New Beginnings

You would think it would be easy to identify the beginning of something.  But the reality is that beginnings usually start with a combination of sparks - of creativity, innovation, desire, interest - that take days or weeks or months of planning and encouragement before they catch and create a fire.  Before growing into something big, beginnings usually start with an idea and grow from there.

Take, for example, my job here in the Novi Community School District. It started as an idea.  It started with a phone call.  It started with someone encouraging me to apply.  It started with me looking at the district and discovering all the wonderful things that go on here.  It started with the Board of Education interviewing me and several others, narrowing the pool of candidates, selecting me, voting for me, and extending me a contract.  The beginnings included meeting administrators, parents, and community members who expressed their collective commitment to the district and their collective belief that Novi is a great place to be. 

My official beginning may have been July 1, 2011, but the real beginning was an idea that grew into an opportunity that grew into the start of something wonderful.

Another example is the new website for the Novi Community School District.  The official beginning for our new district website was July 2011, but the beginning started as an idea.  We asked ourselves how can we use the power of the internet to communicate, to promote, to tell our story?  The beginning included months of planning, working, transferring information, creating pages and links, and updating names and faces.  Our tech department started this project months ago and has spent an enormous amount of time creating a site that will communicate clearly and easily.  The story of the Novi Community School District will be more easily and more productively told through our new website.

I will look back on the summer of 2011 as a time of new beginnings in my life.  My hope is that these new beginnings are creating the sparks that will catch fire and help us continue to create wonderful outcomes in our district.