Things Change

It seems like so many things have changed in just the two weeks since school has been out. Our parking lot and driveways have been completely torn out and access to the building is difficult. They say it is on schedule to be done the first of August before we need it. I hope so. They have also begun phase two of our window replacement project. So at any given point of the day windows in the building are missing. But soon afterwards there are new ones installed.

The administration team has also been working on calendars for students, teachers, secretaries and classified employees. We have also worked hard to find ways to save money and assist teachers next year as we all work with less days and less resources. Darren, Mike and Rich heard our needs to fund the consumable math and reading materials and have taken that into account as cuts in other areas were made. They will take over the annual responsibility for ordering these in coordination with the curriculum office.

We are also working to upgrade and consolidate programs, saving money in consolidation and in use of our technical support personnel. SASI is an outdated program that has not been supported or updated during the past five years even by its parent company. SASI is unable to handle the parent communication, report cards, test data management and coordination of departments such as lunch programs, library and classroom. We are working to transfer data to a program called Skyward. In doing so we will do away with SASI, AMS, Making the Grade, school finance software, District budget software, and eventually food service tracking software. Most of these programs have an annual support fee we can cut. The District is able to purchase Skyward with bond funds that are not available for salaries. This summer is actually our small window of opportunity. With the move of the high school and mid school next summer there would not be the time and expertise to pull off the transfer of data. Bond funds would not be available after that.

There will be a great amount of training on Skyward for Lisa and I throughout the summer. Lisa also gets the wonderful job of helping us clean and check the data for accuracy to ensure all runs smoothly when we return. I do need two teacher volunteers to take the grade book training on August 13th and then help us train the rest in the first week we return. Let me know if you are available and interested. This could be techie people or those that think hearing it twice (training and training others) would be beneficial.