September 24, 2010
Public Use of School District Facilities
Are school facilities available for use by outside groups? If so, what is the procedure? Who is the contact person?
Robert G.
Yes Robert. Most of these requests can be honored. We have hundreds of requests each year. The procedure is to contact the principal for the facility you want to use or the athletic director and ask for a “Facility Use” Form.
September 9, 2010
Federal Dollars to Save or Add Back Teacher Jobs
Recently, I got a question regarding this issue from Larry C. He writes:
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Submitted on 2010/09/01 at 3:31pm
Dear Dr. Erdahl, |
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Submitted on 2010/09/09 at 9:47am
Larry, Nothing could be further from the truth. The federal dollars sent out to save or add back teacher positions were distributed according to the very flawed Wisconsin school funding formula. That formula is unrelated to our local efforts to pass referenda other than it causes us to depend more on local taxpayers than other districts. The formula uses the total property value of each school district as its basis. The higher the property value (per student) in your district, the less state aid the district receives. As property values have risen in “vacationland” Wisconsin, the state has withdrawn support for our schools and sent the money elsewhere. We will probably reach the point of virtually zero state aid in about four more years. Many of our neighbors to the north are already at or near zero aid. Meanwhile, other districts in the state get more aid with each passing year under the theory that if you have high property value you must be wealthy enough to support your own schools and if you have low property value you must be too poor to fund schools and need the help of taxpayers from around the state, including us. While this may have some sort of theoretical appeal, it completely fails the test of simple fairness. Districts with large tracts of highly productive agricultural land are usually net winners while districts with lots of shoreline property, which is in high demand, lose state support year after year. We continue to work with various groups around our state and with our local legislators to try to get this changed. And, these federal dollars, could have been a golden opportunity for our state to experiment with a new plan to distribute the money on a per student basis (a foundation plan) or base it on class size or some other index that would have distributed the money fairly and given us all an opportunity to see if these other ideas could be implemented. Unfortunately, our state decided to use the funding formula that favors some districts over others. While districts close to our size received around $500,000 in other parts of the state, we qualify for $2472. Our friends in Northland Pines received $73 and in Three Lakes, just $41. |
June 15, 2010
June Update
Dear Reader,
We have multiple initiatives underway in the district and I wanted to bring you up to date on several of them. Please feel free to post questions on any of them.
Building Project
Recently, we have met with Miron Construction to get details on how the bid packages will be handled as we get ready to release them for the Crescent and Pelican School building projects. We were informed that they will be released to various outlets later this week and ready for the Board to review at their meeting scheduled for July 12. After that, construction will begin. As a reminder, these building projects will add four kindergarten classrooms, remodel restrooms, improve media centers, improve entrance safety, and provide a number of other upgrades in each building.
Laptops
We are also making progress on the introduction of Netbooks to our ninth grade experince. These are mini-laptops that, when fully implemented, will provide our students and teachers with the ability to download textbooks, stay in digital contact with one another, find instructional materials on the web, and work collaboratively. We see these as a major productivity gain for both teachers and students since, over time, they will no longer be confined to desktops in labs or classrooms. We will be introducing them on a limited basis to our ninth graders in the fall and expect to grow the program over the next several years, learning as we go. Of course there have been many successes and some major challenges to one-to-one laptop use in the nation’s K-12 systems. We have lots to learn but we are eager to start this new and exciting way of acquiring the content of our various curricula. Last year, we completed the “going wireless” process in our Intermediate, Middle and High Schools. That means that all SDR students from 4th through 12th grades are in wireless buildings. This is an important step on our journey toward one-to-one computing.
Energy Projects
Installation of the equipment acquired to reduce the district’s energy consumption is ahead of schedule. Readers may recall that the Board of Education authorized the acquisition and installation of condensing boilers at RHS, JWMS and Crescent, the upgrading of some lighting fixtures in various buildings, new hot water heaters at RHS and the replacement of univents at Crescent with rooftop units. All of these projects were taken from a list of recommendations made by Focus on Energy and are being completed to stabilize and/or decrease the district’s energy consumption.
Stategic Plan
Our Board of Education recently met as a Committee of the Whole to review the Accountability Document that we have been using to measure our progress toward the realization of all of the action steps that were developed in order to acheive the goals of the strategic plan completed in 2005. The plan itself is up for review. You may recall the plan, as adopted in 2005, contained three major goals. They are 1) achieve financial stability, 2) acheive academic success for all students by implementing innovative and effective methods of instruction, and 3) improve the effectiveness of both internal and external communications. You can view the plan by returning to our webpage and clicking on “District” then click on “Strategic Plan.” More meetings with the community members are likely and I encourge you to attend or participate in this online discussion.
Watch this blog for further updates and post a question if you would like more information or a comment if you would like to share your thoughts on SDR.
March 19, 2010
Building Project
We are in the early stages of preparing for some of the upgrades approved in the recent referendum. Preliminary drawings are being completed and schedules are being hammered out. Post your questions on the project and I will repond each week.
December 10, 2009
M.O.C.K (Mentoring Oneida County Kids)
Thanks to a partnership with UW Extension and Forward Service Corporation, the school district has qualified for a substantial grant that has allowed us to expand our fledgling mentoring program into a growing presence at Central Elementary and James Williams Middle School. Under the leadership of Jim Winkler from UW Extention, Central Elementary Staff began working on recruiting volunteer mentors a few years ago. Out of those initial efforts emerged a grant writing effort that resulted in the district receiving nearly $300,000 in mentoring grant money.
The M.O.C.K. brochure reads in part, “…[y]oung people represent our future. We cannot afford to lose even one for they are our future workforce, future leaders and future parents….Some of the youth in our community walk ‘on the edge’ of making good//poor choices. Some do not see the value of education or see themselves as successful at school. All youth need to grow to become dependable, contributing members of society.”
As a result of these needs and these concerns, a group of dedicated SDR employees and partners from the community have forged ahead with the creation of what is turning out to be a robust mentoring program that has now expanded beyond Central Elementary to James Williams Middle School. Students are selected for the program based on teacher recommendations and with parent permission. Each of these students is then paired with a mentor from the community with whom the student meets once per week, one-on-one. A mentor is a friend, someone who listens, someone who encourages, a role model, someone who helps a student discover his/her talents and abilities, someone who communicates the value of the student, a cheer leader, and someone who helps empower the student.
This is becoming a program we can all be proud of and it is making a big difference in our community.
November 24, 2009
February Referendum
As most of you know, our Board of Education has authorized a referendum on two questions and scheduled it for February 16, 2010. The two questions are
- $13.7 million to upgrade things like the electrical, plumbing, and heating, air handling systems in our schools, some remodeling, and two addtions (one at Crescent and one at Pelican). See the attached Factsheet for more detailed information.
- $1.5 million each year for each of the next 3 years to avoid closing more school buildings, cutting more programs and laying off more employees.
This blog will be useful for our community members who would like to join in a discussion of the various issues surrounding the referendum. If you would like to include questions in your post, I will try to answer them on a weekly basis.
