Superintendent’s Report
February 10, 2011
Recognition:
o Rotary Club Student of the Month: Samuel Hardy
o Band Festival: 21 MS students were selected to participate in the Lebanon Valley College MS Band Festival. The students engaged in new musical experiences with other local school districts and gained invaluable sight-reading and performance experience.
Snow and Ice:
It seems we have had storms every week since mid-December. To date, we have had 3 delayed starts, 1 early release, and two snow days. Our two make-up days will be Monday, February 21 and Wednesday, April 20. That information has been communicated via AlertNow and is on our website. When calls go out through the system, 3,566 phone messages go out. If there is an emergency, up to 3 numbers can be called per family and 9,252 calls go out. We recently added the e-mail option and now 2,556 e-mails go out as well. E-mails are sent simultaneously; literally, that takes about 2 minutes. The phone calls, since AlertNow redials if a call does not go through the first time, take about 30 to 45 minutes. So far this winter, AlertNow went down one time and our website was down once. Our website situation had nothing to do with the weather. As wonderful as this technology is, we will continue to use local media, our website, and AlertNow so we have redundancy in the communication methods.
Professional Development:
Administrators:
o Mrs. Brown and I have both completed our PA Inspired Leadership (PIL) course which was developed by NISL, National Institute for School Leadership. Our course was worth 90 Act 45 hours and called “Executive Development Program.”
o Mrs. Bachman has completed GROW I for new principals and Mr. Hale as completed a PIL course on English as a Second Language.
Farm Show:
As you know, the PA Farm Show is huge and represents a large part of Pennsylvania’s economy. Students, by law, can be excused from school to attend the show. To give you a sense of the number of students who took advantage of this through Education Trip requests:
Forge: 13 students
Northside: 11 students
Pine: 11 students
High School: 18 students
Board Opportunities:
o Legislative Breakfast: March 14 at IU13 Burle Center
o IU Convention: April 13 at Lampeter Elementary
Budget:
You are all aware that we held our presentation on the preliminary budget February 3. The budget remains available for the public in our district office and that document as well as the presentation is posted on our website. Administratively, we continue to work to make the budget cuts as reasonable as possible.
