Once again, this past week demonstrated the fickleness of New England weather with a couple of days of sunshine and warmer temperatures followed by a mixture of snow, sleet, and rain. As with so many other things in our Gateway towns, it is always interesting to note the very large and distinct differences between towns; in this case, the difference in snow accumulations. Due to the forecast, we decided to hold a half-day of school this past Friday in order to safely get our students home.
As many readers know, Gateway implemented the concept of “Blizzard Bags” this year where teachers provide work to our students to be done at home so that selected snow days counted as school-attended days. As we currently have missed 8 days due to the weather, the ability to have 5 of those days count for attendance has helped keep the last day of school in mid-June rather than the end of June, as we’ve encountered in other years. I give much credit to our staff for making this idea work – for creating assignments, following up with students, providing services, and even for answering student questions through email or other electronic means on those snow days. We’ll continue to tweak the process to ensure it meets the needs of the district.
This idea is evidently interesting to others as we’ve had a number of inquiries from other school districts in the last few weeks regarding the idea of, and implementation of, “Blizzard Bags”. Just as with our experiences with school safety and building an outstanding technology program, Gateway is once again seen as a positive resource to other districts to help them incorporate these ideas into their operations. Despite being a small and rural school district, and with thanks to the dedication and hard work of our staff, we continue to be on the leading edge of a number of important issues to the educational community.
As we approach the time for Annual Town Meetings, it’s also interesting to note that we’re seeing more and more news about the financial difficulties in other districts including significant increases in requested budget amounts coupled with staff reductions. Given our 1% overall budget increase with no staff layoffs and no reductions in services, and only an average 2.71% increase in town assessments (with two-thirds of our towns having either a minimal increase or decreases in their individual assessments), it appears that we continue to be fiscally conservative and successful in holding costs to a minimum as noted in the recent MARS report.
This past week also included a staff ‘2025’ meeting to gain input on a number of relevant questions regarding how the district should be planning for the next decade. I’m pleased that our staff provided some innovative, insightful, and useful ideas regarding the future of the district that we hope to be able to build into a revised strategic plan. As we review the data collected over the last two years, I’m excited to see so many opportunities for growth coupled with such strong support from a significant portion of our community. Despite the many challenges we all face, the fact that our towns are looking towards sustainability and with the ongoing efforts of the rural schools consortium, I’m hopeful that the future holds more promise and hope than many people believe. Like spring and the promise of green grass and flowers, I believe this area will also come through its recent travails.
