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Dr. David Hopson |
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February 16 , 2007 Gateway’s leadership team and staff continue to work on a number of issues related to safe and drug free schools, crisis management, and healthy students. Committees composed of staff, parents, and community members meet routinely to review policy, monitor progress, and make recommendations in these areas. Thus, as we all realize, the passing of an MCAS test isn’t necessarily the only, or even best, measure of success for our children. One prerequisite for learning is having a safe and secure environment for our staff and students. It may appear that these are disparate items when you read in this column, or in our news releases, that we’ve implemented a new policy regarding student nutrition, have been trained in the Incident Command System (ICS), or have requested the state police K-9 units to come to our schools. But all three are important in providing a safe environment and being able to respond appropriately to emergencies. I have been pleased over the last several years in our increased capacity to handle various situations and the positive feedback we’ve received from local and state police observers. I’m also pleased with our success in providing healthy meals and snacks to students, increasing student physical activity, and addressing student behaviors throughout the schools. While I believe we still have much to do in these areas, I’m thankful that other districts recognize our schools as being in the forefront regarding these issues, an excellent tribute to the dedication and willingness of our staff to go above the basic requirements of their positions. This preparation also extends to working with our communities in planning for natural disasters (floods, blizzards, etc.) or the potential for a pandemic (such as avian influenza) given that the towns and schools should be prepared to implement strategies to reduce harm and provide shelter to all community residents. Given the schools’ building infrastructure and the towns’ emergency services, we have a great potential to meet many community needs in an emergency. As we continue to work on planning for such events with community representatives, we’ve found some serious omissions in our prior building process: namely the inconsistent availability of our schools to be used in certain emergency situations because of a lack of generator capacity. We are attempting to address these issues from several angles including grants, a capital improvement stabilization fund, and shared resources because resolving many of the issues requires additional funding. Once again I am struck by the willingness of community members and the school community to work together to plan for contingencies, to donate their time to make our communities better, and for being ahead of the curve when it comes to joint planning, especially for small and rural districts. The bottom line is that schools and education are much more than just learning the “abc’s” and the relationship between our schools and towns are an integral and important part of the functioning of both. While we may have work to do in order to improve, we certainly should be proud of our successes and our willingness to move forward in meeting future challenges. ### |
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