Spring Forward!

I will admit it was pretty tough to get up on Sunday morning. I could blame it on the Tipp Hill Run or getting home late from taking in Reaching for Marsby downtown, but either of those excuses for being a little slow on Sunday morning would be indicators that I am getting old. It must have been the time change. That transcends age and sounds like the best excuse to me!

Congratulations:

Congratulations to the Academic Decathlon's 3rd place finish at the New York State's Championship over the weekend. The team tallied a total of 26 medals led by Emma Ryan, Andrew Fordyce, Kristina Konfederat and Alexander Pompo. Also contributing to the teams success were Kenneth Brill, Jerry Roy, Michael Richards, Lindsay Grome, Megan Nolan, Callie Campbell, Megan Petty, Nicholas Serrao, Tatyana Shakhov, John Lisi and Lauren Brieant. Nice Job representing West Genesee's excellent academic reputation!

Congratulations to the hockey team. While they came up just short of another state championship, they showed true poise through the entire season which culminated with a four overtime/shoot out loss to a very formidable opponent. Thanks for a great season.  Believe it or not, spring sports start today for our varsity and junior varsity teams!

KONY2012-What is it?: If you were to ask anyone to describe me with one word, "activist" would not be one of them. That being said, if you want to know what your high school kids are talking about the answer would most certainly be "KONY2012". The KONY movement was started by a viral video created by an organization titled, Invisible Children Inc. The goal of the organization is to have young people and key adults (high school students, college students, celebrities, and public figures are the target audience) use the tools that they know best, texting, Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube to make Joseph Kony famous and therefore visible to parties trying to remove him from power. Kony is the head of an African resistance group who is known to be abusive on several levels to women and children. Still following me?  It sounds like a movie script, and there are certainly criticisms against the sponsoring organization as well. The bottom line, however, is that our students and their peers across the country are very aware of the movement and they want to get involved. 

The viral video is about 30 minutes long and can be found with a quick Internet search. I would rate the video PG-13, and I would recommend that you take a look at it if you want to be plugged into what your high school or college-age students are becoming a part of right now. We spoke about the whole thing at our dinner table one night, and it was certainly a more interesting conversation than the usual "Is your homework done and are your rooms clean?"

Budget Information: In other news, we have posted our budget documents on our homepage http://www.westgenesee.org/.  Please check out the budget presentation for all of the details and feel free to contact me with questions. The quick facts about the budget are that:

• we are not adding or removing any additional programs;
• we will have some enrollment and attrition based reductions; and
• we will have a tax levy that falls below the tax cap. 

Redistricting Update: Last week we held our fourth redistricting meeting and again it was very well attended. You can find the minutes from that meeting, as well as the presentation that was given, on our website from the quicklinks section of the homepage. This project is coming into focus and the last two meetings will reveal the final proposals for the Board to consider for 2013-2014. Stay tuned and thanks to all who have been attending the meetings.

I am looking forward to the Festival of Bands later this week as well as a continuation of this warm weather!

Have a great week.

Chris