Principal’s Report
October 2007

Fencing: Complete, on target with bid. MMA Grounds clean up. And then the storm: Blackwood spruce put a dent in our new fence!

Storm damage: minor tree fall out in our yard, which the kids had a good time cleaing up on Thursday. Young and Blackwood lots are going to be
cleared this weekend via access from our lot. Permission granted via Doug Endicott.

French Trip: We have about $13,000 in hand—but not by holding any events, as of yet. Amazing spontaneous support. Enough to buy the plane tickets, but fundraising is only just getting started. Thanks to: Castine Historical, Wilson Museum, individuals and student donations. Now I’m working on the actual dates. Our spring vacation occurs the week before St. Castin has its spring vacation. Perfect timing, in this regard. However, it means going during our vacation week, which is a problem for some of our families and is also an airline blackout week—pricey, harder to get seats.  
Question: May I have permission to schedule the trip, buy airline tickets by the end of the month, using school days prior to April vacation, if need be? I propose to the French April 10-17th as the visit “window.” I think this qualifies as some pretty intense days of learning! No different, really than sending 7th graders to Kieve for a week, in terms of a nontraditional curriculum. But if need be, I’m sure we could make up days by holding school on a few Saturdays…intensive language training?

Small rural schools grant: We were fortunate to get around $10,000 in grant money this year. Had to be spent by the end of September, on specified areas.  We bought: three new faculty laptops, whale watching trip for 7-8th graders, 3 laser printers, 1 inFocus projector, Lego robotics parts, senior book project tools and materials, picnic table construction materials, nature center construction materials, art room furniture, visiting artist, new French textbooks.  Phew.

Woman’s Club donation: I just learned that the Castine Woman’s Club is granting us $1,000 for classroom materials. Thank you!

Open House…Mid-year, not fall. There’s just too much going on trying to get school up and running, with everyone adjusting to new schedules and duties. We’ll invite parents and community for an event in January. Of course, parents are always welcome to visit any way.  

Generator at Adams? No municipal building has a powerful generator installed. Why not us? We’ve got a great kitchen, gas oven, could feed and shelter lots of people, if needed…and holding school wouldn’t be at the mercy of power supply.  We lost one day after the September storm due to loss of power. But thinking of disaster response in the community makes me raise the issue too.

Heating Controls. I’m not looking forward to another heating season! We know our furnace will get us through another few years, but the state of our classroom controls is ridiculous. We’ve been heating the building since the start of school in order to have hot water in the kitchen! I’d love to get a handle on this—for comfort as well as wasteful expense. The recent Honeywell survey recommends same.

NWEA: Despite the usefulness of this testing, I’d rather not start using it without taking something else out of our assessment/testing regimen. Also, I’m not in favor of asking the faculty to try and get up to speed on another piece of software/testing while we are still trying to adopt PowerGrade. Blue Hill will use it this year—let’s see how it goes for them.
    
Todd R. Nelson