Leadership Survey item number 9 also stated:
An effective leader at Marshall will...
As a faculty,
you selected:
...be an ambassador to the district representing the school's needs, desires, mission, and strengths well.
As table-groups,
you were asked to respond to the following question:
How do you envision your administrator advocating for you at the district-level? What could it mean to have an administrator who functions as an ambassador for Marshall Magnet School?
Your responses to these questions included:
- Be aware of what's going on
- Pursue adequate staffing
- Stick up for us
- Protect our prep time
- Communicate to district about our morale
I want you to know, among the many aspects of my job,
I've tried to take this obligation, to advocate for you and Marshall School, on as a top-priority. I understand how challenging your work is, and also how empowering it can be to have a capable administrator working on your behalf. I've been fortunate to have always worked for individuals who have taken this role seriously and worked tirelessly on my behalf. And
I consider it my privilege to do so for all of you. I aspire to become much better at it as I continually understand more thoroughly all that this job requires of me, and to one day find myself on equal footing with the great administrators I've had the good fortune to work for over the course of my career.
That being said, I want you to know:
I have worked hard to try to be as aware as I was able to be of all that was going on at Marshall over the course of the last many months. But there's a lot to know. And I recognize that I've not always succeeded at this, especially when it's come to grasping the intricacies of the many-headed hydra that our schedule so often is. I assure you that I will try to become ever-more capable of understanding and remembering the component parts of our schedule, the long list of special events, the ins-and-outs of our ever-changing RTI groups, our many magnet programs, your field-trips, performances, and all the rest.
If you've visited with me over the course of the past month of so, you know that
I've had our staffing concerns always on my mind. And also that I've worked pretty hard to convince several key folks at the district level that we're in need of more staff in order not just make our school work, but likewise to allow it to grow and thrive into the future. Similarly, I believe that
I've been a consistent advocate for our many students with special needs, and for the services they require and deserve to have within the inclusion setting.
I haven't been particularly successful in the former endeavor, to acquire additional gen-ed staff, but I assure you, it's not for a lack of trying. But in terms of the latter, despite many anticipated changes in staffing, I nevertheless believe that we will see a similarly strong and effective SPED program in place next year, comparable in structure and delivery to the program we've appreciated this year.
We will meet to preview the school floorplan, staffing assignments, and the schedule for specials and RTI before the end of the year. We will
not meet to tweak the schedule,
only to preview it; the work of creating the schedule has been done by a small team with great care and consideration given to the
myriad components of our school day, magnet programs, district protected-academic-time requirements, protected collaborative and individual prep-time, state mandates, and a truly monumental host of other concerns, too. Everyone's ideas simply cannot be implemented in one schedule. But
our school-needs can be. And some of our desires as well. In devising this schedule,
we did everything we could to listen to what you asked for:
- less fragmentation of the school day/week
- uninterrupted individual prep time
- less disruptive RTI switches
- fewer Friday and Monday specials
- fewer transfers between specials
It's my hope, when you preview the schedule for next year, that you feel, as our team does, that we've achieved all of the above,
plus substantially more, and have crafted a schedule that, despite its inevitable compromises, will nevertheless work
to the maximum advantage of all of Marshall's students and teachers.
