Below you will find some news and events I would like to highlight from around the district.

Partners in Sustainability
Last week seven visitors from Burlington, Vermont joined us for three days to explore sustainability education and how we can support high quality student work. The two schools have a great deal in common including a commitment to helping students understand environmental issues and how they can make a positive difference in their world. The conversations were rich and varied, and we all ended the week feeling as though we had learned so much from one another. Take a look at photos and comments at this website.

D2L
Teachers around the district have been very busy this fall completing rich curriculum units that have been entered into our online curriculum program. Desire2Learn really is a terrific resource for teachers. All their instructional materials are readily available at a single click. This makes their teaching so much easier. Second semester in grades 7-12 we will be creating the student side of D2L. Students will open up their computers and their entire coursework will be available to them. If you are a parent of a middle school or high school student, make sure you ask him/her to show you the new web-based curriculum. You will love the engaging, high quality work your students are doing.

The Christmas Tree Walk
My advisory students love the annual Maplewood Christmas Tree Walk. They really step forward and help make the event special. The group assembles over 500 luminaries to place on major streets in downtown Maplewood (see photos). They place and light the paper lanterns and then get ready to roast chestnuts and sell hot chocolate to the revelers. A group of our choir students dress in Victorian costume and entertain with Christmas carols. It is a lovely, magical evening, made richer by a group of teenagers who freely give their time and energy to make a difference.

Gardens
The gardens at the Early Childhood Center, the Elementary School and the Middle School have been wonderfully productive this year. Our summer school classes in the gardens were filled almost as soon as they were offered. Children of all ages love the sense of accomplishment that comes from growing good food and cooking it themselves. This effort is all part of our commitment to the stewardship cornerstone of our mission statement. We believe we need to do more than talk about taking care of the earth: we need to teach children how to do it. Our gardens help us accomplish this. Please visit our gardens at the Elementary School beside the playground, behind the Middle School Alternative School on the corner of Lohmeyer and Oakland, and at the ECC. This fall we are adding a small orchard at ECC and plan to do the same at the other gardens in the spring.

Intense Week in New York
This summer a group of four MRH students, two of our science teachers, and I traveled to New York to a conference center that used to be a monastery. There we studied sustainability and ways we could as a school district become better at addressing issues that are threatening our environment. St. Louis Learns and Leads provided scholarships for our students to attend, and they were fabulous participants. There were ninety of us from across the country—half of us were adults, half were high school students. The conversations were both passionate and hopeful. It was a wonderfully intense week and included a trip to New York City to visit a small Catholic school where children learned about their environment through gardening, keeping bees and chickens. We also saw a school with an amazing green roof. The excitement of meeting other educators and students who were committed to positive change created such great momentum for us. Our students asked that we work with the city to create a community garden where they could support people growing their own food. We have made that commitment to Maplewood and will be joining forces this spring with a group of citizens to create the city's first community garden.

We also now have our first chickens at the Early Childhood Center—fourteen beautiful exotic chickens for the children to tend and to enjoy fresh eggs (read more here). We hope to offer regular urban chicken classes and support citizens who are interested in joining us in the pleasure of keeping chickens. The trip is having a lasting effect on our community...just what a sustainability conference should do!

Kudos to Mindy
I am thrilled to report that one of our students has become a STAR! MRH senior Mindy Siebert was one of 70 area high school student who spent their summer working with some of the top scientists in the greater St. Louis area, conducting a wide range of research, studying everything from the mating activities of female water snakes to new methods for early cancer detection. In July, she graduated from this program at UMSL known as Students and Teachers as Research Scientists (STARS). (See a photo of her on my photo page.) Pursuing a degree in science, technology and engineering is needed more today than ever, and I think Mindy’s accomplishments will better prepare her to do so. I am so proud of her!

Reggio Workshop
On Saturday, April 4, The ECC preschool teachers and principal, Cyndi Hebenstreit, offered a day-long workshop on the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education. It was a stunning success. Almost 100 people from across the country spent the day with our staff learning about this unique approach to the education of young children. The morning began with presentations by Jennifer Strange, who works with our preschool teachers and is also on staff at Webster University. Brenda Fyfe, Dean of Education at Webster University, and Cyndi and her teachers also spoke. The large group presentations were in our new theatre, and it provided a great environment. The rest of the day was spent at ECC in the classrooms. The participants raved about our educators and the program and urged us to offer another program soon. The day was a great learning experience—and the staff earned enough money from the workshop to send two of them to Italy for the next Reggio conference! (See photos from the workshop here.)


English and Technology
I have been working with the English department at the High School to do some fine tuning of our conference writing program. This program allows students in the High School to have ten one-on-one conferences with English teachers about their writing each year. Many of these conferences take place in the writing center located next to the humanities offices. All English teachers take turns staffing the writing center, so they conference with any student who has time during that period for a conference. The teachers were really struggling with how to communicate with one another about the writing the students were doing. Enter Chris Hoelzer, our tech guy at the high school. He designed a great system using Google Docs to solve our problem.

A student schedules a conference in the writing center when s/he has completed the first draft of a paper. To prepare for the conference, a student logs on to a computer and completes a form outlining what has been accomplished thus far in the writing and what s/he hopes the teacher will help with during the conference. The information from the form is automatically placed on an Excel spread sheet that can be accessed by any English teacher. After a teacher has conferenced with a student about the strengths and possible ways to improve the paper, he or she enters comments about the writing on the spread sheet. In this way teachers communicate with each other about how their students are doing. Technology has helped us do our work better once again.


Blue Devil Basketball
Over the holiday break I attended a couple of basketball games that our boys’ team played. I got to see them take home the trophies for the Webster tournament and the Normandy tournament. In both cases they were playing against much bigger schools but their skill, excellent coaching, and sheer grit saw them through. I think part of what I enjoy so much about this team is that in addition to being fantastic ball players, they are fantastic human beings. They are good students and citizens of the school.