Click the image to view the fully formatted Commissioner's Update.This week, I write with a serious concern in mind — one that affects the welfare of our students.
More and more, bath salts — a designer drug — are widely available to our students. As educators, we need to know about this drug, its dangers, and the signs of its use and abuse.
That’s why I’m asking you this week to learn all that you can about bath salts. To help you do that, we’re bringing you information about the drug in a Health Alert and on a special web page.
Hopefully, knowledge about the drug will offer you the tools you need to intervene when there’s cause to suspect the drug is endangering the students and adults in our schools.
Click the image to view the fully formatted Commissioner's UpdateOur teachers and administrators are spending more and more time in their school buildings this month preparing for the beginning of a new school year.
In some of our districts, students will return to those buildings as soon as next week.
What does all of that mean? Quite simply, the end of summer is in sight.
As you gear up for a new academic year, the Commissioner’s Update this week returns to a weekly publication schedule; the next edition will come out Aug. 18.
Today, we bring you news from some of the many trainings our educators attended this summer, our latest thinking here at the Department of Education with regard to seeking a waiver from some of the provisions of the No Child Left Behind law, and — as always — need-to-know information for the personnel who keep our school districts running behind the scenes.
Click the image to view the fully formatted Commissioner's Update.It’s a misconception to think educators take the summer off from work. This week is the perfect example to disprove that myth.
Earlier this week in Orono, more than 200 professionals who work with our students attended the Positive Youth Development Institute: three days of workshops focused on brain development, 21st-century survival skills and classroom practices designed to keep students engaged with their learning.
At Bowdoin College in Brunswick, participants in the Maine Learning Technology Initiative Summer Institute today are going through their third day of exercises aimed at integrating technology in all aspects of learning.
And at Sugarloaf Mountain, the professionals charged with safely transporting our students to and from school and elsewhere are meeting for four days of sharing best practices and sharpening skills. The State Transportation Safety Conference began Tuesday and wraps up Friday.
While this week is packed with professional development, it’s no anomaly.
Next week, arts educators will gather at the Maine College of Art in Portland for the four-day-long Arts Assessment Institute. And later in the month, our food service professionals will convene at Sunday River.
Click the image to view the fully formatted Commissioner's Update.I had the pleasure of meeting Blake Bourque in May during my visit to the Kennebec Valley as part of my statewide listening tour. A recent graduate of Messalonskee High School in Oakland, Blake devoted much of his high school career to the Messalonskee robotics team. He told me he learned best when the time came for his team to put its innovations to the test at regional competitions.
This week, Blake shares with us a video he produced for his senior English class that’s supposed to depict what he learned and what impacted him most during his time in high school. The result is a production that gets us thinking about how our schools need to change to prepare students for 21st-century careers.
Blake, who’s headed to the University of Maine’s college of engineering in the fall, wants to live and work in Maine when he’s older. Our education system is a crucial link in creating the economy that will allow that to happen. Let’s work toward an education system that trains a workforce that’s second to none.
Click the image to view the fully formatted Commissioner's Update.
We crammed a lot into our 100th annual Maine School Superintendents’ Conference earlier this week.
The 175 people who attended were treated to six presentations about school transformation, an iPad demonstration from Apple, a talk about school bus refurbishment, and multiple visioning sessions.
It was hard work. But out of it came something we can use: The tenets of a vision for the education system we want to work toward in Maine. As I write in my blog this week, I left the superintendents’ conference believing that the Department of Education and our superintendents can be productive partners in this work.
This is the last Commissioner’s Update of the 2010-11 school year.
During the summer months, this publication will come out every other week. The next Commissioner’s Update will arrive in your inbox on July 14. We’ll resume our weekly publication schedule in late August.
With the dawn of a new fiscal year, we have many changes as new superintendents take charge and others change positions. If your e-mail address is changing, please update your subscription information to let us know.
Click the image to view the fully formatted Commissioner's Update.The 100th annual Maine School Superintendents’ Conference is upon us. It starts Monday at the Senator Inn in Augusta.
That means it’s time to start thinking about this year’s theme: transformation.
Is your school in the midst of a comprehensive reform effort? Why have you undertaken it? What challenges have you run into so far? How will you know your effort has been successful? What support could the Department of Education offer?
Be prepared to share your tales of transformation and learn from others’ when we gather for two days that I believe will be pivotal in setting Maine schools on a path of retooling for a new age in education. Continue reading “Commissioner’s Update – June 23, 2011”→
Click the image to view the fully formatted Commissioner's Update.Has your rural high school discovered the key to boosting student achievement and graduation rates?
Has your district launched an innovative science, technology, engineering and math (i.e. STEM) program that shows promise?
Do you think other districts would benefit from your innovation, if only they had the funds to replicate it?
The focus for this year’s challenge — with $150 million in awards available — is one that should compel educators in a rural state like ours to reach out to some partners and put together a grant application. The competition places a special emphasis on improvement initiatives in rural high schools and programs that champion the STEM disciplines.
Click the image for the fully formatted Commissioner's Update.We’re now into our seventh week of publishing the Commissioner’s Update. Thank you for the comments of support and the suggestions you’ve made. This week’s issue contains an important improvement that we made in response to your feedback:
We’ve combined all reporting requirements, administrative letters, items you should note and other administrative items into the newly renamed “Action Items” section of the Update. If it’s a must-know item for superintendents, it will be in this section.
Also at your suggestion, we’ve made an addition to the online Newsroom:
Now you can forward every item published — be it an administrative letter, press release or blog entry — by email to the appropriate person who needs to see it. Just click on the “Email” link at the bottom of any item and enter the appropriate address.
In addition, don’t forget that everyone can subscribe to the Commissioner’s Update. We encourage you to invite your administrators, teachers, school board members, parents – anyone with an interest in Maine education – to subscribe by clicking here.
Keep sending us your feedback! And when you’re at the Superintendents’ Conference, look for David Connerty-Marin and Matt Stone. They’ll be showing off the Newsroom and soliciting your thoughts, concerns and suggestions.
Click the image to view the fully formatted Commissioner's Update.Save for a school visit scheduled for next week, my statewide listening tour to schools in all nine superintendent regions wrapped up last week after a meeting with superintendents, two public forums and two school visits in Washington County.
The listening tour has taken me hundreds of miles across our beautiful state, from Turner to Machias, from Limestone to Sanford. It’s allowed me to remove myself from Augusta one day at a time to see what’s going on in our classrooms — where the policies we set and budgets we craft have their greatest impact.
I have met dozens of dedicated teachers, administrators, students and parents during these trips, and the input they’ve provided me on how we can improve what we’re doing for our children has been invaluable. Thank you to all of those who took the time to share their thoughts with me.
While the listening tour might be coming to a close, that doesn’t mean I plan to stop listening. As always, don’t hesitate to contact me to let me know what you think about education in our state.
Click the image to view the fully formatted Commissioner's Update.That final lap I wrote about in last week’s Commissioner’s Update? It’s a long one.
The House and Senate are still debating the two-year budget that will determine once and for all the amount of state funding headed for your districts for the 2011-12 year. On top of that, the fate of legislation dealing with school district reorganization, a standards-based diploma and charter schools is in the hands of the same lawmakers. For now, we sit tight to see what comes out of the legislative process.
While we wait, there’s plenty going on outside of the State House.
Today, for example, we have the chance to see more than 1,000 middle- and high-school students actively engaged in learning the way many of them learn best — digitally — at the eighth annual Maine Learning Technology Initiative student conference. I stopped there on my way back from Washington County and was blown away by the quality of the student presentations.
And in this week’s Commissioner’s Update, we bring you a streamlined Calendar of Reporting Requirements that, hopefully, makes it easier to keep track of some of your administrative work. Please let us know what you think.
Maine DOE Newsroom 