Principal’s Report
December 2007

French Trip Tickets: Purchased! Point of no return has been reached. Trip dates are April 5-13. Fundraising by students proceeds apace…we made $858.00 from dinner and rummage last weekend; $750.00 from candle sales.  Total raised exceeds $23,000.

French Kids: E-mail correspondence with the school in St. Castin, France is fairly frequent now. We await a package of letters and photos from them. Exciting to know how much they look forward to our visit, and starting to get more detail about activities during the trip. For them, our visit is one of their older class’s big projects of the year. And we intend to bring our Right Whale presentation to share—in French—as well as research into the life of the Baron and native Americans here—in French.

Building Heat/Gary’s Fuel: I’m not getting much response from Gary’s, after two calls. Shall we go elsewhere for consultation on building heating system upgrades?

Term One Reports. This is the critical week as far as PowerSchool and report forms. Only one teacher reports no difficulties…and he’s in South Africa! I am collecting the data of our experience with the software and forms for later review.  But I don’t think I’ll ever know the complete story of what makes PowerSchool run or not run as we hope.

Fire Drill with CFD: Two weeks ago, we had a good fire drill (See it in the paper?) with the fire department. Good timing and search and rescue results, despite curve balls, on the part of CFD. We’ll practice a lock-down after the holiday break.

Community member support. This is the time of year when we reach out to the Castine community, and feel a lot of its support and affection for the school. The holiday concert is next week, as are the annual wreath making
courtesy of the Castine Garden Club, ginger bread project with Janis Fitch. Then we have our own 3-4th grade community service project. And readers theater does winter Indian stories this Friday, at 4:00. And just before vacation, we had class parents helping construct picnic tables for Blackwood Park—a nice photo on the front page of The Patriot. It always makes me appreciate the village nature of this place and its school.

Honors and Sports participation policies.  We have prepared drafts—very much first drafts! We see the most problems with an honors policy that switches from academic achievement to citizenship as the criteria for public notice. It feels as if we’re making special mention of behavior we wish to be baseline for all! Needs more work. Sports participation, on the other hand, set the standard where it ought to be: on citizenship and effort, not academic achievement. To be continued.

More Tree Removal: The row of ash trees along our Sheer property boundary were removed today. A crane will come soon, I hear, to remove the big red pines on the Sheer-Koos line that were casualties of the microburst. Front row seat to lots of big machines in action is compensation for loss of our recess access to snow forts.



Todd R. Nelson
Principal