Welcome to August and Welcome to Activities and School is Around the Corner!!

With August comes my much anticipated excitement for kids, chaos, and more coffee than probably beneficial. Seriously, I start missing students and staff and parents once August hits. I hope all students and staff alike have taken some time to slow down, rejuvenate, and count their blessings. My goal is to encourage a calm in the midst of our hurried up society.

I am excited to start this monthly blog/corner to share with you comments and learnings that I have that we can all use to improve our school and community. If you know me, you know that my MIND NEVER STOPS SPINNING with creative ideas for improvement. I want to share with my community and families what I get to do with the great staff and students I have every day. My work at school is my passion.

Our staff has done an amazing job of preparing over the summer. Our school board has worked a lot with improving our school. I’m so grateful for all their work on committees and meetings. Our custodial staff has been moving furniture around, cleaning floors, walls, lights, tables, fixing major items, dealing with leaking with the great summer rains, and mowing more than usual. Our teachers have been taking classes, attending trainings, prepping lessons, and several have been having babies of which we are so grateful. Our office staff has been ordering and preparing supplies; our business/admin have been preparing our updated policies and handbooks, curriculum, instructional programming, and Mrs. Myers, our assistant K-12 principal and tech coordinator, has put an immense amount of work into our new website. I invite you to take a look around the website and give us feedback as we are always working to improve. We also have a new communication tool so our students and families and teachers and coaches can all communicate safely and efficiently. As you can see, we don’t work “just 9 months of the year” like many want us to believe. We are constantly learning!!

Last year our School Board and administration had a goals workshop where we brainstormed all the concerns as well as all the strengths in our school. We completed some root cause analysis of our concerns and strengths and then we developed three goals that our district is going to work on. We also re-thought our mission statement.

MISSION:

The mission of the Wall School District #51-5 is to provide an environment that fosters academic excellence, critical thinking, and lifelong learning, through inspiration, innovative teaching, community engagement, and skill development, thus empowering our students to fully develop their potential to lead and succeed in an ever-changing world.

DISTRICT GOALS:

1. Develop Financial Planning Procedures

2. Improve Academics and Develop Clear Learning Targets

3. Develop Clear Directions/Expectations for Students, Staff, and Families

I’m going to leave you with a great idea from our students at the Activities Meeting we had last week. I love to visit with the big group of students, and I told them in our assembly that I had tightened up the academic eligibility requirements. When I told them, “When we raise the bar up here...”, a student spoke out “We go above.” YES, we do! My challenge: when a bar is raised, jump over it!!

We Welcome You, Your Students, and Life as we Know it at Wall School!!

My door is always open and the coffee pot is on...if you can find me in my office (I’m probably out learning with kids!)

Until Next Time...