Updates for the Week 11/8/2013

Congrats to Liz King and the Assumption Knight Players on their performances of Lend Me a Tenor, our Volleyball team who makes their second straight trip to state, the Cross Country team that took 3^rd at state and the Football team who capped off another successful season!  Thanks to all of our seniors for their service to the Assumption family by putting on another wonderful Spaghetti Supper. 

Another congrats to Emily Coryn for all her hard work putting together another great Information Knight.  It is always wonderful to have our grade school students visit Assumption.  This night provides a tremendous opportunity for students and parents to learn about all of the great things Assumption has to offer, while getting a look inside the school, and having the opportunity to learn about the Family Tuition Plan.  It certainly seemed like everyone I talked to was there not because they were still trying to make a decision, but because they had already decided to attend AHS. 

We had a great showing at Assumption for the meeting with the Iowa Catholic Conference on the proposal for Educational Savings Accounts - final count was right around 60 people. With other Diocese in the state having already held a couple of meetings of their own, it was great to hold this information meeting here in Davenport.

After hearing from the Catholic lobbyists on Wednesday, I had the opportunity to hear from the public school lobbyists on Thursday at the AEA. As always, allowable growth will be an issue for them, along with start date and the teacher compensation system. I was happy to hear that there would be a major push to focus some lobbying efforts on ways to provide better mental health, bullying prevention, and suicide prevention in schools. I never understood why they spend so much time talking about start date when there are other valuable education issue to discuss.

Finally we will have our first session of North Scott Rotary today.  Should be exciting!

Have a great weekend!

Andy

Weekly Update 11/1/2013

Congrats to the football and volleyball teams on their first round victories in the playoffs.  Good luck to Girls’ Cross Country, KKD Soloists and Competition Cheer as they head off to State competitions this weekend.  Finally a special “break a leg” to the cast and crew of the fall play, Lend Me A Tenor!  If you are looking for some Sunday entertainment, I invite you to attend the 2:00 pm showing of the play and then stay for some dinner at the Annual Spaghetti Supper.  

 

In development, we wrapped up the addition of another $1,000 scholarship for students to attend Assumption.  The family I have been working with will be naming the scholarship after one of the family members.  What a great gift!  

We are finalizing plans on the Presidents’ Appreciation dinner and working on the Annual Report and Annual Appeal.   This week was also the week that we ported over our Blackbaud data for our target analytics project.  I am excited to see the information we get back and to begin using the data to strengthen our development efforts.

On the technology side, we had to do some trouble shooting on some of our electronic whiteboards.  While none of the problems were too serious, it still took a little time and effort to get everything back in working order.  I sometimes forget that we began this project over five years ago and technology does have a shelf life.  We will need to begin replacing some of the hardware on these units to keep them in top shape. 

I spent some time this week working to get the details in order for our second First Tech Challenge team.  Some of you may remember the First Tech Challenge from last year. There is still a lot of interest in the team, and we have been lucky enough to have a parent volunteer help us out.  Just to recap, the FTC website describes First Tech challenge as follows:

FTC is designed for those who want to compete head to head, using a sports model. Teams of up to 10 students are responsible for designing, building, and programming their robots to compete in an alliance format against other teams. The robot kit is reusable from year-to-year and is programmed using a variety of languages. Teams, including coaches, mentors and volunteers, are required to develop strategy and build robots based on sound engineering principles. Awards are given for the competition as for well as for community outreach, design, and other real-world accomplishments.

Hope to see everyone this weekend at either the play or the Spaghetti Supper!