Bill’s Weekly Reflection: DSST Wins Prestigious Award - I Need Your Advice
This past week, DSST earned an El Pomar Award of Excellence, one of the most prestigious for non-profit organizations in the state of Colorado. ( http://www.elpomar.org/news/118 ) The El Pomar Foundation chooses six non-profits in six different areas each year to win an Award of Excellence. DSST Public Schools won the 2011 Education Award. The award was presented on Monday night at a dinner in Blackhawk. Governor Hickenlooper was present and received a special award, himself. In his speech on education and health care, he pointed to DSST Public Schools as a Colorado model for the nation to learn from. It was a huge shout out!
This award was humbling—and forced me to take a step back to celebrate the big picture. I admit to being somewhat consumed with growth and improvement, always looking for new ways to better serve our students. This can lead to an inability “to stop and smell the roses” and celebrate success. This award is one rose bush we need to stop and smell. The award came with a $25,000 grant to support our work. The award is for excellence and comes with few restrictions on how it can be spent.
For many in Colorado and the nation, DSST is synonymous with excellence thanks to our extraordinary team. As Shaun Bryant, our Director of Technology stated in a home office morning meeting this week, he works at DSST because every single member of the DSST Public Schools team is exceptional. He continued by saying that he had never, in all the high-performing companies he has worked in (Webex, Sun Guard, Mania TV), been a part of team where everyone is exceptional. I could not agree more.
Thank you for volunteering to be on our team and for the great work you do day-in and day-out on behalf of our students and families. Your excellence is being celebrated.
I am committed to using a portion of this award to make DSST a great place to work. I would love your input. Please comment on the blog with your ideas!
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Comments
Option 1: you should divide it up on the per student basis to the schools during difficult economic times and let director’s decide how to do something special for their own staff - plus do something to enable more great teachers and teaching! and keep back some amount for the great work the Home Office does as well!
Option 2: purchase SMART Boards for teachers who don’t have them.
We could use it to fund some college scholarships.
I think a nice Christmas bonus for teachers would great be during difficult economic times. . .or towards some sort of pro-compt for teachers.
Use it to fund an Advisory to the Library Program! Once a month, every advisory gets driven to their closest library to check out individual reading books—this will give kids a chance to read all the fun, less-than-literary books we don’t teach. It would help create a reading culture across our network, give students the valuable life skill of how to use a library, and develop students who read for pleasure.
I second the LIBRARY PROGRAM idea. We have almost no classroom library books at GVR, and it would do wonders for promoting a culture of reading.
Start up a DSST community garden. Crops could be eaten by teachers and students, could be used in health/wellness/science classes, could have a bench or table and chairs in it too to act as an outdoor meeting place or spot for people to take a quick break from indoor life in the sunshine.
Hire someone to proctor CP and Refocus. This way teachers won’t have to turn away students who want to schedule quick tutoring appointments after school. A shorter work day will also increase our teachers’ work-life balance!
Use it to fund accelerated reader for stapleton MS and the other middle schools.
Purchase books for various schools and then treat teachers to a special event - a show at DCPA,etc
Hi all – thanks for all of your thoughtful comments on how to best use the El Pomar grant. Lots of great and creative ideas. We are going to take these into consideration as we look at how to best invest these dollars in the coming weeks and get back in touch by October 30.