Friday Update 10/28/2011

Before we go into the happening from the week a couple of good lucks and congrats.  Good luck to our Cross Country team as them head to state this weekend.  Bring home some hardware!  Good luck to our volleyball team next week in their Regional final match in Dewitt next Wednesday.  Last night’s semifinal match against Keokuk was a great performance by our Lady Knights, keep up the good work!  Finally, congrats to Coach King and our football program on a successful season.  I am proud of how our kids competed this fall.  They are a great group of young men.

A couple facilities updates this week:

Eric finished the installation of the flooring on the auditorium stage.  We began this project last year, but with all the use our stage floor gets we couldn’t complete the project until now.

There are several small improvements taking place in the gym.  New square backboards were installed this week, to replace the existing fan shaped backboards.  Another great aesthetic improvement to our large gym!  Starting next week we will remove the broken tile from the concession stand in the gym area.  This is currently an eyesore and will continue to be a problem due to the amount of moisture that gets on that floor.  We plan on replacing the tile with a bare concrete floor to prevent future problems.  We are also moving ahead on replacing locks in the athletic areas.  Almost every door in the gym has a different key and this problem has become a major headache so we are trying to remedy the situation by organizing our locks so there is some method to which keys go where.  We will be purchasing some new locks and moving around some of our existing locks to make this happen. 


I spent some time this week working with CDW on our Microsoft licensing agreement. It sounds like we will be able to save a good amount of money when our agreement ends. I believe Microsoft has become a lot more flexible and affordable due to competition from free programs like Google docs.  Many schools have switched to Google because of the affordability, and we have also considered this option..  Next Monday I will present the use of Google docs and the applications of Google’s programs to our teachers.. 


We had an affective Scott County principal meeting on Thursday.  This is a monthly meeting with Lee Morrison, Julie Delany, Katie Selden, Chad Stiemle, Jeanne VonFeldt, Chuck and me.  This has been a great effort to work together to improve all Scott County Catholic schools. Items discussed this week included AHS Info Knight, elementary tuition rates for next year, elementary school conferences, Embracing Our Future, and the K12 e-newsletter updates.


I spent a lot of time this week reading through all of our parent surveys.  There is a ton of great information embedded in these documents and I am grateful to everyone who took time to fill them out.


There has been a lot of work put in this week down in the Business Office on tuition assistance, including compiling data on enrollment and retention  My role in the process was to compile and analyze 5 year enrollment trends for the elementary schools and 10 year trends for Assumption. There were some interesting pieces of knowledge in this data, including 10 year retention rates from 9th grade to 10th, 10th to 11th and 11th to 12th.  The good news is in comparing the 2000-2005 retention rate to the 2006-2011 retention rate, the data shows we have improved our rate of retention in the past five years.  One area that we need to concentrate on is our 10th to 11th grade rate as indicated by the data.  This week our administrative team had a good conversation on this topic and we will continue to discuss ways to increase retention.


Thanks and have a great weekend.

Friday Update 10/21/2011

Despite this being a short school week in certainly feel like a lot went on!  Here are some of the happenings this week:

First, it was a big week for our athletic program.  Congrats to Head Coach Mary Millman and the Lady Knights’ Volleyball Program for being named MAC Co-Champions. This is the first ever volleyball MAC title for Assumption. What an awesome accomplishment for these ladies.

It was also a big week for our girls cross country team who placed second at the regional meet last night.  This qualifies them for the 2011 state cross country meet.  Erica Grubbs and Rebecca Mallon were both top ten finishers. 

Congratulations to wrestler Topher Carton who committed to the University of Iowa this week.  It will be great to see Topher wrestling for such a great program in the years to come.

Our insurance walk-through this week went very well.  Eric did a nice job addressing the suggestions that he made last year and the inspector even commented that, “we make his job very easy.”  His main suggestions for improvement for next year was to replace an exit light in the gym (already done) and to purchase a full body harness for Eric for when he works on the roof (we are looking for one). 

I met with the English Department about how their pilot study of the computer program Turn It In is progressing.  It seems there are many positives to this online paper submission and citation checking program.  We will continue with the test of the program for another month and then make a decision on purchasing a full license. 

We continue to work on developing a tool for classroom walk-throughs for administration.  Classroom walk-throughs provide the administrative team with a way to observe a teacher and quantify 3-5 data points which are recorded on an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch.  While it may seem like an easy process to “look for good teaching” it can be much more difficult to quantify.  We will continue to work on making this process beneficial for everyone. 

We are working on finalizing all of the little details prior to our 401K switchover.  Our new representatives will be here on October 31^st for informational and individual sign-up meetings.  I feel this will be a better option for our employees and give a more personal touch to our benefit package.  Thanks to the finance committee for helping to improve Assumption High School.

On the admissions side of things we had a marketing committee meeting on Wednesday.  Two of the major conversation pieces were the survey that we sent out to our parents and the upcoming information night on November 1^st.  I have spent a lot of time reading through the survey responses and feel like there is a ton of great information available to all of us at Assumption.  At the suggestion of the committee we will explore ways to interpret this information and frame it in a way that is most beneficial to all of our fellow Knights.  

We approved the final cut of our recruiting video and will be releasing it soon.  We are all excited to get this up on the website, Facebook and our Twitter account. 

On the development side of things we are putting the finishing touches on the Annual Report.  Liz has done a nice job putting this together and I know the finished project will meet everyone’s expectations.   As part of the improvement of this process we are working with Blackbaud, the company that produces our development software, to insure that our addresses are up to date.  This is our first year doing it this way and we feel that this will decrease the amount of returned mail we receive. 

We may be seeing a change to our student information system in the next couple of months.  JMC is currently developing an online based program for schools.  I spoke with one of the reps this week and received an email from another.  We will be in a holding position until we see how the development of the program progresses. 

Finally, I asked the administrative team to submit a list of five things they feel are our biggest challenges in the next five to ten years.  After looking over their replies, I think our team has done a good job of framing some of the challenges we are facing and will continue to face in the future.  These challenges will be of no surprise to most people.  Here are a couple of examples:

1.  Continuing to make Assumption affordable for all families.
2. Ensuring that what we are teaching is tied to the core standards and improving the education in the classroom.
3. Making sure that our classes are rigorous, relevant, and preparing students for success beyond the walls of Assumption. 
4. Staying ahead of the curve in relevant technology for student use. 
5. Recruiting and retaining high quality faculty and staff.
6. Developing integral and faith-based relationships in our diocese and our Quad Cities community in order to offer a curriculum of knowledge and experiential learning for all students, so that our actions are visible and reflect our mission statement.
7. Continuing to develop programs that increase interest in our school and the opportunities we offer.

We are now working to find ways to better address the challenges we face.  Very exciting stuff!

Wow!  For such a short week it certainly was busy.  Let me know if you have any questions or concerns. 

Friday Update 10-14-11

Happy Friday everyone!  I hope you have all had a productive week and you are enjoying a little break from our fall heat wave.  It is great to see the leaves changing; it is such a pretty time of year.

A couple of happenings from this week:

I have received a lot of positive comments about our pink out last week.  These compliments have come from everyone from alums to those who have no connections to Assumption. I have been quick to point out that this really was a group effort.  Our students, parents, faculty and staff put forth an amazing effort. 

I spent a lot of time out in classrooms this week observing the academic environment.  It was nice to see great teaching and I had the opportunity to listen to presentations in Spanish.  One of the students I saw present stuck around after class and shared some more facts he had learned from the project.  It was great to hear the pride in his voice as he spoke about what he had learned.  I also spoke to a senior class about resume writing and getting a job.  They seemed amazed when I told them that I have revised my resume over 100 times.  I clarified that 50 of those times were my first attempt to get a teaching job and I wanted it to be perfect, so it took a while.  One of our Knight Beacon writers asked me to write a “point/counterpoint” on the issue of reading announcements over the loudspeaker.  I am really looking forward to doing this for her. 

I spent some time working with some teachers on using Google ngram.   This program allows users to search for the frequency of words used in over 500 million pieces of printed materials.  It is very cool to look at how words such as “war” increase in frequency when the world is experiencing conflict.

Our email system had some issues this week, which were not easy to fix.  One thing is certain and that is that we need to move the info from our exchange server to our new server.  The reason we have not yet done this is because it will cause us to experience a communication shutdown for an extended period of time.  We are now looking at the end of this month for the switchover.

I listen to a webcast on the Iowa Blueprint that I shared last week with all of you.  I would keep an eye on how this is progressing in the legislature.  Very interesting stuff!

We have scheduled our insurance walk-through for next Wednesday.  These are normally event free and we take the report from the previous year to make sure we have everything updated that they request.  I will let you know how it goes next week.  

We finalized our proposal for an increase in internet speed to the AEA this week.  We currently operate around 3 MEG and are looking to increase to 6-10 MEG.   The possibility of adding some online classes and going 1 to 1 will require the extra bandwidth.  We will wait to hear back on how much this could increase our annual internet costs.   

Let me know if you have any questions and have a great weeekend.   

Friday Update 10/7/2011

The biggest education news in Iowa has to be Governor Brandstad’s release of the document, One Unshakable Vision – World Class Schools for Iowa.  Many meetings I attended this week have involved a good deal of discussion on the plan and potential benefits and challenges.  It seems like people fall into two camps when discussing the plan, either they doubt its feasibility or they consider it to be a resounding call to “change the face” of education in Iowa.  Politics aside, there are tremendous implications for Assumption High School, depending upon which parts of the plan are enacted. We will have discussions about these implications as a faculty in the future.  The plan can be read at:  http://educateiowa.gov/

Speaking of politics, I had an opportunity to listen representatives Bruce Braley and Dave Loebsack speak about some potential education changes at the federal level.  Some of the conversation surrounded the process for opting out of No Child Left Behind.  It is my understanding that this is a decision made at the state level, but does have implications for all of our schools. 

There was a very good article on Catholic education in the Wall Street Journal.  I encourage you to check it out at:  http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052970204138204576600660103642184-lMyQjAxMTAxMDAwMzEwNDMyWj.html?mod=wsj_share_email

There was a technology hiccup on Monday, which appears to have been caused by a power outage around 4 am Saturday morning.  All of our servers restarted perfectly except for our student information system server.  After we got it up and running again, we changed some settings to prevent this from reoccurring, which caused us to discover that one of our backup power sources failed when the power went out and will need to be replaced. 

A couple of facilities matters for this week: We are looking at having some roof work done and Eric has begun the next set of memorabilia cabinets to match those already installed in S-wing. 

Our students, faculty and staff participated in a pink out this Friday for Mrs. Shovlain.  She will be undergoing surgery soon and the Assumption Family wanted to show their support.  It was great to see everyone come together and send such a strong message.

Have a great weekend and let me know if you have questions.