SCHOOL ZONE 9-24-15

VERMILION EDUCATION FOUNDATION

The Vermilion Education Foundation held its annual banquet last week.  The dinner was very successful, as once again the attendees were generous in funding grant requests from teachers and administrators.  The Education Foundation committee has consistently supported quality educational projects not only for public schools, but also for St. Mary’s Elementary.  I applaud these volunteers for their continued dedication to Vermilion students and look forward to working with them in the future.

VOICEMAIL MESSAGE RETRIEVAL SYSTEM

Did you miss that call from your child’s school?  We now have a way for you to listen to past messages.  Any message that has been delivered within the past week can be retrieved and heard again. The toll-free telephone number to access the Inbound Message Retrieval System is:  888-882-7179.  When you call in you will hear the following message:  “Thank you for calling the Vermilion Local Schools Message Retrieval System. All messages directed to your current phone number for the past week are available for review. Please listen carefully to your options.”  Please follow the easy to use prompts that follow this message.  Respond to each prompt by pressing the appropriate key on your telephone keypad.   We hope that parents and guardians will find this service useful, especially during inclement weather. 

PUBLIC EDUCATION CHALLENGE

Recently two separate events caused me to reflect upon how politics affects education and what our priorities should be.  The first was a letter that was read to the Board at the September meeting, and the second was a questionnaire I was asked to complete regarding the role of politics in education.  Many of the topics on the questionnaire addressed how politics affect our jobs, what the role of elected officials should be.  The District Leadership Team, which is composed of teachers, administrators and community members, developed the district vision, mission, commitment and value statements that guide us in our decision making.  At the forefront is our commitment statement: “The student is the focus of every decision we make”. 

We must constantly strive to honor these precepts and improve in everything that we do.  We must be cognizant of the fact that we are no longer the only option parents have for education.  We are seeing increased competition coming into the market on a daily basis.  Many of you have seen advertisements for online schools, and other alternatives to public education.  These alternative educational options are not bound by the bureaucratic regulations that legislators impose upon public schools, yet they seek to use your tax dollars to support their programs. 

With ever increasing competition and scrutiny from social media and entertainment venues, the role of board member and educator are more difficult than ever.  The primary focus of any board member should be education.  We must face the fact that parents are seeking alternatives because they believe we are not serving their children well.  The role of the elected official is to publicly support the leadership team’s efforts to reinvent and update public education options to compete with media, online alternatives, home schooling, private schools and charters.  The job of the administration and teaching staff is to continue to improve what we do and not lament these outside competitive influences.   We must continually strive to improve by offering innovation, personalized instruction, fostering relationships with parents and students and setting high expectations for both staff and students.  Most importantly, I must always remind our staff, administration and board of our vision to “inspire students to be leaders and lifelong learners”, our mission of “making every student college and career ready through personalized instruction”, and finally our commitment that “the student be the focus of every decision we make”.  These values and statements should be more than mere words, but must be words to live by if we are truly going to be an exceptional school district that is viewed as excellent in all it does to educate the most valuable resource our country has, which are children.