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Author Archives: Steve Atwater
Return on investment
Last week I sent an email to all staff to let them know of my recommended expenditure reductions for next year. The $1.25 million in cuts includes raising the pupil to teacher ratio by .5. While the sky is not falling, ($1.25 million is less than 1% of this year’s general fund) this pending change […]
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Student Performance
When I was in elementary school I took piano lessons. About twice a year, much to my dismay but to my parents’ delight, the teacher would coordinate a recital for her students. I recall the anxiety of having to play in front of the small gathering but also remember the motivation to practice extra hard […]
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Safe school environment
This week I was appalled to learn of the murder of two teachers, one in Nevada and the other in Massachusetts. Obviously, this was not a good week for our country’s schools. The two accused of the crimes are and were students at the respective schools. What is sad is that these horrific events, […]
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Report Cards
Today is the last day of this school year’s first quarter. Teachers across the district are having professional development and deservedly catching their breath while the students stay home. A part of the teachers’ day will be spent completing report cards. For many of our parents, the report card is the most important communication of […]
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Finding common ground
Earlier this week I attended the Soldotna area advisory committee meeting. This is the committee that is tasked with recommending, among other things, the names of our three Soldotna area secondary schools. On the drive home, the news on the car radio droned on about the government shut down and our federal legislators’ inability to […]
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Maintaining our schools
One of the emails that I received yesterday included information about the age of Cooper Landing School; I learned that it is 41 years old. The comparatively old age of this school reminds me of our need to regularly perform major maintenance on our buildings. In a perfect world our students would attend school in […]
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Tightening our belt
When a business needs to generate revenue to pay its bills, it can charge more for its product. When a government needs more money to provide its services, it can raise taxes. But when an Alaskan school district is short on money, it can only ask the entities that pay for education, primarily our state […]
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Common Assessments
Last week I met with the building representatives of our education association. We had a good conversation that mostly focused on how the district is guiding instruction and measuring student learning. Despite not having all the answers to the posed questions, I was pleased that the teachers were grappling with how the district can better […]
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Resilience through football
Each Sunday I look in the paper to see how our various sports teams did in their competitions over the weekend. In August and September I inevitably find that several of our schools’ football games were lopsided affairs with one of our teams either winning or losing by a sizeable margin. On the assumption that […]
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Thanking our educational support personnel