Friday, August 30, 2013

Time for School!

While I thoroughly, and I mean thoroughly enjoyed the summer, I cannot wait for the start of school. Buildings full of faculty and staff, students tired but ready to go, and our first full-day Kindergarten class all await us. I am really looking forward to a very positive school year.

Concussion Management is Important: With fall sports in the air, I want you to know that we have revised our policy on concussions (click here). Concussion prevention is paramount, and our Athletic Director, trainer, and coaches are all on board to make sure that our athletes have a safe and positive experience. We have stepped up our pre-testing for concussions as well as how long an athlete needs to be symptom-free before they can return to playing field.

Road Construction Update: We have heard from officials in charge of the roadwork happening around the high school and West Genesee Street that there is still some work to be done. They are going to try and block lanes AFTER the morning rush to the high school so that the least amount of inconvenience is felt.

If you are a parent who drops their children off at the high school or a student driver, I would recommend coming to the high school a few minutes earlier than normal until everyone understands and uses the new traffic flow that has been established. The first few days, we will keep an eye on traffic build-up in the morning from the high school campus onto Hinsdale Road and West Genesee Street over the first few days and ask officials to adjust the timing of the lights if necessary. We do not know if they will respond to our requests, but that have indicated that they will do what they can in order to make traffic flow as smooth as possible.

Parent Portal is Now Open: Now that many of our parents have gotten use to accessing Schooltool for their child’s information, we appreciated your patience over the summer as each building needed time to build their master schedules. Although this required outside usage of Schooltool for a few weeks, all of our applications are up and operating at this point. As early adopters of many of the programs we have grown to depend on, we are hoping that this year will be glitch-free.

New Theme: Our theme for this school year is going to be centered around, "thinking differently instead of working harder". I saw tremendous efforts from parents, faculty, staff, and students last year. I feel that there is another gear somewhere that will lead us to even more student success, but it revolves around thinking outside the box instead of putting forth more effort. I will talk more on that as the year progresses.

I am firing up the twitter account again @cbrownwgcsd (https://twitter.com/cbrownwgcsd), so be sure to follow if you want to see what everyone is up to while they are at school.  Enjoy your Labor Day weekend leading into a wonderful week, and I will be sure to post again soon.

Chris