A Good Start

After just three days of school I can say with some certainty that we are begining the school year in excellent fashion. And by fashion I mean some satisfaction with the decision to drop skirts from our school dress code. Now if we could just get some of our young men to get their hair cuts....
The feedback we received from streaming chapel hs been very positive, so look for that to happen again real soon. We have a few techical glitches to get fixed, but we are working on them...
Look for an email this week about providing students with email accounts through school. Please know we are taking appropriate cautions to protect student identities. Having an email address will enable students to access the wikis and blogs that our teachers are developing, all with the idea to improve student learning. Parents will have the right to opt out their student, but before you do, please talk with Mr. Orr , Mr. Chalfant or me so we can answer any questions you might have.
We are hoping to fully occupy CPAC by the end of the month. Much of the work being done currently is related to the lines sets for scenery and lighting. Additional work is focused on the sound system.

Almost Time

With school less than 24 hours away from starting, the place is abuzz with activity. Here are a few things I wish I could tell everyone:


1. Please be patient, especially in and around our parking lots and drop-off/pick-up zones.


2. Be engaged. I know we send quite a bit through the mail and we will try to reduce that amount by using the website as a primary means of communication, but that means people have to check the website regularly. Please attend your student's events: athletics, concerts plays. No matter what they may say about "It's no big deal," your presence in their life is much more significant than ours.


3. Pray for your students, their teachers and our school.



On a different note, I have prepared for the Board of Directors an annual report built around a powerpoint presentation which you can view below. Of course, you'll miss my pithy commentary, but if you have any questions I would be happy to answer them. If you are checking this immediately, you'll see it even before the Board of Director's. Is that legal?

Annual Report August 2008

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

Open for Business

The Chapel/Performing Arts Center is ready for occupancy! Well, almost. A temporary certificate of occupancy will enable us to gain access to the lobby, restrooms, storage spaces and the classrooms. The auditorium should be ready by October 1st. Over the last few days some students and parents have helped move band and theater equipment and supplies to their new digs in CPAC. Landscapers have put the finishing touches on our gorgeous amphitheater. New grass and new trees dress it up nicely.

This is a view of the ceiling in the auditorium. Seats will be going in next week and the rigging for the stage will start soon as well.

This is the drama room just waiting for students in 12 days.

The band room is perhaps the largest classroom on campus with room for individual and ensemble practices.

The bell tower reminds all who pass by that this is a Christian school.

Not the Smartest in the Room

It is an extraordinary feeling to be in a room with 1000 people and get the feeling that almost all of them know more than you about something very important. That is a rough approximation of my experience at the Building Learning Communities 08 conference I attended last week in Boston. The conference is an activity of November Learning and its namesake, Alan November, who has been a leading educator and technology advocate for as long as I can remember.

The most important lesson I relearned was that all of this technology is in service to enriching student learning. That is a mantra we will have to repeat often this year as we work with teachers to prepare them for a time when our high school students all come to class with laptops. Jon Orr, one of our schools most tech savvy teachers will be working with our faculty to provide them with the knowledge to use the tech tools we have or will be getting.

I often wonder if 19th century teachers went through all this angst when the lead pencil replaced chalk and slate and inkwells and quills. Were there pencils workshops? Could you get a Master's Degree in educational pencilship?

There is an enormously interesting world out there, a world with challenges that I know our students can tackle. In wrestling with those problems, they learn more useful material than reciting the Gettysburg Address or listing the elements of the periodic table. Technology can put the world at our fingertips, but that is only an advantage if we know how to interact with it.

I expect that students will be bemused at our efforts to use technology to learn. Some of the coolness of having a blog is dimished when every old guy (read administrator) has one. But if we do it right, the journey to using education to enhance student learning is a journey we can take together. I hope it works that way at Faith.

He's Baaaaack.....

I am back in town after a brief respite. Besides my parents and a few other relatives, our time was structured around visits with people who had crossed our path along our thirty years in Lutheran schools. In contrast to Mary and I who've moved around a bit, we enjoyed some time with Barb and Mark Korntheuer who have spent their entire careers at Walther Lutheran High School in Melrose Park, Illinois. A few days later we lunched with John and Ramona Ragland. John is at former athletic director at Faith and is now the Interim Executive Director of Rockford Lutheran High School (I am a proud alum, class of '74). Ramona teaches at Concordia Lutheran School in Machesney Park, IL (my 1st Lutheran School). The Lutheran world is really connected! We also spent time with Larry and Rhoda Baldwin, now living in Iowa (a relatively dry part). I miss Larry's excellence in teaching and our common frustration with the game of golf. Larry is serving on the Board of Valley Lutheran High School in Cedar Falls, Iowa.

Those Lutheran Schools in the Midwest reflect much earlier some of the challenges we may soon face. They are facing even worse economic conditions than we currently have in Las Vegas. It reminds me that the sacrifice parents make to provide Christian education for their students must be honored by those delivering that education. We will work to expand dollars available for financial aid and work with families facing short-term financial situations that make timely tuition payments difficult. We just ask that families stay in contact with us and let us know when a problems occurs, not when tuition is so far in arrears that a student's attendance is in doubt.

I am fearful that my vacation is so attached to my work, but our lives would be much poorer without these wonderful people from who I have learned much, laughed until it hurt and shared the joy of ministry.

BHAG

In a few hours our faculty will embark on a journey that will never end, but hopefully reach it's destination fourteen months from now. Today we start the first of six hours of technology training over the next two days, the first sessions in a series designed to help our teachers use technology as an effective tool in instruction. That instruction will continue into the fall and throughout the next school year. It is a part of an overall strategy to integrate technology in an ubiquitous way. It is one leg of our BHAG.

Readers of Jim Collins's Good to Great are familiar with the term, but for those readers not familiar, BHAG stands for big, hairy audacious goal. Our BHAG is to be the leader of technology in education for the state of Nevada and for Lutheran schools throughout the world. While there are a lot of elements that make up that goal, perhaps the most impactful is our plan that every HS student at Faith will be provided a laptop at the start of the 2009-10 school year.

In order for us to make that commitment it is critical that our teachers have a good understanding of the power of technology to engage students and change instruction. The current crop of students we have is literally wired differently. There is at least some research that suggests that the multitasking, social networking digital kids of today have brains that function in different ways than those of a generation ago. We need to be aware of those changes and design classroom instruction that accounts for the differences.

I remember conversations as a young teacher about how Sesame Street was producing a generation of students with short attention spans and much less patience for the lecture and learn style of teaching pretty prevalent in the 70s. It sure seemed like kids had much less ability to focus. And today we can identify kids with attention deficit at earlier ages than ever. We make accommodations for those students in our classrooms. However, one of the lessons we should have learned from J.K. Rowling is that students are more than willing to devote time and attention to an activity if the content is engaging. Thanks Harry Potter.

Many of our students can text faster than I can type this blog. They can integrate video, audio, photography and other content in new and creative ways. They process information faster. We need to teach them to take all they information at there fingertips, judge its accuracy fairly, and think critically about what they information means and how it affects their lives and decision-making. It is an exciting time to be a teacher. But when hasn't it been?

The End of (School) Days

As we close the end of the 2007-08 school year we bring to an end some school and personal milestones. This was the tenth year our school has been located in Summerlin. That happens to coincide with the number of years I have been the head administrator here. The first is not much of the surprise; the 2nd is.

I am amazed and humbled at what God has accomplished in just ten years at this school. With the exception of the tennis courts and a dedicated soccer field, the original Master Plan is now complete and the buildings are much bigger than than what was originally envisioned. Even with that, we have had to keep and grow the portable classroom farm on the southwest side. Over the last ten years our student population and faculty have more than doubled. Faith has become a school of importance in our community.

Mary and I have been glad to ride along. After stops in Portland, OR; New York City; Cleveland, and Chicago, Las Vegas is now the longest place we have ever lived. My previous connections with the city were not remarkable. In the early 80s the school had contacted me about being a teacher but I had no interest in moving west again. In the mid-90s we took the longest of any of our family vacations, travelling from Chicago down to I-40 and across the southwest to LA and then back northeast up to I-90 and back to Chicago. One of our stops was a July day in Las Vegas. I remember it being 103 degrees at 10:00 am and declaring with great certainty that only crazy people lived in such a climate. My antipathy was lessened somewhat when Mary won $40 at a Caesar's Palace slot.

But man plans and God laughs. Not that much later I would consider and then accept the call to be Faith's principal. My 1st goal was simply to be the longest serving administrator in the school's brief history. Reached that milestone a while ago. We crossed the 1000 student plateau and kept going.

As we approach graduation it is hard not to be nostalgic. The last Moyer is graduating which ends a streak of more than a dozen years of having a student at Faith. Other families are bringing long associations with school to a close. Some will watch students cross the stage and know that it took an act of God to make it happen; others will wonder what will become of their son, daughter, niece, nephew, grandchild or friend who may have talents and abilities that surpass most of us regular folk. Is there a future Bill Gates, Mother Teresa, John McCain or Hilary Clinton among them? Are there teachers and preachers to inspire another generation?

The future for them and for us is in God's hands. My prayer for those who graduate is that they are happy and make a difference in the lives of people around them.

Take a look at the progress our building is making:

We have some sidewalks!

This is the support structure for seating below the mezzanine.

This monster pump supports the sprinkler sytem for the tallest building on campus.

This will be the drama classroom/green room. It is really big!