Ridgway Schools Focused on the Future

RIDGWAY – Preparing students for the complexities of the 21st century’s increasingly competitive marketplace was the theme at the Ridgway School Board’s Tuesday, May 27 meeting. As Board President Kara Mueller explained it, the board’s main goal is to discern “what is the mission of our school district as we prepare our students for the 21st century” – a world, she observed, that’s obviously “different from 20, 30 or 50 years ago.”

In an effort to come up with a mission statement that will inspire students, faculty and the community at large to focus on the future, the board spent more than half-an-hour telephone conferencing with Colorado Association of School Boards advisor Vera Dawson about how to involve the public in the process.

“You don’t want to confuse them,” Dawson cautioned the board, regarding public involvement in coming up with a compelling statement, “or cause them to burn out.” Describing the current mission statement as more “slogan” than mission statement, Dawson emphasized the need to come up with a public process that “won’t bore people to death.”

“It’s always a challenge to get people there,” Mueller told Dawson, “and then, once they are there, to get them to feel they are part of the necessary process,” feeling “useful and heard in the process” and “making it worthwhile for them.”

“We are a small mountain community,” emphasized former Board President Howard Butcher, a lifelong Ridgway area resident, who is moving his family to California later this summer, “and it’s kind of isolated.

“Sometimes I feel a certain amount of complacency” on the part of students and parents, Butcher continued, as well as a lack of awareness that students will eventually compete in the workplace with, say, “Korean students who are studying 15 hours a day” right now to increase their eligibility in the job market.

Butcher, who had begun the meeting by declaring that his recent tour of schools in California – of a range of public, charter and private schools – left him impressed by “the talent and capable teaching here and how there is so much going right, going well here, at our schools,” he went on to emphasize that the district’s mission statement – which it is hoped will be completed by the start of the next school year, will “reflect the reality that we’re very serious about this world” today’s students must prepare themselves for.

The board hopes to have a perfect-pitch mission statement in place for the 2008-09 school year.

Budget ‘Looks in Line’

Comparing the end-of-the-school-year wait to balance the books to “a tidal wave,” with “three-quarters of the revenue coming crashing in” now that the school year has ended, Superintendent Douglas Bissonette voiced confidence that, with $500,000 outstanding, “everything still looks in line; now, it’s a matter of waiting” for revenues mostly from property taxes.

Bingo!

“We want to do more than just a turkey dinner and a carnival” on the fund-raising front, Mueller told the board, and to that end, the board is considering bingo gatherings – as a fundraiser as well as “a vehicle for creating community.”

Greenhouse Studies

District resident Heidi Comstock, who has a greenhouse in her home at Log Hill, and has developed greenhouse-curriculum in the past, has offered to work with the district on a greenhouse program for the schools.

A Cool Mission

The Ridgway High School graduating class earned $1,360,700 in committed scholarship money this academic year; the total committed moneys from colleges accepted by students, to date, is $598,120; and 19 students with college offers have accepted.

Staff Comings and Goings

The board voted unanimously to approve recommendations to hire Emma Brockman as secondary principal; Maggie Guscott (high school math teacher); Anne Hilleman (secondary special ed; Mary Ownes (11/12 English teacher); Mary Haskins (6-8 English teacher); Tim Lyons (technology teacher); Nancy Randall (middle school Spanish teacher); Ryan Wilson (high school social studies teacher) and Jessica Kimball (secondary school PE teacher); Robyn Cascade (third grade teacher); Kelly Charrier (elementary Spanish teacher) and Rebecca Hazen (pre-school teacher.” The board accepted resignations from Kelly Hagemeyer (paraprofessional); Beth Costa (librarian); Charlie Jones (athletic director); and Gina Rogers (English teacher).