President's Message
January - February 2010
Happy New Year to all and a warm welcome to the new decade.
It seems like just yesterday that we were celebrating the beginning of a new millennium and wondering if our ATM card was going to work with the much hyped Y2K crash looming.
A lot has changed since then, and we are definitely in store for much more of the same - change.
As teachers and support staff, we are those being asked to do more in a constantly changing environment to ensure that all of the students of the district get the education that they need and deserve to be successful and life-long learners in the 21st century.
As we have seen, kids today are very different in many ways from their peers who went through the system during the last decade.
So much is being made of preparing our students for the 21st century, and imbuing them with the skills they will need to survive and thrive.
I myself had been to several workshops in this topic lately that hve left me both awed by the daunting task that lays ahead and enthralled at the prospect of making this journey along with my students.
We are not in the schools of our own childhood any longer and Kansas is a long afterthought.
We know that the stakes are high on all levels: local, state, national, and international arenas are where the adults of tomorrow will ply their trade and work in fields yet unnamed. If you need any further proof of this, I suggest you go to you tube and watch the latest version of the video: Shift Happens.
So what are we to make of all of this?
It has become my stock line, but here I will modify it for the context of this message: we are the continuity and backbone of the district, but we must also resolve to (as Ganhdi said) be the change that we want to see in the world.
As leaders in this change, we must accept the responsibility that comes with the positions that we hold. We must stand as stakeholders and be the integral piece of developing and implementing the change and the methods in which we employ it.
If we choose to stand idly by and allow the change to be enacted upon us, we will be swept up in it without a say in its scope or sequence and that would be the great tragedy of the 2010's.
-- Steve
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