Scot Graden's Blog

I have heard that for some – my district wide voice mail that was sent tonight at 7:15pm didn’t go through.  Here is what I said…

Hello, this is Scot Graden, from Saline Area Schools.  I am calling to remind all Saline Area Schools families that tomorrow, November 3rd is the date to vote on a very important school issue.  All Washtenaw County voters will be presented with a ballot proposal for a Regional Enhancement Millage. The proposal would generate approximately $3.5 million for Saline Area Schools and for every $1.00 collected from the Saline Area School district residents, $1.18 comes back to the district. The proposal request is for 2 mills for 5 years.

Please remember to get to the polls tomorrow – check the Budget blog on the school website for information on the proposals and information on where to vote.  Thank you for your continued support of Saline Area Schools.

Recently, I have been thinking a lot about decision making.  We have several major decisions that are on the horizon for Saline Area Schools.  In this month’s Harvard Business Review, Mr. Thomas Davenport notes that important decisions are often made without enough thought and support, with all-too often negative results. Smart organizations, he says, improve their decision-making by taking the following steps:

• Analyzing each decision in terms of who plays a role in making it, how often has to be made, what information is needed to make it, and the track record with decisions like this in the past.

• Designing the roles, processes, systems, and behaviors needed to make the decisions well and execute them after they’re made. Inclusiveness is a key factor in decision design.

• Identifying key decisions and ranking them in priority order, asking how important they are to achieving the mission and goals of the organization.

• Thinking through and institutionalizing processes to decide how to decide: which decisions should be made unilaterally by the supervisor, made by the supervisor after consulting with a group, made by a group by majority vote, or arrived at by group consensus. In addition, there should be procedures for deciding who needs to be consulted or informed and who will be accountable for results.

• Decisions need to be assessed after the fact – what were the results, and how well did the process work?

Over the next several months, it will be important to stay informed about the processes we will use to address serious financial and instructional decisions facing Saline Area Schools.

Well, last week is not one I will soon forget.  On Friday morning, I sent this message to Saline Area School staff:

Late Thursday afternoon, Gov. Granholm initiated the proration process for schools and raised the total reduction by another $127 per pupil to a net loss of $289 per student.  For Saline, this equals over $1.5 million in lost revenue for the current year.

Quite honestly, as the leader of this district, I am deeply troubled with some conversations I have begun to have regarding the steps we will need to take to offset this drastic loss in revenue.  We are considering options that include staff reductions across all areas, elimination of programs, reduction in services, and numerous other cost saving measures.  Sadly, this doesn’t even begin to address the structural deficit for the 2010-2011 school year that is only 8 months away.

Once again, I encourage all of you to be informed about the statewide issues related to public school funding.  In addition, in Washtenaw County, we have the opportunity to vote on a Countywide Enhancement Millage on Tuesday, November 3rd.  For more information about this critical proposal, click here.

Thanks,

Scot

I now know the exact number – $1,612,975.00.  Sadly, this number will grow even larger due to a slight decline in our enrollment.  It is also possible that there will be yet another proration as the collection of revenues have been consistently coming in below already deflated projections.  I know Saline Area Schools is in better shape than many, many districts – the drastic impact will be felt in communities across the state.

It is very clear, regardless of the outcome of the current Millage proposal, that local districts and the State of Michigan must develop more stable funding for public education.  This week along with Board President David Friese, I had the opportunity to hear State Superintendent Mike Flanagan speak to school board members and superintendents from around the State.  He noted that he sees a new three “R’s” for education.  “Revenue, Reductions and Reform,” he said, “that becomes the three legs of a stable future.”  Well, for me – a stable future can’t get here fast enough.

One of the questions I get from time to time and certainly one that I think about often is, “Does anyone read the website?”  and another familiar one is, “Does anyone read your blogs?”

As I have noted here in the blog previously, I am concerned about how to get information out to our broad community audience.  How do I reach people in the community who do not have children in the system?  How do I reach families looking to move to the area?  In the current “Monthly Poll” on the website – the two traditional print media outlets are at the bottom.  (I do realize that people have to come to the website to even know about the poll…. but it is interesting.)

October Monthly Poll

I have also been tracking visitors using Google Analytics – another FREE product from Google to help gather information about who is visiting your site and what are they looking at when they are on the site.  So, I wanted to share that data.

Here is a screenshot that shows from September 23 to October 23 – we had 45,428 unique visitors to the http://www.salineschools.com website.  They represent 142,875 visits, looked at 239,107 pages, and stayed on the average just over 2 minutes per visit.

Website Visitor Overview

Another interesting report is the Map Overview.  The vast majority came from the United States.  However, 71 visits origininated Canada, 17 from the United Kingdom and even 10 from Turkey.  The green shading shows the countries where users visited salineschools.com in the past month.

Map Overview

As for the blogs, we do not get near as much traffic.  So, if you are reading this… first, thank you and second, you should be proud that you are among an elite group of information hounds.  The last thirty days we had 789 unique visitors, that represented 1,434 visits and users on average spent about 45 seconds reading per visit.  The overview represents all of the blogs – this one, News and Notes, Budget, Curriculum, H1N1, Technology, etc.  We are also looking to encourage comments related to the topics we are posting about.

Blog Visitor Overview

As you can see, we do get some very good information – but like most data it prompts more questions.

I just read a very interesting Op-Ed piece from Thomas Friedman. He quotes Harvard labor expert Lawrence Katz:

“If you think about the labor market today, the top half of the college market, those with the high-end analytical and problem-solving skills who can compete on the world market or game the financial system or deal with new government regulations, have done great. But the bottom half of the top, those engineers and programmers working on more routine tasks and not actively engaged in developing new ideas or recombining existing technologies or thinking about what new customers want, have done poorly. They’ve been much more exposed to global competitors that make them easily substitutable.”Those at the high end of the bottom half — high school grads in construction or manufacturing — have been clobbered by global competition and immigration, added Katz. “But those who have some interpersonal skills — the salesperson who can deal with customers face to face or the home contractor who can help you redesign your kitchen without going to an architect — have done well.”

The Mr. Friedman adds,

“So our schools have a doubly hard task now — not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.”

Thoughts?

Last week I attended the Foundation for Saline Area Schools trustee meeting.  The primary agenda item dealt with the distribution of the grant requests that have been sent in by our faculty.  It was exciting to see the 31 grants submitted for review.  In total, over $62,000 in project funding was sought for grants that included math facts, tech integration, chemistry & matter, smartboards, hands-on science, ELMO projectors, brain based tools, ELL materials, and more.

Unfortunately, the level of funding within the Foundation for Saline Area Schools (FSAS) does not currently provide for the ability to fund all of the grants that have merit.  The FSAS Trustees will have tough choices to make over the next month.

This week, we are just kicking off the 2010 campaign for Saline Area School staff to use the payroll deduction method to support the Foundation for Saline Area Schools with monthly donations.  I encourage staff to join me in contributing to the Foundation.

For those of you in the community who would like to support the Foundation for Saline Area Schools – and in doing so support the innovative projects that they fund – send your donations to

Foundation for Saline Area Schools

P.O. Box 5

Saline, Mi 48176

Over the last few weeks in particular, I have been in and out of classrooms where students are working together on many different projects.  We call it “collaboration” and it seems to be working as an instructional strategy.  The one issue that has come up at various times, particularly at the 5-12 grade level, is their lack of time to “collaborate” on projects outside of school.  Our students are extremely busy after school.  In Saline, we are blessed with endless extra-curricular activities that keep them physically and mentally active most nights.

As a District we have been working to help students collaborate using technology. We looked at how the adults in our organization communicate and collaborate – via email, Google chat, and shared Google documents.  In order for us to get our students on board – we need to provide them with email accounts based in Gmail. This provides them access to email that can be monitored for appropriate use and also allow them to collaborate with classmates both in school, and out of school.

With student’s email and shared document access – coordinating busy after-school schedules will no longer be an issue.  The best part of the deal is that it is completely free!  Google provides Google applications free of charge to educational institutions. Our students will have full access to communication (7 GB of email storage) and collaboration tools, document sharing, group calendars and websites – all at no cost.

Look for this beginning in January, 2010.

This month marks the start of my third year as either the interim or permanent Superintendent for Saline Area Schools.  As I reflect on the district and my role in leading it, I see the need for planning.

Most of you probably agree – teachers imparting information to students in a one-way direction – is outmoded.  I also think that we as school administrators need to make the same kind of adjustments.  As classrooms move from content to knowledge, education leadership must also shift. We must cross the road from management to leadership.

As leaders we must ask questions.  I tend to preach about the ever increasingly complex society – in doing so I need to recognize the increasing complexities of my own role.  My job is to understand the interests of every constituent group in the system and to ensure that my team has taken these interests into consideration before moving ahead.

To be successful in 2020 students will need to navigate a complex world, appreciate different cultures, and make sense of endless sources of information.  To have a system that accomplishes this – we need a plan.

Over the next few weeks you will begin to hear more about a strategic planning process that Saline Area Schools will be initiated in December, 2009.  It is my hope to use this process to add clarity to where we are heading.

Today was the first Community Conversation meeting of the year.  I have the opportunity to meet with parents and community members to discuss Saline Area Schools. There were about 20 people who stopped in at My Favorite Cafe and shared their thoughts on a variety of issues. I would like to thank them for taking the time to give me feedback on the current practices of our district.

A few of the items we discussed were:

• Development of a Suggestion Box on the website
• Collective Negotiations with Support Staff
• Use of Moodle for sharing information with parents
• School Calendars – How to manage them?
• Academic Advising
• Weighted Grades
• High School Sign
• Supporting students mental health
• Washtenaw County Enhancement Millage

The next Community Conversation is scheduled for Thursday, October 22^nd from 7:30-9:00am at Benny’s Bakery, 111 W. Michigan Ave.  Please stop by, say hello, and bring any thoughts about the district you feel I should know.

High School Media Center

This week there was an interesting article in the New York Times about a trend in new school construction to use artwork and design elements to create an inspiring learning environment.  A quote from a building principal in one of the new schools caught my eye –

“Looking at art is not just an aesthetic; it’s a learning resource,” said Abie Benitez, principal of the Columbus academy. “We’ve created a framework for everybody to find a connection to the art in the building — and to the building itself.”

We are very proud of the incredible educational facilities here in Saline.  They are a symbol of the value our community places on education and our future generations.  I do, however, wonder what we can do (at little to no cost) to add to the artistic details of our buildings.  Any ideas?