Keeping the theme alive all year

Day 5 of blogging each day in June for the "Spilling Ink" Challenge

Last year was the first year that my staff voted on a school-wide theme for this year. We started out the year with the theme and decorations around the building, but that's really as far as it went. This year I took the time to visit another school that has kept their theme alive all year to build unity and learning. From the ideas gathered there, our staff met to come up with ideas to keep our theme alive all year and build unity throughout the school.

Here's what we came up with for next school year:
2010-2011 School-Wide Theme
“Around the World in 180 Days”
•First week of school we will send information home with students about our theme and a contest for students/families to design the logo for our theme that will be on our school t-shirts. The logo must include a hot air balloon in the picture.

•Each grade level has a designated continent for the year. The classrooms/grade level hallways can be decorated for this theme from the start of the school year. Each grade level will research their continent and create a simple newsletter that will go home with all students to share what they’ve learned about their continent. We could also figure out a way to include facts about the continent on the morning announcements during that grade level’s month for sharing (maybe just for a week on the announcements).
4K Antarctica
5K Africa
1st South America
2nd North America
3rd Europe
4th Asia
5th Australia

•Once we have received student pictures, each student will be given a cut-out of a hot air balloon with their picture on it to send out to a relative/friend as their personal version of a “Flat Stanley” to receive information back about that place to post in the hallways of the school to learn about that location.

•Post Card project: At the beginning of the year we will include an article in the Dodgeland Connection asking parents/community members to help us with this project. We will be seeking post cards for locations outside of the United States…they can be sent to Dodgeland from themselves if on a vacation or ask family/friends that live out of the US to send them to us. We will have them on display with a world map on one of the main hallway bulletin boards.


•We will plan a Cultural Fair as our culminating end of school activity.

•Music concerts could incorporate songs within each grade level from the continents they are learning about.

•We will go back to having a Character Trait for each month and have students nominated by teachers each month for displaying this Character Trait instead of the generic Student of the Month.


I'd love to hear what other schools do to keep their school-wide theme alive all year.

Singing "Kumbaya" to build unity as a school?

Day 4 of blogging each day in June for the "Spilling Ink" Challenge

I remember working in a previous district where my principal joked about us all getting to gether to hold hands and sing "Kumbaya" to build unity. I thought he was nuts. Well, now I'm starting to reconsider...just not with singing "Kumbaya." Before you laugh at me and click the x to close this page, please hear me out. This past week we have had two staff parties. The first one was to celebrate with two of our retiring teachers. One of our very talented teachers had written a personalized song for both of them that we all sang together. They were both touched to tears by the song and us singing it together. Today we had a luncheon to say goodbye to one of our secretaries that is leaving us. Again, that talented teacher wrote a song for her that we all sang together. It was during today's song when I realized we were all singing together with smiles and tears in our eyes, how it really felt like we were one united team together celebrating the good times we've had together. I can't think of any other time in the past two years in this school that I've felt that.
So, would getting together to hold hands and sing "Kumbaya" build unity in our staff? I don't know, but I'm not going to suggest it because they will all think that I've lost my marbles!! But, I did ask that talented teacher to make a school song to go along with our school-wide theme for next year so we can sing it together as a school at each of our assemblies to build unity.

Maternity Leave for the Principal? Not Really

Day 3 of posting a blog a day for Spilling Ink Challenge

I had my baby on Friday, May 14th...a beautiful, perfect baby boy who looks identical to my first son. My maternity leave started that day...or did it? Well, let's see. I stayed home that day from work timing my contractions all day ( finally went to the hospital at 5pm), but I had checked my work email several times that day. I was in to work 4 days later with my newborn in tow (after kids were gone to avoid germs) to get everything set up for the scoring of our Spring 6 Traits Assessment for 3,5,7 and 9th grade students. Since that day I have now logged 16 hours of going in to complete various tasks: compiling 6 Traits Assessment data, printing spring reading reports, a few meetings, and dealing with some staff issues (some people seem to think they don't have to continue business as usual without me there!). This time does not include the numerous phone calls I've received from school to check with me on this or that or the time I've spent from home keeping up with emails and corresponding with staff about end of the year stuff.

Why am I blogging every day in June?

Day 2 of Spilling Ink Challenge...blogging every day in June. http://writenowtroup.blogspot.com/

I'm currently on maternity leave (well, kind of, but I'll blog about that tomorrow), so why did I get myself into this challenge to blog everyday when I barely have time to shower? I want to feel connected to other great educational leaders again and be motivated to plan for another great school year. During the times that I stayed active on twitter, I was constantly dialoging with other leaders...on twitter, through their blogs, chat rooms, emails, online book studies, etc. I feel like it kept me current, motivated me and saved me from the "island" that the daily life of a principal can feel like.

During the last few months of my pregnancy I was not the best principal...I had to follow doctor's orders to stay off my feet as much as possible or go on bed rest. So, I became a "paper pusher" sitting in my office the majority of the day. After putting my son to bed at night, I was so exhausted that I rarely checked twitter or other blogs for my online PLN (twitter is blocked at school).

So now, that is why I am joining this challenge to blog each day in June...even though it means I might not get the blog posted until just before midnight and it has taken me all day to try to type it during baby naps...and that I typed most of this with one hand while holding the baby. I'm taking the challenge with the hopes of getting feedback from others and following their blogs as well to stay current and motivated by other educational leaders.

Hiring procedures/tips

I used our week long spring break to catch up and plan ahead for my maternity leave. What I couldn’t plan for at that time was the amount of time I would have to spend on hiring new staff. With retirements, resignations, and staff moving into different positions in the district I had seven new staff to hire. In addition to this was keeping track of the movement of staff changing grade levels. Most school districts around us are on the opposite end of the spectrum; laying staff off. Because of this I have had to screen hundreds of applications for the hiring process. Something that you don’t learn in college is how to efficiently screen applications to narrow down the amount of candidates for interviews. Through this experience, I’ve come up with my own set of criteria: cover letter/resume must have appropriate format and be free of grammatical/spelling errors, must have three or more letters of recommendation (one must be from the current principal), the last important of each recommendation letter usually points out well whether it is an outstanding or just an average candidate, frequent movement between positions is a “red flag” to be concerned about, and it is worth looking at applicant transcripts.
Our school/district uses a committee process to hire additional staff, so I had to form 7 different committees and seek their input on interview questions that addressed what qualities we were seeking for each position. Again, this was time consuming, but I found it essential to have a variety of members on each committee to provide a variety of insight and to have enough variety of interview questions to really find out about each candidate. I found it very important to have dialogue amongst the committee after interviewing each applicant and by the time we completed interviews each day, we were able to come to consensus on our top choice for each position. I then had the additional time consuming task of calling all references (which usually turns into multiple games of “phone tag”) before offering the candidate the position. I’ve learned from a previous experience to always wait for the candidate to accept the position before calling the others to inform that they were not chosen for the position. In addition, I’ve found it very helpful for myself to have a “script” on an index card that I use to call each of those candidates, because otherwise I fumble with my words when giving them the bad news.
What have others found to be helpful in the hiring process to ensure that you hire the best candidate and ways to save time when flooded with hundreds to choose from?

Planning for Maternity Leave

This has been quite an interesting and fast-paced year. I haven't kept up to date with this blog or my PLN on twitter and other blogs, because I've made it a goal to get home in the evenings and have a life with my family. I am excited to share that we will be adding to our family, with my due date in early May. While this is exciting, it is also very overwhelming, because planning for my maternity leave is not the same as when I was a classroom teacher.

Due to the small size of our district and the timing of my expected arrival, we will not be hiring anyone to fill my shoes. Instead, we are being creative with the people and resources that we have. One benefit of having all K-12 in one large building is that the Middle/High School administrators and Superintendent will be able to assist in the elementary building if a serious discipline or other incident should occur. I am also fortunate to have a teacher that is working on her administrative degree and completing her internship hours under my supervision this spring and summer. I have been utilizing her this past month to assist with planning for summer school and end of the year events at school. I will also be relying on her to check my phone messages each day during my absence and either return the phone calls or pass them onto an administrator.

There will be some tasks that I plan to come into the office on evenings/weekends during my maternity leave to complete and will be attending several end of year events for staff and students. I only live a mile from the school, so it will be easy for me to pop in and out as needed. I am only planning to take off five weeks for this maternity leave (using only my sick and vacation days) and then return during summer school.

Have any other administrators taken a maternity leave? What tips/advice can you offer?

Long-Term Plans

Here's my February article in NAESP's Mentor Center:

In my first year as principal at our school, I often felt stressed and overwhelmed at the amount of work needed to get our school on the right path. I formed a leadership team, created time for grade-level meetings, established professional learning communities, and began educating staff on response to intervention. In February 2009, I attended a statewide RTI summit; however, since our school was so behind on the path to having any sort of RTI plan, I felt out of place and overwhelmed by the summit sessions.

We started small at our school with a voluntary book study over the summer and then formed an RTI team in the fall to attend additional RTI trainings to learn together, present to staff, and begin creating a plan for our school.

Last month, I attended another state conference and attended many sessions on RTI again. This time, I was relieved and reassured as I listened to speakers and saw what other schools in the state are implementing because I could finally identify with what some of the other schools are doing. Even though we still have a lot of work to do, I feel like we are on the right path now and are making some positive changes to impact our students.

The difficult part of this process is remembering that change is a process and it won’t happen overnight. The literature I’ve read says this is a two- to three-year process. This is also a major change in both philosophy and practice for many teachers.

How do you keep the process moving forward with momentum, but not too fast to overwhelm staff?