SCHOOL ZONE 10-23-14

BUS ROUTES TO NEW ELEMENTARY WILL NOT CHANGE

As reported in last week’s Photojournal, we would like to continue to assure parents, guardians and caretakers that any student in kindergarten through grade 3 currently riding a school bus to Vermilion Elementary School will continue to be eligible for transportation to the new school through the end of this school year on May 29, 2015.   Our current policy states that students living within one mile of a school building are not eligible for school bus transportation.  New bus routes will be established for the 2015-2016 school year using a 1 mile radius from the new building.  Information about transportation eligibility changes will be communicated to parents and guardians as early as possible.    

INFECTIOUS DISEASE INFORMATION

The recent increase in news and information about Ebola has sparked conversation and controversy throughout our community, including in the schools.  The news seems even more unsettling when it affects facilities or communities that are close to home.  I would like to assure the entire community that our staff will continue to monitor news and information sources like the Centers for Disease Control and Ohio Health Department, as well as local health agencies.  We will follow all guidelines and take every precaution to protect staff and students.  Factual information about this disease is posted on our website.  We will continue to update the information as it is provided to us by reliable sources. 

VHS PARENT UNIVERSITY

The VHS School Counseling Department is beginning a new informational program called Parent University.  This group will meet periodically throughout the year for informal discussion in areas that relate to our students. The first session will be held October 23 from 6:30 PM to 7:30 PM at Vermilion High School in the Digital Learning Lab (Room 807).  The topic for the first session will be academic issues including grades, transcripts, and the college application process.  There will also be a short discussion about PowerSchool for parents.  This is an important outreach to help high school parents stay in touch with the issues their children are facing, and learn more about how to be involved in the decision making process.  We hope that many of you will be interested in taking advantage of this opportunity. 

ACT PRACTICE TEST

Your child can find out how to improve his or her score on the ACT.  A practice ACT test opportunity is available on Saturday, November 8 at the Educational Service Center of Lorain County, 1885 Lake Avenue, Elyria.  The test will be given from 8:30 AM to 12:00 PM.  This is an opportunity for students to experience an actual ACT test without the results being reported to VHS or colleges.  Following the test, students are permitted to keep the test booklet and will receive a solution key.  A few days after the test students receive a complete analysis of their score, with notes about the areas of weakness so they can focus improvement efforts.  The cost is $30.00 (checks payable to ESCLC Endowment) and the deadline to register is October 31.  Registration forms are available in the School Counseling Office.

3-D PRINTERS – A NEW TECHNOLOGY FOR CLASSROOMS

The 3-D printer uses a digital 3-D design file for any object and prints the object by laying down successive layers of a material until the object is complete.  3-D printing is being used today in many industries.  This technology will continue to grow and will have uses in many industries around the world.  U.S. News and World Report in their July 21 edition, that 3-D printing has become surprisingly affordable for schools.  A variety of printing materials are available, but most teachers choose a low-cost plastic filament.  While the process sounds expensive, printers are available for as little as $500.00.  Our technology and administrative teams have been discussing this with teachers, and it is our intention to make these printers available to teachers at Sailorway and Vermilion High School no later than second semester this year.  This is in keeping with our emphasis on providing our students with the best education opportunities so that they can be competitive as they move into colleges and careers. 

SCHOOL ZONE 10-9-14

BE CAUTIOUS WHEN TRAVELING NEAR SCHOOLS

Travel in the area of Sanford Street and Sailorway Drive was further interrupted this week as crews work to complete construction for ongoing road and facility projects.  On Monday, October 6 the south end of Douglas Street was closed for approximately 8 days to allow tie-in of the water line and construction of sidewalks for the new building.  On Wednesday, October 8, the north entrance to the high school was closed to allow concrete to be poured for the apron from the driveway to Sanford Street.  We anticipate that the north entrance will be open by Monday, October 13.  Traveling the various detours around construction can be frustrating, but we ask that you consider safety first when driving in the area of the schools.  Please be patient and watch for children and adults who may be walking or riding bikes in the area.  Parents are asked to allow extra time as you transport your children to and from school.  We are excited about the improvements in the area and look forward to sharing them with you very soon. 

HALL OF FAME NOMINATION REMINDER 

Nomination applications for the Vermilion High School Hall of Fame are available on our district website, or by contacting Vermilion High School at 440-204-1701.  The deadline to submit applications has been extended to November 1, 2014.  The ceremony to honor this year’s inductees will be held on Friday, December 12, 2014. 

ARE YOU CONSTANTLY BUSY?  CONSIDER THIS

Recently I came across the New York Times best seller, “Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less” by Greg McKeown.  Below is an excerpt from that book that I feel is worth sharing.  If you are interested in learning more, visit http://gregmckeown.com/essentialism-the-disciplined-pursuit-of-less/ 

“We have a problem—and the odd thing is we not only know about it, we’re celebrating it. Just today, someone boasted to me that she was so busy she’s averaged four hours of sleep a night for the last two weeks. She wasn’t complaining; she was proud of the fact. She is not alone.  Why are typically rational people so irrational in their behavior? The answer, I believe, is that we’re in the midst of a bubble; one so vast that to be alive today in the developed world is to be affected, or infected, by it. It’s the bubble of bubbles: it not only mirrors the previous bubbles (whether of the Tulip, Silicon Valley or Real Estate variety), it undergirds them all.

Here are the three words: “The Busyness Bubble.”

The nature of bubbles is that some asset is absurdly overvalued until - eventually - the bubble bursts, and we’re left scratching our heads wondering why we were so irrationally exuberant in the first place. The asset we’re overvaluing now is the notion of doing it all, having it all, achieving it all; what Jim Collins calls “the undisciplined pursuit of more.”

This bubble is being enabled by an unholy alliance between three powerful trends: smart phones, social media, and extreme consumerism. The result is not just information overload, but opinion overload. We are more aware than at any time in history of what everyone else is doing and, therefore, what we “should” be doing. In the process, we have been sold a bill of goods: that success means being supermen and superwomen who can get it all done. Of course, we back-door-brag about being busy: it’s code for being successful and important.

Not only are we addicted to the drug of busyness, we are pushers too. In the race to get our children into “a good college” we have added absurd amounts of homework, sports, clubs, dance performances and ad infinitum extracurricular activities. And with them, busyness, sleep deprivation and stress.

Across the board, our answer to the problem of more is always more. We need more technology to help us create more technologies. We need to outsource more things to more people to free up own our time to do yet even more.  Luckily, there is an antidote to the undisciplined pursuit of more:  the disciplined pursuit of less, but better. A growing number of people are making this shift.  I call these people Essentialists.

These people are designing their lives around what is essential and eliminating everything else. These people take walks in the morning to think and ponder, they negotiate to have actual weekends (i.e. during which they are not working).  They turn technology off for set periods every night and create technology-free zones in their homes. They trade off time on Facebook and call those few friends who really matter to them. Instead of running to back-to-back in meetings, they put space on their calendars to get important work done.

The groundswell of an Essentialist movement is upon us. Even our companies are competing with one another to get better at this: from sleep pods at Google to meditation rooms at Twitter. At the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos this year, there were, for the first time, dozens of sessions on mindfulness. TIME magazine goes beyond calling this a movement, instead choosing the word “Revolution.”

One reason is because it feels so much better than being a Non-Essentialist. You know the feeling you get when you box up the old clothes you don’t wear anymore and give them away? The closet clutter is gone. We feel freer. Wouldn’t it be great to have that sensation writ large in our lives? Wouldn’t it feel liberating and energizing to clean out the closets of our overstuffed lives and give away the nonessential items, so we can focus our attention on the few things that truly matter? 

People are beginning to realize that when the "busyness bubble” bursts (and it will) we will be left feeling that our precious time on earth has been wasted doing things that had no value at all. We will wake up to having given up those few things that really matter for the sake of the many trivial things that don’t. We will wake up to the fact that that overstuffed life was as empty as the real estate bubble’s detritus of foreclosed homes.

Here are a few simple steps for becoming more of an Essentialist:

1. Schedule a personal quarterly offsite. Companies invest in quarterly offsite meetings because there is value in rising above day-to-day operations to ask more strategic questions. Similarly, if we want to avoid being tripped up by the trivial, we need to take time once a quarter to think about what is essential and what is nonessential. I have found it helpful to apply the “rule of three”: every three months you take three hours to identify the three things you want to accomplish over the next three months.

2. Rest well to excel. K. Anders Ericsson found in “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance” that a significant difference between good performers and excellent performers was the number of hours they spent practicing. The finding was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell as the “10,000 hour rule.” What few people realize is that the second most highly correlated factor distinguishing the good from the great is how much they sleep. As Ericsson pointed out, top performing violinists slept more than less accomplished violinists: averaging 8.6 hours of sleep every 24 hours.

3. Add expiration dates on new activities. Traditions have an important role in building relationships and memories. However, not every new activity has to become a tradition. The next time you have a successful event, enjoy it, make the memory, and move on.

4. Say no to a good opportunity every week. Just because we are invited to do something isn’t a good enough reason to do it. Feeling empowered by essentialism, one executive turned down the opportunity to serve on a board where she would have been expected to spend 10 hours a week for the next 2-3 years. She said she felt totally liberated when she turned it down. It’s counterintuitive to say no to good opportunities, but if we don’t do it then we won’t have the space to figure out what we really want to invest our time in.

A hundred years from now, when people look back at this period, they will marvel at the stupidity of it all: the stress, the motion sickness, and the self-neglect we put ourselves through.  So we have two choices. We can be among the last people caught up in the “more bubble” when it bursts, or we can see the madness for what it is and join the growing community of Essentialists and get more of what matters in our one precious life.”