Dr. David Hopson
During February vacation I will be attending the American Association of School Administrators (AASA) conference in Los Angeles, CA without cost to the Gateway district. This opportunity was made available through my role as President of the Connecticut Valley Superintendent’s Roundtable, a professional organization of the superintendents and assistant/associate superintendents with school districts located in the Connecticut Valley. I hope that this opportunity will provide fresh insights into the many changes occurring in education (many of which I’ve shared with you over the years) and provide actionable information to help address the many areas that Gateway is working on to make the district even better.
I hope that many of you were able to read the Springfield Republican’s recent article on Gateway’s use of technology to improve education for our students. This article pointed out many of the things I’ve shared with the community and the efforts we’ve made to move the district forward to meet student needs in their future. As I’ve frequently said, the Gateway District is often recognized as a leader outside of our seven towns, while these accomplishments are often overlooked by our own constituents.
One of the items that came out of a recent Gateway Towns’ Advisory Committee (GTAC) was that we should share the successes of the district with the communities. With a recent article in the State Police Newsletter, the Springfield Republican article, and the release of the executive summary of the FY’14 budget, I hope we’ve shown that Gateway is a gem in the making. I’ll share some of the items from the executive summary for your consideration.
The first is that the district has lost roughly five percent of high school class offerings over the past 5 years due to reductions in staffing brought about by reducing the budget by over a million dollars during this time. Fortunately, this has been partially offset by a growing number of our students taking courses on-line. Some of these courses have been Advanced Placement classes (wherein a student scoring a 3 or higher on the AP exam may be granted college credit forthe course) on such diverse subjects such as Micro and Macro-economics, Physics (C-E&M, C-Mech, and B), and Psychology. I’m pleased to report that the students taking these online AP courses have done very well in their AP exams. I will point out that these online AP courses, as well as other online courses, demand a level of determination, self-motivation, and planning that not all of our students are willing to put forth at the high school level but, for those that do, this is a wonderful opportunity.
The second is that over the last 5-years, nearly 80% of Gateway’s graduates have continued their education at the post-secondary level. Of the 82 schools, colleges, and universities attended by Gateway graduates, 41% of these are in the top 100 colleges and universities in the United States as ranked by US News & World Report. Some of these prestigious schools will ring a bell with many of you including Mount Holyoke and Smith Colleges, Rensselaer and Worcester Polytechnic Institutes, and Clark and Northeastern Universities. In addition to attending these schools, our graduates have done well and over time have progressed to doing well in graduate programs in engineering, mathematics, liberal arts, and medicine.
While many of our graduates have done very well, there is still much work to be done to help ensure that all of our students have a well-rounded experience at Gateway and are better prepared to succeed in life. That is part of the process of taking the gem that is Gateway and ensuring that it’s polished and put into the right setting to maximize its value for all of us in the district.
