Click the image to view the fully formatted newsletter.Welcome to Maine DOE Updates!
You’re receiving this email newsletter because you signed up at our website or at a community forum during Education Commissioner Stephen Bowen’s listening tour.
Each month, this newsletter will highlight attention-grabbing and thought-provoking dispatches, press releases and blog entries from the Maine Department of Education and Commissioner Bowen.
SEARSPORT – Representatives from more than 40 schools in Maine, Canada, Scotland and elsewhere have toured Searsport District High School over the past year.
Their mission?
Learn from a rural school of about 200 students – more than 60 percent of whom qualify for free- and reduced-priced lunches – that has executed a transformation by shifting entirely to a system of standards-based education.
ORONO – Joe Lien didn’t follow the conventional path to graduation at Poland Regional High School. But after four years, he’s a graduate with plans to enlist in the U.S. Navy and attend college after that.
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.
The Maine Department of Education has displayed student artwork in its Cross State Office Building lobby for eight years.
On June 7, the Department invited student artists from Wiscasset — whose work is currently on display — to celebrate their work at a Blaine House reception attended by Maine’s First Lady Ann LePage and Maine State Board of Education chairman James Banks.
The following is excerpted from a Maine Department of Agriculture press release.
AUGUSTA — Annette Caldwell and Gretchen Kimball, teachers at the Buckfield Junior/Senior High School in Buckfield, Maine, have received one of five top awards in the nation for “Excellence in Teaching about Agriculture.” This award is offered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the National Agriculture in the Classroom (NAITC) Consortium. Teachers from all 50 states are eligible.
PORTLAND – When Mike McCarthy took over as King Middle School’s principal in 1988, students were segregated into five groups based on perceived ability: “challenged,” “remedial,” “below average,” “average” and “advanced.”
Test scores were below the state average, and teachers accorded students different treatment based on the group to which they were assigned.
PORTLAND – The junior class at Casco Bay High School has spent the past year delving into all aspects of Hurricane Katrina, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and those two disasters’ effects on the people of Biloxi, Miss.
Maine DOE Newsroom 