Here it comes….

The start of the school year is upon us. We have been able to spend the last few days as a faculty and staff together preparing for the new school year.  Now the focus of all of our attention and hard work will be arriving… the students.

One of my comments from my opening day address was “Remarkable is the desire to help all students realize their dreams.”  Saline Area Schools is a remarkable school district, however, we often times become wrapped up in percentile rankings, standardized tests, and numbers of students proficient. While these are very important (the data does need to be crunched and reviewed for improvement) it should not be the focus of our daily work. We need to look closely at each student in our classroom as individuals, with unique talents and needs.

It will be our task in the first few days of the school year to assess the current performance level for each student. We need this information in order to accomplish our greatest purpose – which is to help ALL students achieve growth. It does not matter near as much where a student is at when they start the year, but rather it is most important where they are at when we finish the year. It is our purpose and goal as educators to take each student for what they are as an individual and then each day ask ourselves did we help that student to grow, academically, socially, and personally.

If we all work hard to be able to answer that question with a “yes” each day for every student, then we will be successful in our work.