You Can’t Always Get What You Want

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When someone calls with a concern or praise or wants us to do something differently, we LISTEN intently. We most often have lots of discussion about that concern or request or problem. We investigate EVERY issue that comes before us carefully. We follow through.

If we don’t do exactly what you want us to do, it doesn’t mean we’re not listening. You can’t always get what you want. And you’re not always right. There’s always more to the story, another perspective, other people involved. Don’t rush so quickly to judgment. If you’re always angry at everyone around you, as my mother would say, you better look in the mirror.

And I’ll make you a deal. I’ll listen. I’ll realize I can’t always get what I want. I’m aware on a daily basis that I’m not always right. I’ll have room in my head for the ideas of others, not just my ideas. I’ll listen to all sides of the story. I’ll make the best decision I can, given the information I’ve gathered. I’ll research and evaluate and then decide.

If the decision isn’t what you wanted, it doesn’t mean I didn’t listen. It’s just that you’re not always right and your opinion isn’t the only one that matters.

Learning Outside the Zone

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Our daughter Bryna is getting married in April. For this reason, she asked us to take dance lessons. Apparently, she doesn’t want the father-daughter dance to look like two kids at a Jr. High Dance. The junior high sway has been working for her father and me for 24+ years so I’m not sure what the problem is, but hey, we’re game.

I cannot tell you how far out of my comfort zone I have to go to take dance lessons. I remember going to dance at Miss Fletcher’s studio in the 2nd grade. Let me tell you, as a six year old I knew this was not my calling. The night of the recital they had a mother helping to get us ready and when she placed me in the front row, I assured her she had me confused with the petite Kim in the class. Sure enough, Miss Fletcher took one look and switched us.

Off we went last Friday night, to Guys and Dolls Dance Studio in Jamestown with this memory in my head and a glass of wine from dinner counter-acting the nervousness. When we met the instructor, Laura Cimino, I thought “this woman is OUT THERE.” She was hugely enthusiastic, used her mic to speak to six of us, and kind of goofy acting.

You know what else she was? A genius. Just like Todd Whitaker advised in the tapes we watched with our new teachers yesterday afternoon, this dance instructor made it ‘cool to care’. She was fun and bubbly and I got over myself quickly. Had she been a “Black Swan” kind of perfect dancer in a tight little leotard, I would have felt like a big klutz and my insecurity would have over-shadowed everything else, making it much harder for me to learn.

We go back tonight and I’m really looking forward to it. I know (at least she made me believe) that I didn’t completely stink at it, so I’m confident I can learn something. I’m game to try. She’s so enthusiastic and ‘out there’ about her topic, that she’s got me buying in.

Which is exactly what our best classroom teachers do every day! They make it cool to care about school, they make kids feel safe, they act goofy and fun and empower their kids who may be feeling just as insecure and inept in the classroom as I felt entering that dance studio. They help kids get over themselves and discover the joy of learning. Pure genius.

The Governor’s Proposed NYS Budget

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By now you probably know about our governor’s proposed budget. As a resident of NYS and taxpayer, I’m glad we have a governor who is attacking the State deficits head on. I understand how difficult it has to be to get this huge machine of NYS under control with regard to spending and special interest groups.

As a school superintendent, I also understand it. The taxpayers of the district are never far from my mind. The school aid cut for RCS is larger than we expected at 5.98% ($596,209)  but smaller than that of many of our neighboring districts.

Thanks to the planning of our fiscally conservative administration and BOE, we have a fund balance that will help us through this year. We also offered the retirement incentive last year of which 12.5% of our teachers took advantage, bringing payroll savings to the district. Those savings coupled with the savings from the elimination of a more expensive health insurance plan (PPO) for our Administrative, Teaching and Support Staff groups puts us in good stead for the 2011-12 budget year. For now.

No small, rural district such as ours can sustain programs for kids with cuts like this from state aid over more than a few years. We don’t have “extras” to cut like larger, wealthier districts have–we don’t have a violin teacher or an equestrian program or elective teachers. We have a solid basic program with Art and Music, Technology and Athletics and we need to sustain those opportunities for our students.

The governor must include proposals that offer significant cost reductions for school districts: capping the amount districts must spend on health insurance, adding a less costly pension tier or requiring pension contributions from all of us, reductions in the cost of health insurance and relief from Triborough, the state’s law which severely limits a school district’s ability to achieve concessions in contract negotiations. Districts and organizations from across the State who represent us have been lobbying for this kind of relief.  All of which were noticeably absent from the Governor’s budget. Hand in hand with the state aid cuts, they would have been much easier to manage.

Excluding the Drop Outs

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It’s the story of a girl. A girl who drops out of high school.  For what reason, I’m not sure. Does it matter? Our fault, hers, life got in the way, not enough support–either way she left us without a diploma.

What happens to a drop out ten years after high school? What opportunities does he find, what obstacles? Does he find gainful employment? Can she get hired anywhere?

What about here? Do we hire one of our own former students who never graduated? One who’s raising a family in our community and trying to make it, one who wants to work and provide a life for her kids? Do we hire that boy who carries the stigma of drop out his whole life? Do we hire him to work in the cafeteria or as a grounds keeper helper or to clean our buildings?

It’s honest, hard work. People to work cleaning up after the 1000+ kids and 200+ adults who course through our buildings every day. . . there isn’t a long line of people looking for this work. The cleaners and custodians we have now work hard to get it done and it’s a thankless job most of the time. I treasure them for cleaning up after the rest of us. Substitute cleaners? Even harder to find.

So as an institution dedicated to learning with an end game of graduation, do we exclude people from work who don’t hold that diploma? Because that’s what our procedure states and it’s just not feeling right to me.

I get that it’s us saying, “a diploma is so important to us that we’re going to require everyone who works here to have one”. I struggle with the idea that we’re kicking someone in the teeth who as an adult must feel every day the consequences of the decision to drop out. I’m not sure what that’s accomplishing?

Spanish in the Valley

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I taught Spanish and Business for ten years at Pine Valley Central, a little district that borders the one I’m in now.  Back in the day, I was able to obtain certification for the position after only 24 credit hours in Spanish. Business, I had to have 36 hours. I entered my Spanish classroom in 1990 clutching my college notes for dear life.

That meant I always felt inadequate in the content. When I finished my course work my professor said, “and now you go to Madrid.” My reply? “What should I do with the 2 year old who lives in my house?” Obviously, I couldn’t leave my daughter and husband for a year abroad.

I loved teaching in every imaginable way, but mostly I just loved my students. I always felt like a fraud, not fluent enough, not good enough. My students did very well on the State exams, but I never got over that feeling that I should be fluent. When I became a principal, it was a relief. I could just focus on the parts of the work that I knew I was good at, without feeling so inadequate.

Now we have the wonders of Facebook and other social media and I’m reconnecting with all of these amazing students who I taught in the nineties and the feedback I get from them is so positive and warm and caring that I wonder, if my Spanish had been perfect would I have been a better teacher?

Cause honestly, I’m thinking no matter how perfect my Spanish had been, my students wouldn’t likely remember any more of it than they do now. But they do remember me and how I treated them, how I listened to them, how I cared about them. We do our best with the content, what’s more important is that we do our best with the kids.

Are We More Alike than We Are Different?

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Saturday night at our house will hopefully bring our college boy home with his friends. Belfort faces Silva in the UFC. With our clan, that’s a big draw. Our daughter and her fiancé will be home, my in-laws will be up.

Here’s the thing about watching the fight at our house. There’s no talking allowed during the bouts. This is serious business. With a husband who’s taught karate for 30+ years and two kids who rank among his fewer than 25 blackbelts over that many years–we’re talking serious as a heart attack furor over the UFC. When Tallon was little, we played 20 questions with “I’m thinking of a boxer. . . ”

So here’s where it gets interesting. My “girls” asked to come over that night too. I have an incredible group of girlfriends and we love to laugh, share a glass of wine- – -yeah, it gets LOUD. My husband’s definitive answer to this request from them was “HA!HA! No way!” We are compromising with my promise that we’ll stay in the dining room, the exact opposite end of the house. Husbands in the living room with the fight, happy as clams. Wives in the dining room with good conversation, ditto on the happy part.

This all makes me reflect on conversations at Educon, led by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, exploring the lack of gender diversity in the edtech thought leader space. Actually, I’ve been reflecting on that session since I left it on Saturday. I’m thinking a lot about those differences in the genders and what each of us brings to the workplace based on our gender.

I’m wondering about our gender differences and while I realize generalizations are typically unfair no matter what they are. . . I’m going to be paying attention to this issue as I watch people interacting. Yep, going to be analyzing my friends and the people with whom I work.

I’m wondering if there are gender traits that I bring to personal relationships that I leave at the school house door in my role as a superintendent?  Is that good or bad? Does it contribute to my leadership or take away from it?

And the Two Paths Diverge. .

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How much would you say you’ve changed over the past five years? Professionally in that time, I’ve moved from the high school principal at Gowanda to the assistant superintendent there to my current position of superintendent at Randolph. Personally in five years, I’ve gone from being the mother of a high school daughter and a middle school son to an empty nester. That’s a fair amount of change.

My thinking has changed over those five years too and consequently, this blog has transformed. When I started writing in July of 2006, I was writing just for me. This blog, then entitled G-Town Talks, was a place for me to process my thinking, to get feedback from a few colleagues who were reading and responding, and to sometimes influence someone else’s thinking. It was fun! It was also professionally rewarding, cathartic on some days and an avenue into the online learning community. It’s through this blog that I began to grow my own professional learning network as I read the work of others who I met from following the bread crumbs of a trail when they left comments or when I noticed someone on another blog I was reading. My RSS feeds grew, my readership grew, the personal rewards I felt from writing every time someone commented grew.

And then it all began to dwindle when I left work I absolutely loved and became an assistant superintendent. It seems that with every step I took up the ladder, I had less to say on this blog. I felt I had to write more formally, as the “SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS”. This continued until the point I’m at now where it’s really like an on-line version of a newsletter. The only blog post that’s gotten my creative spirit going was one I did as a guest post for Scott McLeod, and that was good enough to get noticed by Jay Goldman to be published next month in AASA’s print magazine The School Administrator. Didn’t write it here though, did I?

Why? I stopped writing for me. I stopped processing my thinking here. I lost all of the rewards of writing. It became a chore. I have taxpayers and BOE members and students and parents in my head now where only ideas and reflection and learning should be. Instead of just letting my thoughts flow onto the blog, I started to second guess my every sentence and re-read my posts through the critical lens of someone else (who? I don’t know. Every person who’s ever called to complain about something?).  My work consumes me, I’m thinking about what all of those constituents need twelve hours per day. When I’m writing here, it’s not helpful.

I realized all of this over the weekend at Educon, as I got back to learning again and talked to colleagues like Ben Wilkoff, Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Will Richardson. I processed the whole conundrum through on the 7+ hour car rides there and back with my three poor colleagues who surely got sick of listening to me. (Thanks, btw!)

The result? I’m reclaiming this blog for ME. I’m taking it back for my own learning, as a place to process my thinking about education or whatever I want, and for whatever influence I may have out here in my big, fat digital footprint. I’m sticking my toes deeply into it all instead of tip-toeing about, worrying that I might say something that someone doesn’t like. What kind of a light weight, cowardly footprint was that ever going to leave anyway?

And what about continuing to communicate with our Randolph Central school community as the superintendent? That’s extremely important. I’ll continue to be linked on the school webpage as Randolph Central BlogPosts. Most people who read from Randolph probably won’t even notice the difference. But if you’ve been accessing the blog from back in the day, when I wrote with originality and passion and heart on G-Town Talks, I hope you’ll notice my return. Cause I’m just writing for me here. I’m owning Kimberly Moritz BlogPosts again.  I might even return to the name G-Town Talks, just to tip it back to center.

And the two paths diverge. . .

Closing School For Freezing Temperatures

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We closed school today because of freezing cold temperatures. The noon news is reporting these are the coldest temps since 1996. I don’t know about that but at -13 to -14 plus a wind chill that put us at -24, it seemed like a smart decision today.

I hate to close school for two reasons. One, it’s a lost day of instruction. Two, it’s a real hardship for working parents. It is a very involved decision when there’s snow but in the case of freezing temps, we actually have some guidelines from the National Weather Service that we can use. A temperature of -10 degrees is enough to cause frostbite within 15 minutes.

You might argue that our kids aren’t waiting outside for the buses that long or required to walk far to school. Do you know what the problem with that argument is? Watch our students getting on or off the buses some day. MANY of them, particularly our older students, come to school ill equipped for the weather–wearing only a hooded sweatshirt or less. The picture of our kids without hats, gloves, boots or in many cases, a proper winter coat, definitely affected my decision this morning. If you’re a working parent like me and you leave for work before your kid leaves for school, take the time to talk to your child about what he or she is wearing to and from school. You might be surprised!

School Budgets: Have You Read the Paper?

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If you’ve picked up a newspaper lately, you’ve likely read at least an article or two on school budgeting. There’s no doubt you’ve been reading or hearing about the state of the state and our new governor’s preliminary plans for fixing the financial problems of NYS.

I’m glad Governor Cuomo is taking a hard look at State expenditures. I hope he carries through with doing what’s right which isn’t necessarily what’s popular or easy. I’m cautiously optimistic as to whether or not he’ll deliver. I want him to make the hard decisions necessary and I wish they could be based on what’s best for us as a whole, but I know that the heavy lobbying that occurs will ultimately affect what’s done.

What’s all of this mean for RCS?

A significant part of my work is budget planning, particularly at this time of the year, and good fiscal management of the district. All school districts across NYS rely upon state aide to some degree (about 65% at RCS) and face similar challenges with increasing pension, payroll and health insurance costs. I have several meetings per month with different organizations so that I stay as up to date as possible on the challenges and opportunities in education.

How are we faring as a school district? By making the hard decisions necessary, including reductions in staff where feasible over the past two years, we are in a solid financial position. We’ve reduced our health insurance costs by eliminating the more expensive health insurance policy from our negotiated contracts (a savings of $7,000 per family plan per year), we offered the State retirement incentives over the summer of which 14 employees took advantage, including three positions we didn’t replace. Where prudent, we’ve kept our special education students in district, delivering their specialized programs and services ourselves. We’ve worked hard to cut our costs, delivering a 0% increase to our taxpayers over the past 2 years, something we will work hard to do for this upcoming school year. I have every expectation that our taxpayers can count on a 0% increase to the tax levy again.

The bulk of the credit for this solid fiscal management goes to our leadership team: our business official, our building level administrators and managers and their staffs for containing costs, and our Board of Education members for advancing our responsible budgets every year. We’re doing a good job of balancing the program needs of the district with the financial constraints facing our taxpayers. We have fully funded our reserves and continue to plan five years out so that we may stay in this solid position.

I cannot predict where we’re headed with state aide or the economy.  You know how that goes, depends on the day and what I’ve read last. I can tell you that good fiscal management is of paramount importance to me and to our leadership team including our BOE members. Every financial decision we make includes two major considerations: the educational needs of our students and our responsibility to our taxpayers.

Starting at tomorrow night’s BOE meeting, we will examine a section of the budget. This will continue at each meeting through April. You have my word that we will continue to work hard to keep the budget where it is now, with no increase to our taxpayers. Thank you for your continued support of the work that we do.

Just Ask, Please!

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Something wonderful happened today! It may seem like nothing unusual to you, it may seem like common sense, you may even think it happens all of the time. I can assure you it does not.

Someone in our community heard something that worried him and it ran contrary to what he knew directly from us. Instead of getting upset about it, or repeating what he’d heard, or calling our BOE members, this gentleman contacted me.

Why is this extraordinary? Because it seldom happens. I know I hold the responsibility for communicating what we’re doing to our community, along with our administrative team, faculty and staff. I’ve learned that we have to repeat the message in lots of different ways: in face to face conversations, in the newsletter, on this blog, on our FB Page, linked on the website, letters to parents, and at meetings.

Sometimes, as in this case, an employee or student hears a bit of a conversation or the germ of an idea and then repeats it with additional information added in. Remember that old telephone game from elementary school? The one in which someone tells a message to the first person in class and it’s quietly whispered in the ear of every kid in the class until the last person says what he’s heard? The final message is always drastically different from the original.

So the very best thing happened today. This community member went right to the source and asked me if what he’d heard was true. There was a spark of accuracy in what he’d heard, coupled with a whole flame of inaccuracies.

If you hear something that doesn’t sit well with you or runs contrary to what you’ve thought before or just leads to a question, give us a call. We’ll do the best we can to listen and answer all of your questions, to give you good information and to help you to be well informed. We’re a public institution, it’s our responsibility to be transparent and share information. Please ask us!