Novi High School Girls Soccer

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The Novi High School Girls Soccer team was recognized today as the High School Spring 2011 National Champion. Congratulations!

First Football Game

Tonight at Eastern Michigan University the Novi Wildcats prepare to play Chelsea. A beautiful night to open the season.

Novi's Administrative Team Plans for the New Year

The Novi administrative team met today to plan for the 2011-2012 school year and beyond. The administrative team focused on identifying key issues that face the district and focusing our effort. The administrative team knows that The Novi Community School District is one of the premier school districts in the state and the goal is to continue moving us forward and ahead.

Novi High School Band

The Novi High School Band presented a preview of this year's halftime show today. This was the culmination of this week's band camp.

Coming clean on how we determine proficiency in Michigan

The Michigan Department of Education recently sent an interesting letter to the U.S. Department of Education.  The letter, seen here, requests a waiver that would exempt Michigan from meeting the No Child Left Behind requirement that all students reach 100% proficiency on state assessments by 2014. The reason this request is made is because Michigan is instituting new cut scores on tests starting this fall.

What are cut scores?

The state divides the scores on state assessments into four categories - advanced, proficient, partially proficient, and not proficient. Students who score in the advanced and proficient categories are said to have passed the test.  Correspondingly, students in the partially proficient and not proficient categories are said to have not passed the test.

The state is raising the cut point next year.  No longer will a student be able to "pass" the test by getting 18 answers correct out of 53 questions as was done last year on the 3rd grade math MEAP test.  In other words, last year, with the cut scores that were in place, the state certified that a student was proficient if they got 34% of the questions correct.

I applaud the state for raising the cut scores and making proficient mean something.  What I am puzzled by is why the cut scores were so low in the first place.  No parent and no teacher would claim that a student is proficient if they only got 34% of the answers correct.

We need a system that clearly and honestly identifies the skills and knowledge that our students have.  Without it we give every student and every parent a false sense of who the student is and what the student can do.  That does not prepare a student for what is ahead in life.

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.  

Camp Invention Final Day

Today was the final day of Camp Invention. Campers and parents gathered to celebrate and campers were able to tell their parents about the week's activities.