizing learning for students, but in far too many classrooms across the country, this is not the reality.  In my doctoral studies as far ba...
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Building Life Ready Graduates through a Culture of Service to Others

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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 ...
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Why Do We Never Get an Answer?

  "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...
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The More Things Change . . .

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 ne...
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