A letter to the students of Novi High School

You, my friends, are an awesome group of people.

You are funny, talented, thoughtful, and intelligent. You are, most of the time, friendly, polite, caring, and honest.

But you were not happy with me this morning.

A parent in the district received this message from her Novi High School daughter this morning:

(I assume the frozen fingers accounted for the spelling error - years instead of tears. But there certainly was no mistaking her earlier sentiment of how she felt about me this morning.)

Many of you, as evidenced by this text, were not happy with me this morning.

If you think this was an isolated occurrence you would be wrong.

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I chuckled at your comments, enjoyed the banter between us, and appreciated that you were paying attention.

But there are at least two lessons that are important to remember here.

First, each of us will be called to make difficult decisions in our life. Difficult decisions should be made with care. You should collect information, weigh potential outcomes, examine alternatives, and then make the best choice you can.

I did that today.

Did I make the right call on having school when there was a wind chill approaching -20 degrees?

I think I did.

Obviously some of you had a different opinion.

When others disagree with a decision that you make it is important to listen, reflect, and see what can be learned.

Which brings me to the second lesson that I remembered today.

In your life there will be people who make decisions that impact you with which you completely disagree. In the social media world that we live in it is easy and somewhat comfortable to take to Twitter or Facebook or Snapchat or whatever other application there is that I don't know about and vent.

It feels good. It makes people laugh.

But it could get you in trouble. Some bosses, colleagues, employees, or employers may not be as understanding as I am about comments that are vulgar, disparaging, or mean.

I would urge you to use caution and to think while you Tweet, post, and communicate via social media.

I was in your school today during "A" lunch. I visited tables saying hello, smiling and laughing with your classmates. It appeared that you were enjoying being in school. I hope that was true.

Novi High School is a good place to be - even on cold days like today.

Sincerely,

Dr. Matthews

Baby it's cold outside!

When I arrived at work this morning the air temperature, as measured by my car, was 5 degrees.

As I walked from the parking lot to my office I said to myself, "It is very cold!"

As I fired up my computer I looked at a weather site on the Internet and saw that we had winds of 19 MPH. That produced a wind chill of -15 degrees.

Finally I pulled up the National Weather Service wind chill chart.



This chart serves as a guide. Wind chills can be dangerous. But we can moderate the effects of the wind in the winter by dressing appropriately.

The school district's unwritten policy is that we will not cancel school unless the wind chill is consistently below -25 degrees.

Living in Michigan we can expect there to be cold weather. We must take the appropriate precautions.

The safety of the students in our district is always on my mind. In the winter I take great care to monitor weather conditions. I will not put our students at risk.

However, we can expect there to be cold weather in Michigan. Being in school is important. Cancelling school disrupts the learning process.

Cancelling school because of the weather is not a decision that I take lightly. I gather as much information as I can. I look to weather experts to give us guidance.

And I always keep the safety of our students in mind.