Principal’s Report
January 3, 2007


Spanish has started. Emily Gibson spent her first day. She began by helping Adams kids remember, revise, or discover their Spanish names, then proceeded to greetings and partings and sent them off to collect vocabulary from home and school in order to label things. We await arrival of a new, formal curriculum, ordered just before vacation. The sounds from across the hall—the art/music room is also the Spanish room—were energetic, happy, productive. A good start!

Whiz Kids.  One of the new applications/abilities in the new MLTI laptops is an application called WhizKids. We’ll send someone to the training session in Ellsworth on 1/18-19. I may go too. It sounds as if it has as much to do with a new way of teaching as just using laptops to do familiar things. We’ll see.

Dang warm weather: The rink! Argh, as Charlie Brown says!

Locksmith: The building has been re-keyed to that all teachers can actually lock their rooms, and there are fewer key versions. Good for vacation security as well as lock-down procedures.

Whoosh in December: A faculty New Year’s Resolution for 12/2007 is to make sure that we are doing less in the weeks leading up to vacation. Too many concerts, field trips, special events, etc. So we did a little assessment of the particularly whooshy week in December and made note of what we can drop, move to another time of year, keep in place, etc. Next year will be saner. Here’s the list from this year, primarily from just the first two weeks in December:

Gingerbread houses with Janis (4th and 8th)
Start of Basketball games, home and away…7 games total.
Woman’s Club (usually singing…this year, just candle sales)
Men’s Club singing (I cancelled the night before)
Report writing, printing
Parent-teacher conferences
Concert & day-long rehearsal
Wreath-making with Castine Garden Club
GSA Concert (whole school)
X-Fish (grades 4-6)
The Grand (whole school)
4-5 woodworking project (birdhouses this year)
2-3 Auction
Cookie Making (K-1)
Votive candle project (Castine Arts Association volunteers)
Canned Food drive and visit to food pantry.
Class parties (whew)

X-Fish a Success: The kids and teachers returned from the X-Fish adventure in Portland very energized, if tired. Everyone seemed to feel this is something we would like to take advantage of again, if offered. It’s also one of the things we would avoid doing in December! See above. Yes, it’s a long ride, but a very well-run program.

8th Grade Fund Raising…shifting into higher gear. Spaghetti dinners coming soon to a town hall near you. The next three months, January to March, are the peak money-making season.

Coast Guard Exams. We approach the week when MMA Seniors are taking their Coast Guard exams in the field house and our P.E. classes must shift to Emerson. This is also the year when construction in Emerson may make this a little awkward. If it would just snow, we could call it “Snowshoe Week.”

My Goals: You’ll see them listed in Denis’s evaluation of me. I feel as if I’m pretty far along in working on them all. To clarify the third one: faculty board interaction. Tonight’s presentation by Bill McWeeny is part of that. But since we’re spending more faculty time in discussion, rather than logistics and nuts and bolts, it seems natural to have board members attend and participate. We have to avoid constituting a formal board meeting, but it would be good to have board members coming to share things like joint board meeting discussions, etc.

Comprehensive Plan Survey: School enrollment data for the Castine CPC has been delivered to Dale Abernethy. Same data is enclosed here, with projections for future, including data for the three other towns. I noticed that it had been the practice of past principals to include current enrollment figures in their town reports. I neglected to do so, for the past two years. I’ll resume the practice this year.

Middle Day is January 23…half way through the school year. Hard to believe. Talk about whoosh!



Todd R. Nelson
Principal



Enclosures:


Maine Public Radio piece aired 12/14.
Enrollment data sent to Comprehensive Plan Committee