Saturday, July 30, 2011

Welcome to My Blog

I have spent four days in July meeting with principals and touring buildings in the school district.  I am very impressed with how well maintained the buildings are kept.  I also met a lot of the people that are cleaning the buildings and my hat goes off to them.  Some of those days (especially last week) those buildings were hot but they were working to make sure everything will be ready when our kids come back in about one month. 
I look forward to starting the new school year and getting to know people in the schools and the larger community.  The preliminary results from the PSSA scores suggest that Penn-Trafford once again surpassed expectations.  I will blog more about the test scores after the State officially releases them.  I also look forward to learning about other measures of success that the school system uses to measure success for their students and the schools.  I believe strongly that the PSSA tests do reflect student learning (and great teaching) and I also suspect that this school community measures success in other ways.  I look forward to learning about these alternate measures of success that overlap with PSSA results. 
I hope to blog on this sight about twice a week.  My goal is that the blog will be a place where you can come to learn about the school district and how larger educational issues will impact our school district.  I also will add some interesting stories of students/staff as I learn about the outstanding people that make up this school district.  I also welcome you to follow me on Twitter (@tombutler10).  I do not “tweet” about mundane happenings in my life.  Rather, I use Twitter as a clearinghouse for educational ideas that I learn from other people that use Twitter.  I also use Twitter as a place to store good educational ideas that I find on the internet.  In other words, my Twitter account is used for learning and education.