Summer is here, and with the summer the work of schooling takes a break. Well, at least that’s what many people think.

In reality, there is still a lot going on throughout the Spring Lake Park Schools during the summer months – students are engaged in academic enrichment and support, leadership development, athletics, and activities. In addition, district staff are involved with a wide range of professional learning and planning activities to continuously improve all we do.

There will be hundreds of students who will participate in Summer School at the elementary, middle school, and high school levels this summer. These experiences are personalized learning opportunities for students to accelerate their learning in areas they may have struggled with during the past school year. In addition, many of our students will participate in Summer Academy, another options we collaborate on with other districts to provide enriching learning opportunities for our students.

There are also numerous learning opportunities, athletic camps, and varied activities provided through our Community Education program. I encourage you to go to our website to learn about these many opportunities for community members of all ages.

More than seventy teachers and staff participated in a professional learning experience – “Shift Happens: Learning in the 21st Century” -- focused on preparing our students for the global economy and ever-changing world of technology, through their own meaningful application of technology tools. Their first session started on their very first day of “summer vacation,” and will continue throughout the summer. You can read a little more about this at slpschools.blogspot.com.

We have been working to continuously improve the personalized learning experience of our students over the past two years. This has involved professional learning and support to our teachers in differentiating instruction to meet the varied needs of our students, and developing higher-order thinking and substantive conversation skills. A task force of 15 teachers and staff from across the district met for two days to assess the implementation and impact of this Personalization Initiative. They used this data, while also looking at exemplar districts across the country, to develop plans for Fall 2010. The focus will continue in the areas mentioned previously, as well as in fostering meaningful relationships with each of our students.

A team of fifteen teachers spent three days planning for the implementation of an improved district-wide mathematics curriculum for Fall 2010.

A team of twenty district leaders spent a day last week identifying areas for needed improvement across the district, as well as planning for the upcoming school year.

This is the reason we had teachers planning for the implementation of significantly expanded online learning this spring, and will be throughout the summer. We realize that online learning is expanding world-wide, and will be a significant aspect of education in the future, and we intend to get out in front of that with our planning.

We also know that the global economy and technology is influencing what we need to teach, and how we might teach it. For example, students have access to all the content and information they need online. Yet, they need to learn to think critically about this information, what content is valid and how to apply it. Technology has an influence in education now, and will even more so in the future. Thus, this is an area in which we have teachers and staff working this summer.

Finally, and unfortunately, as we look at the continuing financial challenges the State legislature will face in the next biennium, we are planning for yet another year of flat funding, at best, for the 2011-2012 school year. Thus, we are already in the midst of planning modifications that will address the limited funding we anticipate as a school district for that school year, as well as looking further into the future.