This past week delivered an early Halloween surprise in the form of several inches of snow, which was not predicted by the professionals and made travel somewhat dicey for the afternoon elementary bus runs. Thankfully everyone made it home safely, albeit somewhat later than usual. This also forced the rescheduling of both the boy’s senior night soccer game and the college financing workshop. Although today is sunny and warm for late October (making for an enjoyable ‘Trick or Treat’ evening for those who may still partake of this tradition) the fact is that winter is approaching.
The busing delay also allowed us to test out our new emergency contact system and showed some areas that we need to change to enhance this service. I apologize to those families who only have students in the middle or high schools and received a call that ideally would only have gone to the families of our elementary parents. The new system, a part of our new student information system, was implemented as a cost savings measure and requires a few more steps to use than the previous system and is not quite as user friendly, especially if you need to make an emergency notification using only your phone rather than your computer. We’ve made some modifications to how we use the program that we anticipate will make calls more targeted to specific messages and groups. I anticipate that we’ll continue to ‘fine tune’ the process as we gain more experience with this specific program.
We also anticipate rolling out another program we’re putting into place as another cost saving measure. This one will revolve around how building/ground uses are requested and approved. As a quick background, we’ve continued to shrink office support staff throughout the district in order to focus resources on the classroom. This means that, wherever possible, we are trying to automate functions that were previously handled directly by an individual. For building and ground requests, this means moving away from a paper request, staff checking schedules and assigning space, and an approval process that required several days and multiple staff. The new system (hopefully open to the public in mid-November) will allow individuals and groups to request the use of specific facilities, determine immediately if the space is available, and request an approval for a date/time that will generate an approval form that should cut much time and repetition out of the scheduling process. I anticipate that this program will also require some practice and fine tuning before it operates as well as we hope and ask that everyone bear with us though the change.
It is always amazing to see how much work is done by office support staff and administrators that no one really focuses on when discussing staff reductions in non-teaching positions. However, as these cuts take place, even those in these positions begin to realize that what sounded so simple is not simple, easy, or quickly accomplished. Thus our focus on automating several functions, distributing responsibilities, and streamlining processes wherever possible. We’ve had some bumps in the road during these changes and, based upon our experiences and anticipating some interesting insights into district operations from the DESE-required study of operations, we will be suggesting some changes for consideration during the FY’18 budget process. Our goal in these changes will be a continued focus on educational opportunities for students, while being cognizant of our financial responsibilities to our towns.
