Article Round Up

[Raynise]

Thank you to our partner, AASA, for these articles. 

• What Happens When 11 School Districts Decide to Learn Together? - That is how the Superintendents’ Early Childhood Plan began in June 2014, when the superintendents of every district in Douglas and Sarpy Counties in Nebraska sat down together and agreed to do something they had never done before: build an early childhood strategy as one Omaha-area region rather than as 11 separate school systems.  More than a decade later, the plan still includes all 11 districts and reaches thousands of children each year.
  What Happens When 11 School Districts Decide to Learn Together? - 

• Building a Strong Cultural Bedrock -  Culture is the bedrock of an organization. If the bedrock isn’t solid, what is built on the bedrock isn’t structurally sound. In Warren County Public Schools, one of our goals is to build a culture in which staff choose to work, students desire to learn, and parents elect to send their children – a culture with a strong bedrock.

•  Learning Is Not Optional: Reimagining Advisory Periods - It’s easy for advisory periods that are built into a school schedule to become disconnected from the core work of teaching and learning. The time is allocated, but the impact is unclear or unmeasurable. School districts are constantly being asked to do more with less; therefore, leaders must be intentional about making sure scheduled time is used for its intended purpose, which is to improve learning for all students. But what if there were a way to use it to strengthen teacher collaboration as well?

• Purpose, Planning, and Partnership: Elevating Summer Learning in Allentown - Summer does not have to be a pause in learning. It is one of the most powerful and underused resources in education, capable of shaping minds, communities, and possibilities for generations. With clarity of vision and strategic intentionality, a district can transform these months into a catalyst for ongoing growth for its students.

• Dreaming Bigger: How Jasper City Schools Reimagined Summer Learning - Through planning, partnerships, and a willingness to think beyond compliance, Jasper City Schools and the Alabama State Department of Education are showing what can happen when summer learning is reimagined as an opportunity rather than an obligation.

• Building a Strong Community: A Plan to Respond to Student Needs - Strong communities breed strong schools, and strong schools breed strong communities; schools and communities work in tandem and rely on one another for mutually beneficial outcomes. Together, strong schools and communities develop educated, productive citizens.

• Listening to Lead: Students as Partners in Improvement - When a school district treats listening as a leadership practice, improvement becomes more responsive, more human and more aligned with the students it serves.

• Exercising Voices Productively - First-person essays by current high school students about the influence of their voices on school affairs in their respective communities.

• From the Mouths of Student Board Members - What two recent student representatives in Virginia and New York see differentiating lip service from effective governance work.