LEADING THROUGH LISTENING

Following the Vietnam War in the 1970s, the Vietnamese government spent millions of dollars trying to solve childhood malnutrition throughout the country. After many failed attempts, 20 years later in the 1990s researchers from the United States determined that poverty was not a cause of malnutrition, however, the manner in which families utilized resources was. They approached their research from the standpoint that someone among the Vietnamese people must be flourishing despite challenging living conditions. What they found was simply that families whose children were nourished well were feeding their children on a regular basis and in portions that were suitable for kids, while those who were malnourished were eating on the schedule of an adult and for portions like an adult. The concept of 'Positive Deviance' was born. Positive Deviance is based on the observation that in every community there are certain individuals or groups (the positive deviants), whose uncommon but suc...

 On an increasing basis, it feels like folks in education think that because something worked a certain way once upon a time, it can continue to work that way in today's society. Warning, for anyone that enjoys trying to live under a rock, the world and society for our kids today is not nearly the same as it once was before. We as adults and parents, no matter how hard we try, can prevent society and the world from changing. It just doesn't happen. Technology is the prime example. When I was in high school, we used a computer maybe once. In college, I can remember sending a grand total of TWO emails. You read that correctly, two. Today, I'm lucky to send less than one hundred emails PER DAY. The world is different. Today, everyone has a computer in their pocket and our kids know more about technology than most of us adults ever will. As parents and educators, we have to embrace the fact that society is different, whether we like it or not, and work within it to help our per...

The week of October 17, 2022 is dedicated in New York State as Board of Education Recognition Week. On behalf of the entire school community, I say thank you to the Rome City School District Board of Education members, including all past members, who have given their time, energy, and passion to help the students, staff, and families of the Rome community.    It takes strong schools to build a strong community, and the women and men of our board devote countless hours to making sure our schools are helping every child learn at a higher level. They help with supporting administrators through tough decisions every month and spend many hours studying education issues and regulations in order to provide the kind of accountability our citizens expect. The key work of school boards is to raise student achievement by creating a shared vision for the future of education, setting the direction of the school district to achieve the highest student performance, providing accountability f...

The month of October marks National Principal's Month throughout our country. There is no doubt that there is no shortage of folks, events, initiatives, etc. to be recognized, however, the Rome City School District is extremely fortunate to have an amazing team of Principals and Assistant Principals working with our students and staff every day. With each passing year, the responsibility and workload of a school leader has increased as more and more mandates (state and federal) are being dumped onto the laps of school officials. Making the job more challenging than mandates that require hours and hours of desk work, research, and reporting is the fact that the options we once had at our disposal to assist students and families continue to diminish on a yearly basis while the passing of the pandemic and increase in social media access has seemingly increased student management challenges in schools everywhere. Despite everything that could go wrong and will be a challenge, our schoo...

  As life goes on, there becomes an increasingly large number of things that a person can lose. If you're anything like me, you probably feel like you are losing your mind more times in a day than you care to talk about! But there truly are kinds of things that we have grown to rely on every day to help us through our lives. Material things are obvious and losing a material possession can cause a significant problem. Just misplacing a phone or a set of keys can cause some people to go into complete panic mode. However, there are many things in life that are not material in nature that are really driving the force in our daily lives. One thing that is so important for our students is that we do not lose our "why". Why did we enter the educational profession? What is our passion? All of us had a reason for entering education, and if I had only one guess to make as to what the vast majority of our "why" was, it would be to help improve the lives and futures of chil...