Welcome to a New School Year

The 2010-2011 school year is underway in North Greene and we've already had some excitement. The 340 or so Roodhouse Elementary and North Greene Junior High students gained access to their MacBooks on Thursday, August 26 with a wonderful Roll-out event that was truly magnificent. Dr. Cindy Carlson Rice saw her dream come true as students unpacked and began to charge their new machines one-by-one.

Meanwhile the faculty members at North Greene High School got their individual Apple iTouches with the simple instruction to "dig in and see how these might be useful in your classes during this school year." We hope in the future to see such devices in the hands of all high school students OR to make use of the smartphone technology students already have at their disposal as they pursue their educational goals. This, too, is an exciting prospect.

Making use of available technologies as educational tools is a change in mindsets for staff and students alike. It'll take a bit of time for the learning curve that almost always accompanies such a sea change. But at some point in the near futurer, we should see increased achievement on the part of our students, as they and their teachers learn to make effective use of these technologies.

Congratulations to the teachers and staff at NGHS. Despite once again failing to make AYP (adequqate yearly progress) as measured by standardized tests, they did see five-year high's in all areas of the ACT test. That's reading, mathematics, science, as well as the composite scores. Congratulations, too, to those students who did so well on the ACT last spring, a group mostly made up of the Class of 2011, this year's senior class.

We may continue to miss the target set by NCLB legislation, as so many more schools are - because the qualifying standard score gets raised each year. But we're going in the right direction and look for continued climbs in our test scores, while at the same time realizing those test scores never have told the complete story concerning North Greene students or their learning and academic achievement. We are seeing them gain more content knowledge and acquire 21st century skills each and every day. The tests? They take place over two days each spring, hardly a true picture of how students are doing or how we're doing as a school.

As you may have heard me say, previously, "Test scores tell us something about our schools. But they never tell us the whole story."