Scot Graden's Blog

On July 16th, Dr. Betty Garner was in Saline to provide insight into her book, “Getting to Got it”. The book, and her training with our staff, focused on why some students struggle and some students “get it”.

Dr. Garner shared methods to help students gather, organize and make sense of information. She also provided suggestions for using these techniques in daily classroom practice.

Yesterday, I listened to a podcast interview with Terry Davidson, the Director of the Annual Michigan School Testing Conference

He had some very interesting thoughts on the “new” focus on testing. In Saline, we are adding or reviewing options to add assessments (a.k.a. tests) at various levels. Last year we implemented the Plan and Explore tests at the high school level. Our interest in doing so is to gain information that can be used here to support instruction.

For example next year, we are implementing the NWEA assessment to get norm-referenced data on our students. This information will be beneficial for staff and families to make better instructional decisions for each student.

In my opinion, Mr. Davidson’s quote below sums up both the concern and opportunity with regard to testing in the current political environment.

“Ultimately, any test data that are collected, as far as I am concerned, need to be justified, and the primary justification for it, if I am a School Superintendent, has to do with gathering assessment data that help local classroom teachers make intelligent decisions about the effectiveness of their instruction, that’s number one.” Terry states.

“I understand the State wants data and I think there are ways to get that, but we can’t lose sight of the fact that if we take teachers away from their primary task and don’t arm them with the kind of data necessary to make intelligent decisions about what’s effective instruction for each and every student in their class, we have lost the battle.”

Click here to listen to the podcast.

The annual organizational meeting began with Board Secretary Paul Hynek swearing in the recently elected board members – Lisa Slawson and Chuck Lesch. Their four-year terms will run until June 30, 2012.

The board then elected their officers for the 2008-2009 school year, which as it turned out will be the same as last year. Ms. Lisa Slawson will serve as the President, Ms. Trudy Driscoll will serve as Vice President and Mr. Paul Hynek will be the Secretary.

We began to adopt the new policy manual by voting to use new by-laws, human resource and financial controls. The process of policy adoption will take place over the next two months. Once the process is complete, the new policy manual will be placed on the www.salineschools.com website in a searchable format.

We discussed the new school issued email addresses for board members. It will be the practice of the board for emails that request and/or require a response to reply to the entire board. Typically, they will also be sent to the Superintendent for further response. School issued voice mail boxes for each board member will be discontinued and a main “All Board” voice mail will be established so community members can leave messages for the entire board in that format.

The consent agenda was quite large with numerous housekeeping issues being handled as we begin a new school and fiscal year. One change of note for 08-09 is that all regular board meetings will begin at 6:30pm. In the past, the first meeting of the month has been at 7:00pm and the second meeting was at 6:30pm. From time to time this had created confusion for interested community members and staff as to when the meetings were scheduled to start.

Our next regular meeting will be held Tuesday, August 12th at 6:30pm.

The 117th Annual Saline High School Alumni Banquet was held tonight in Union School. It was fitting that the event was located at Union School, as we celebrated the class of 1958, who was the last class to graduate from Union School. The next year, the class of 1959 graduated from what is now Liberty School.

Patricia Visel Aungst spoke about the class of ’58 – 43 members strong, 25 of whom still live within 30 miles of Saline. For comparison, there were 428 graduates in the Saline High School Class of 2008. There were also a good number of former students from the classes of 1948 and 1943, who were celebrating their 60th and 65th reunions.

Joan Starkey and Kathy Raus Hoey performed “You’ll Never Walk Alone” just as they had at their graduation on June 5, 1958.

In looking at the 2007-2008 evaluation of the Weber-Blaess Schoolhouse from the Saline Area School Historic Preservation Foundation, I was impressed by the number of people who visited this past year. Over 40 groups, including virtually every 3rd & 4th grade class from the Saline District, spent time in the schoolhouse learning about the rural education system that existed in the Saline area up until about 50 years ago. It’s a team effort, led by Jim and Cheryl Hoeft, there were 6 docents and another 3 docents in training.

It’s great to see that over 1,300 individuals benefited in one year.Thinking back to our trip to Greenfield Village in Dearborn to visit a schoolhouse when I was in elementary school and now trying to manage a budget that includes $4.00+ fuel prices, having this schoolhouse resource in our community is wonderful!

I also got word of an upcoming event at the schoolhouse at 520 Woodland Drive, Saline.On Sunday, August 17th there will be an old fashioned ice cream social.The event will include numerous activities for children and adults.

icecreamsocial

On Friday, it’s time to head to Battle Creek! Saline defeated Detroit Southeastern in the Quarterfinal and have advanced to the State Semi Finals on Friday, June 13th in Battle Creek. Saline (31-9) takes on Troy (27-11) at Noon on Morrison Field.

The Pleasant Ridge site is under major renovation including parking lots and drainage capacity.

Improvements to the Woodland Meadows playground have also begun to take shape. The asphalt fitness pathway is being constructed with future developments later this summer and into the fall. A special thank you to Ms. Heather Kellstrom and the Woodland Meadows PTA who developed a CARES proposal to access a portion of the funds for this project.

What a run! Over the past 5 years, the Saline Varsity Boys Golf squad has set the standard for excellence in boy’s high school golf in the Michigan. This year they were State Runner-Up. Six shots out of the Championship and had two individuals in the top 10, Matt Paterini and Phil Gieseker. A deeper look shows SEC titles, District and Regional titles, numerous major tournament wins. Along the way there were a variety of individual medalists, showing the depth of the program.

For the past five years in the State Tournament, Saline Boys Golf has finished:
2003: 2nd
2004: 21st
2005: 2nd
2006: 1st (undeafeated)
2008: 2nd
2009: Is looking solid with excellent underclassman returning.

Coach Carol Melcher has established a program that simply reloads. In the bigger (and more important) picture she has helped developed a group of young men into leaders in the classroom, on the course, and in life.