001kind of interesting with this because back in our buildings we do have people gather in a room just like this watching a video and wondering what the heck is going on josh it's pretty okay i'm going to take that meaning we are off and running so good morning again everybody um hopefully you have that restful and relaxing weekend hello to everybody out in the buildings as we get ready for this third pd day for our school corporation just a reminder about these professional development days we put in the waiver with the state over a year ago actually the last summer of 2021 to see if they would allow us to use time a little bit differently and measure our school year in minutes instead of days they granted that waiver that's why last year's second
002semester we went ahead and started off with a couple of professional development days we had one in february another one in april and here we go this year we had to find that way over once again and we were granted that waiver once again so we have four pd days this year this one just following uh the monday of labor day we'll have one following the week of thanksgiving we have another lane in february another one in april uh for second semester so looking forward to using those days hopefully you find those valuable as we look at just trying to get our staff to the same place a similar place to move our vision our strategic plan forward is really difficult with the jobs that we have because when you report to work it's a
003very specific thing to do for us and as we try to do that every day we just don't have much time to get together talk learn and get better at our craft and taking care of our kids so hopefully a day like this we have the entire day uh parents have got to sacrifice some things a little bit at home because they're trying to find what to do with their kids at home today or take care of whatever that looks like we found a way to have them at home us here and hopefully have some valuable professional development for you so i'm going to jump right in talking about a couple of things so first of all if you are able to get to our website wondering what all is going on within the school
004corporation uh there is a link to this and takes you to a website that is um available to our staff just to look through see the various things that are happening today and various opportunities that might be there this is the schedule for the day so as we look at it it is pretty open in the sense that we're starting off with this little welcome to begin the day rick weinheimer will follow with the keynote i think most of you here rick back in april yes hands we had a chance to be here here rick awesome he will be here again today to get a little bit different spill on things i will take a quick break and then we're back to departments and buildings and and just a variety of things so for example
005an elementary school have their staff together talking about the building plan that ties back to our strategic plan various departments food service transportation whatever will have some things going on throughout the course of the day and on that note here's just a sample list of things going on around our school corporation today besides this activity and going back to the buildings and having those building meetings so just a long list we have um tech titans my name is by that i have nothing to do with that because i am not a tech titan but it's in our building and so we have a space reserve for them we have a new learning management system they're working on the math resource adoption for both elementary and secondary we have cpi training which is with our special
006education department 504 coordinators book buddies speech etc all those things happen at different times so if you're watching and you see your category or or job placement up there those are some of the times that a lot of people are taking off and doing variety things throughout the course of this day but before i turn things over to rick i do want to spend time a few minutes just talking about our strategic plan i introduced this back in february we'll just put it back in front of you again because everything we try to do as an organization is tied to this strategic plan so we reached out to our community we had over 1900 uh responses to this feedback survey that we gave out we met with 19 different focus groups to try to get
007information from them about what we should be about as a school corporation and from that information we've put this together and so you see that our core beliefs we all can rise with of high expectations we need to believe that that every child can rise to the challenge of high expectations but also everybody we work with can do the same learning is the most effective way of choice flexibility and see relevance we thrive in our physical social and psychological needs are met so think about that for a second in terms of trying to be the best you can be trying to be the best our kids can be helping them be the best they can be how can we can how can we do that if some of those basic needs are not that physical
008social and psychological i'll just throw up one thing here it's one of the reasons i know drivers you're going to probably cringe at this i hate to call off school because so many of our kids need to be here we obviously have to be very careful when the roads get bad and we can't drive and we can't drive we have to stay home if we can get our kids to school they are better off in many cases being with us getting fed we offer three meals a day we have we have breakfast lunch and if kids are staying with us after school they're getting a snack or something again after the day they're getting support we're able to put our eyes on and see them uh talk to them learn about and know how things
009are going when i think back to code and that time that we didn't have kids in our building a lot of stuff was going on we just didn't have any opportunity to see them lay our eyes on them again and help them out and help meet these needs that are so important for them to move on and be successful our community and school district are stronger we partner with one another those partnerships are just so critical we are lucky in this community to have so many great partners we flourish because of the diversity and variability in our community and our democracy and democratic institutions are strengthened by civic minded citizens we need to develop that have the students become maybe more civic minded as we work our vision bcsc is a choice to learn work
010and play we want people to look at our school corporation as not this place they have to go when i was growing up as a kid the public schools over the door that's just where my parents stood that's the school is available the doors are open go we want bcsc to be the choice regardless if that's the case or not there are a lot of other options for parents to send their kids for kids that choose to go to school they can take an online option that doesn't want us we have one now there are hundreds of online options available in the state of indiana there are private schools available for kids they're charter schools available for our kids there are public schools available to them outside our district that they know to without cost
011we want to be the choice for our kids and the parents to come here to to go to school here and then hopefully work and play here as well our mission we develop expert learners by partnering with our community to invest in people so just a quick slide there it summarizes what we believe we are all about as a school corporation and growing and developing our kids and their reminder in terms of the three focus areas that we have as a school corporation to try to accomplish those things excellence and high expectations a healthy safe and welcoming environment and then pathways to success we are fortunate as these school corporations have many different pathways available to our kids i mentioned the virtual one how many people do we have a virtual pathway that our kids
012can participate in and we have a few hundred kids in that that are only in a virtual school now they do come into that building we have a building where they come into that building with teachers and so forth but they are taking their schooling in a virtual way uh we have a spanish immersion pathway beginning in pre-k so we have four-year-olds spending about 80 of their days speaking learning spanish and then going through our right now in fourth grade to click to creek elementary school just a lot of different options we make available to our kids with excellence in high expectations they qualify for that bcsc prepares expert learners in an equitable system of high quality curriculum resources and educators that equitable system means we're trying to make sure that every person has the
013opportunity to access the programs he offers the opportunity that we have the school corporation the strategic objectives titled that students will have equitable access to learn bureau administration success and staff will be able to remove barriers and provide options for student learning through udl in terms of programs and methods already in place that we're working on to try to accomplish those two things we are working to improve equity and academic achievement making sure that across the board kids have access they're performing well we're trying to increase our capacity through our udl framework and we're implementing a systemic vehicle celebrations of student success i don't think we can celebrate kids often enough you look at the newspapers all the time there are opportunities for kids to sit down and sign that they're going off to school
014to play baseball a basketball or something like that and it's a celebration that's really cool what about kids that are going into other crafts you just got a welding certificate out in the world of work and make a few thousand dollars quite a few thousand dollars right after graduation because they just achieved that welding certificate maybe we need to have a signing ceremony for that student too in terms of attracting retaining high quality staff that's the second part of high expectations we have to have high quality staff and our positions again to take care of our students this is an example of the high quality staff we put together and we know there are so many pieces to that what will attract you to come here first and work for us and then what will
015convince you to stay so recruit and retain are two very important pieces for that and so students and community members will view your career as attainable and fulfilling staff will feel a sense of belonging among their colleagues they'll be engaged and have a sense of self-efficacy in their work in terms of what we're trying to do to figure that out and make sure it's working we're implementing an educator development and recruitment program right now we're paying people to go to school and become teachers who come back to work for us we're conducting annual research based employee engagement survey i think all of you had a chance to to fill that out before we did it once a year through copen twice last year we'll do it twice again this year and that time frame is
016coming up so you will have again an opportunity to provide us feedback what we're doing right hopefully a few things and what we're not doing so right and give us that feedback so we can continue to learn and grow as an and then we organization celebrations for students we also have to implement systemic celebrations of staff success and i've seen some examples of that from a certified and classified standpoint i know where we have some support staff awards and recognitions uh employees of other things going on as well as teachers of the year that we started put together and working with now in terms of second focus area healthy safe and welcoming environments it is one thing to talk about high expectations wanting everybody to achieve at their highest level and going back to how
017can we begin to do that if we don't provide a healthy safe and welcoming environment we don't meet the needs of our our people our staffers our kids when they come through our door and work or learn with us if we can't beat those needs we can't have anybody be high expectations so we're looking to provide that those environments in which every learner has positive relationships and access to resources needed to thrive positive relationships are key how do any of us go through the day go through a week without having some form of a positive relationship we don't we're struggling that the positive relationship whether it's with a spouse significant other are our kids the people that you work with the students you have in front of you those don't exist it's really hard again
018to be as successful as we want you to be from the meeting those needs the different strategic objectives that we're looking at are students and staff who have ethical access to necessary resources so we have resources out there we're making them available to you whatever that need might be is it equitable meaning everybody has similar access and opportunity to access those resources staffing you confident in their understanding of equity cultural responsiveness and sustainability i'm not going to get into a definition right now but the reason that's in there about confidence or understanding of that there is a heck of a debate that ranges on about equity versus equality equity versus equality and maybe you're involved in that debate yourself we have settled the word equity because we're looking at everyone having access to opportunity regardless
019of the circumstances they've done themselves how can we help renew barriers to make sure that access is truly there stat student staff of knowledge mindset and skills needed to foster trusting relationships going back to the need for positive relationships programs and methods we're going to increase staff capacity for implement pbis increase our capacity to provide comprehensive social emotional and counseling services across the board students and staff and develop a staff capacity to incorporate cultural responsiveness and cultural sustainability welcoming safe and inclusive facilities we're doing a lot of work on our facilities we've done a lot of things with the various equipment that we've had um but we'll work and learn in those kinds of environments student learning spaces reflect the diverse book for views of the community and community members will have access to our
020facilities as resources we would love to see our schools that are taxpayer funded become centers for the neighborhoods in which they serve that they are used more than just the hours they're already open those are expensive buildings a lot of taxpayer dollars our taxpayers dollars go into those and they're open whatever those number of hours are 24 hours a day how can we continue to expand access because that helps with that those provision net prevention resources um and then uh peter was one of that's the last one talking about programs about this implementing student health clinics that's a way to make sure that our our schools are open maybe a little bit more and provide health services to people those communities and upgrade our elementary schools right now an example of that is parkside elementary
021school going through a multi-million dollar renovation of that school to make sure that it is up to speed with meeting the needs of its learners and then we will take the learning from that and put it out for all the elementary schools in our district over the next several years the last one pathways to success we do again believe it we're very important to have a lot of athletes available to our kids we want to make sure those pathways are accessible so if we think about the pathways that exist for our kids do all students have ethical access to them can i get into that program can you give me that program can you give me that pathway what is the access truth that's available to it and so as we work on that we
022need to evaluate whether or not we have equal access and we want to make sure our students families and community understand the pathways that exist for us so i mentioned making sure we have a system to evaluate the existing pathways we have to develop that system we have that in place we'll be working on evaluating each pathway we have to make sure it's truly ethical and accessible and we're looking at developing a marketing campaign between four members of our pathways an example that hardening campaign with what we're doing at parkside right now we've put together a marketing campaign so the entire community knows exactly how we're spending the taxpayer dollars they've provided us to fulfill that motivation lastly the using partnerships to establish additional pathways we need to learn from our community what pathways are
023still needed so working with the community understand as we work with our kids we develop them for the world of work in this community what are those things that they're still looking for and needing and we would have to engage the community and identify those additional needs the last slide in the north substitution plan so i'm very quick the best my fans are rick there's a lot more entertaining than i am um but in regards to our strategic plan importantly just put it in front of you because it is so important to us continue to grow and move forward together we launched the tagway tag line that was established for um together we wanted to see that a lot in terms of social media hashtag together we learned we do believe that working together helping
024each other we're going to be a lot better in serving the needs of our kids so without further ado rick disappear like a long time ago so i'm really hoping to steal this building somewhere rick weinheimer has been a long time educator for ucsc a wonderful teacher and coach uh state champions across country coaches boys and girls had a chance to speak to us back in april and it was it was such a great presentation it was so engaging that we want to bring it back to the entire school corporation because what we're looking to do is have people that get engaged everybody we have 2 000 staff members and we all come in and do different jobs every day and so what might be interesting to me may or may not be interesting to
025somebody else we think rick can serve that need for us and provide us something and talk about your why what is it that that allows you to get up in the morning and start the day in a good way and get out here and do the things the best way possible what is your why we're going to jump into that rick weinheimer now please fellow plus good morning i think i think we're still sorting some things out um but i brought a snack so i'm good and if it goes 15 minutes i don't know how many are in one of these boxes but i suppose we can start passing it up and down or i could just throw them like convey does anybody uh look at this box and think of the movie theater okay
026that's how i am i love dots and and we went to movies i was little and you could get one box you look at that big glass container they've got all those candies there i always picked up but i've only seen them in movie theaters and now there's amazon and so everything can happen as we as we hope thank you oh good morning and i'm thankful that i love docs because what an incredible questions it is look at the title we're talking about dots but i want to start with this slide and those of you that were here with me in april you already know this but i'm going to say it again because we've got people all over watching this but i'm going to use the word educator often in this presentation and my
027definition of educator is every single person in this room and every single person that's watching this streaming this some way every person hired by bcsc is an educator it's all about how all these different pieces work together to educate kids and so those of you that are here in april heard me say that i mean that again i'm reminding you of that those of you that are watching at home on like netflix or hulu or whatever we're on now or mount healthy hbo or taylorsville tv or whatever however they access that just want to remind you that every single person that we're talking to and listening and sorting things out with today are educators and so let's move on with that and and back to the fact that i love dots but there are two
028at least two things that i love more than that and that's my granddaughters grace and cecilia and the other day we were at their house their home and uh one of them said to me hey pop let's play twister and i thought you know it might be as hard as it is to believe it might be a few years since i played a really competitive game of twister but i thought okay i got this i still got the moves i can make this happen i'm good with this this is going to happen and so i said absolutely i can play let's go and my wife amy was on the couch and i could hear her eye roll behind me but no i thought we can do this because what's it take playing twister just takes
029a little patience and a little flexibility and i have both those things or did when i made this decision and so that's how we started out and you know i got right foot red and left foot green and cece's got her set and grace has her hands down and notice that everybody's smiling because that's how twister is it just makes everybody happy all the time and then as we got started and got going and got playing i was thinking a lot about this presentation coming up and i thought you know for an educator all day every day is a game of twister and i hope your your brain's already processing that about what you do when you come to be an educator in bcsc all day every day is like a game of twister and
030i thought well isn't that nice that's i'm able to send you the message that your job is simple and easy all day every day and then we got we started spinning i'd kind of forgotten this existed we started spinning this contraption and it took those happy faces and kind of totally changed what the whole thing was like as we went and i started thinking about how important it is that we recognize that we connect the dots every day and by that i mean okay where do these dots of our work come from well to be kind to us some committees of politicians got together and put together and told us what all the dots are and where they are and told us to connect them and told us it would be simple and easy and
031so our lives really are about every day working with every single kid and helping to connect those dots while at the same time of course we're connecting the dots of our own lives and so our life is about connecting the dots and it's playing twister and it's happy and simple and i have a plan and every day i've got a plan so it's going to work out but unfortunately as we get on the on the board the plan gets complicated by this spinner thing and this spitter says left foot right foot left hand right hand but i kind of put together a list of the things that really pop up on our spinners every day so if one of these sounds familiar to you go ahead and raise your hand or wave at me or
032something like that as we go i will not call on you i'll just they'll just be goodly connected but this is what the spinner of twister does for educators you spin and it doesn't land a hand or a foot it says you're due at the car line at the exact same time as your case conference and all of a sudden you're a little more twisted than you were before and it spins again and it says when you just finish replying to a parent email that same parent sends a whole longer email and you spin again and it says your student leslie vomits in the middle of your classroom and you spin again and it says your student andy walks in it and you spin again and the copier jams and eats your original copy and
033you spin again and it says your student katie has a tantrum in the lunch line because her friend lori got one extra tater tot and all of a sudden which seemed simple and exact and direct all of a sudden we're bent and we're twisted and we're challenged and the feet made sense but now your hand is here this hand is here this one's terribly moving and that's what the game of twister is like for an educator it starts out simple and easy but before you know it it changes before you know it's more pushing and chopping and bumping involved in this whole game than he originally planned because when you spin again it says you bring soup for lunch but a fork instead of a spoon and you spin again and it says your student
034rick opens a bag of peanuts and the entire school goes on allergy alert and you spin again and it says oh today leslie vomits in the lunch line and you spin again and it says your elbow bumps your special grande latte frappuccino and it spills on rachel who's sitting in the front row and you spin again if you're a high school teacher and you realize that in this last class period seven students phones have rung during class and you spend one more time and your student kelly eats an eraser and that's what twister really looks like and now all of a sudden your arm is bent at an unattractive angle and your legs are crossed over and you're trying to hunch your back and what started out as a simple cane has kind of twisted
035and shaped and shaken us out of our comfort zone and and there we are what was a simple game becomes a competitively spirited king thank you for crazy you happened to fall on the couch after i shoved her but it spins again it spins one last time and you've got all these things and there's a little wesley again who vomited the bus on the way home and then your real life intrudes when your veterinarian calls and said your cat needs braces and then this is the day to mow the lawn and they happen to be mowing the path that's right outside your classroom window and it's nap time either for the students or for the teacher or both and it spins again and you realize man i'm really hungry but then you realize your lunch
036doesn't start to 1 45 and it spins again especially for the elementary people and it's halloween or worse is the day after halloween it spins again when the main office calls and this is your daily phone call you forgot to take attendance and it spins again when you have the perfect classroom lesson going everything's clicking and then fire drill and then of course it clicks on this last one when at that moment your supervisor comes in to do your evaluation and so that's what's happened to us and we think of you know we're ready to play twister we had planned any it's like what has happened to that and then all of a sudden we have to have plan b and plan c and plan d and that's just the way the life of the
037educator goes we start out with a plan twister starts out really simple we had the smiles and it's like okay how has it become that what has happened to make that turn out that way and so i thought a lot about that during this during this game of twister that happened and as you can see pop one i invoked the pop rule and it became very physical and so i had a chance to win that but i appreciate all that you go through on a daily basis we almost always start out with a plan and then things happen and things happen and things happen that really change that so all of a sudden we're twisted in what we are planned and had to do as we go so i made this slide being an educator
038is not easy and i want to say clearly i've made a lot of presentations at a lot of slides i think this is the most obvious thing i've ever put on a slide i hope you know there was no reason to put that there we all know that being an educator is not easy i just wanted to be sure to say it out loud that we acknowledged that sometimes i had a little fear as dr roberts invited me to to do this that people listening were going to think i had some secret ways this job would be as hard as it is and this slide is for me to let you know that i don't but i want to talk about this difficult thing that we do and why we continue to do it in
039the face of being difficult i remember many times when i was a young teacher and i'd had a student one year that i was really struggling with or a parent one year i was really struggling with and i think okay can't wait till next year because they will have moved on and one of the biggest lessons i learned in the whole game of educator twister somebody else will come in and take their place next year there will be another student just like that or another parent just like that and so rather than waiting for it to be over i need to learn how to do my best in working with that situation and so as a reminder yes i wanted to say this that what you do is not easy and there's really no way
040for us to make it easy so let's do spend some time kind of thinking through what's its value what's the why behind what i do how do i connect the dots in the face of all these things that i had written down to change your your game of twister and so one of the things we wanted to do is to do our best in the situation where we're trying to make this work on seven streaming networks and two thousand people all over rochelle county is to give you a little bit of time to process some of the things we've talked about and and we're going to make this do it's a game of twister we don't know that it'll work exactly the way we play it we're going to do our best but what we'd
041like to do is take that beginning ideas the fact that um we've all been trained either before we got this job or once we got in this job but there have been a whole bunch of twister things that have happened since you've had that job that you weren't trained about that you had to learn from on the spot and i know there are probably some teachers out there listening who have been employed as teachers like five weeks but there are still some things they've already learned and there's some people here who have been working as an educator in all these different positions for 35 years and there are lots of things that that you could have learned and so as we i'm looking josh is back up there in the booth so as we look
042to this first short breakout session we thought we'd take about seven minutes now about seven minutes later on to kind of think through some of those ideas that we have from the beginning and uh and i will admit dr roberts dr hack mr jensen dr bozeman they said let's just play twister for seven minutes but i haven't been able to walk very well since i played that with my granddaughters and so i had to come up with a different idea so for seven minutes we're going to give you wherever you are dr bozeman has a plan for this group that i'm looking at in person they're facilitators at all the different places where we're streaming this to have a plan of some kind we're going to take about seven minutes and i'd like to just
043think about what are our first thoughts on this what is one valuable thing you've learned as an educator that you are not taught before taking this job this is valuable knowledge this is powerful stuff so i'm going to give you a chance to think that through as we talk about it but that's the question i'm sending out do you hear my friends in the auditorium but to everybody that's watching in some other venue what's one valuable thing that you've learned since you've been on this job as an educator that you weren't taught beforehand what's the practical knowledge that you have and so josh i don't know what you're doing with the other people around the world we here are going to see if i can make this work that was a lot we are not
044going to do that i'm going to look at my watch so we're going to take seven minutes dr bozeman has a plan am i right here never nobody answered that do this right there's okay we'll talk with their departments great great so we have people stationed josh if you're ready to kind of shut us down with the whole world we'll come back in seven minutes on my watch so thank you for however that worked and for the facilitators that are are making that happen there's so many different venues and so we you think that i had a good conversation with uh with the south side lunch line people because they've seen grace and cece come through there and that was just an awesome connection um and and they saw through this twister game we had
045because they've never seen grayson cece brown like that and i told him we had to stage it for the for the pictures they really had to run with that uh that process and then i'd like to go into this part of it because i'm back to the slide about how you know you work hard every day it's just it's hard work it's valuable work but it's hard work and sometimes you know you're being asked to connect the dots by a lot of different people and you're knowing that within your brain it's important to connect the dots for yourself you recognize that about taking ownership of your job but sometimes it's hard to see that that's connected and sometimes you think maybe the dots haven't connected at all so let's spend just a couple minutes talking
046about okay what do we do when we just don't see the the uh results of the dots connecting that we would like to have in what we do and so some thoughts about when the dots don't connect or when we don't see them connecting quick story in june of 1974 north central high school in indianapolis was having his graduation ceremony and i walked up to the microphone to speak to my classmates now we have to do a quick timeout because i need to show this slide for those of you that don't know me poop i was not the valedictorian and so i know the people who know me when i said i stepped up the microphone they never thought for a second oh it's because he's not victorian they thought it was some prank and
047that's the people know me so those of you that don't know me i want to clearly say when i tell this story that was not like a humble brag oh i was i was not the valedictorian i think some of them my teachers in the audience moved when i stepped up to the microphone but it was 1974 i was 18 years old it was the graduating class and they gave me a little bit of freedom to say whatever i wanted to to my classmates and so part of what i said was what's known as most places is the irish blessing so part of what i said was this may the road rise to meet you may the wind be always at your back may the sun shine warm upon your face the rains fall soft
048upon your fields and until we meet again may god hold you in the palm of his hand and i thought that was a beautiful bend and i still think it's beautiful but looking back the 18 year old of me was really excited to share with his classmates i hope the world works for us and toward us i hope we live life that's easy i hope that life makes things uh easy for us as we move ahead i hope everything comes together for us and that was the 18 year old me from that perspective looking ahead at what i thought life should be and the 66 year old me now looks back on that and realizes that is not really the wish that i had for me and my classmates because i've realized since then that
049it's not the easy moments in life that lead us to growth it's the difficult challenging moments in life that lead us to growth and if life were really all about soft winds and gentle sunshine we'd never grow because we grow from the challenges and so as i'm thinking about connecting that to twister i want to share that with you when the game is soft and easy at first there's nothing to it but when you get twisted out of shape in your job and when you get challenged and twisted out of shape in your life outside your job how do we put that in perspective well i'd like to offer that we put it in perspective because those are our moments facing challenges are our greatest opportunity for growth everything that was on the back of
050this spinner all those things that i read some we laughed at some we identified with some we shook our head especially those of you who know exactly what i'm talking about when a student gets sick in your building you got to make it better that's what you do and that's not why you signed up for this job you do it because that's what you do for the building so those of you that were thinking about those things as we went through you know we're thinking about can we think about the challenges to our day in terms of opportunities for growth as we're twisted and bent and challenges happen how do those become opportunities for growth one of the things that i've heard since i was 18 was that the qualities we really want are impossible
051to develop unless they're challenged outside of our comfort zone one that i continually work on is patience i just want to be a more patient person but if everything goes my way if the winds are always soft on my face and the sunshine it's warm up on my field i don't get any more patient for me to become more patient i've got to stand in long lines i've got to try to contact the cable company and be put on hold in situations like that those challenges that's the only way i can become patient because we can't become more patient unless we're put into situations where we're tempted to be impatient and similarly we can't become stronger unless we're put into situations where we're tempted to be weak and on the same lines we can't become
052braver unless we're put into situations where we're tempted to be fearful and because we need those challenging situations can we flip it around we'll never avoid them i've got a slide that says what you do is not easy we're not going to avoid them instead can we embrace them and what we become by and with those opportunities i had a great mentor his name was phil when i was a young teacher and coach and he always said you know what there's going to be a crisis every day and you've got two ways to face it you can spend all day trying to hide from that crisis or you can say bring it on it's gonna happen today anyway let's have it in the morning let me work through it and we'll go from there and
053you know over the decades i would say that there's going to be a crisis today is an understatement in all of your work and all of our work there are going to be multiple crises a day but those are our opportunities for growth we will never hide from them i face the fact that this job is difficult but it's valuable and i'm proud that i do it and so i'm going to take on those challenges so thinking about that in terms of as we move forward how do we look at the times we're all twisted out of shape sometimes we just have to take a deep breath and go okay this is my growth opportunity i'm doing what i need to do to the best of my ability and so let's get into our next
054little piece of conversation and see how this works the second time i'd love for you to think about what challenges do you anticipate knowing your job as you do what challenges do you anticipate and how can you use those challenges what can you get from each one to help yourself grow in your role as educated i'll say that again what challenges do we now anticipate in our jobs in our lives and our work with kids and how can we think ahead plan ahead to use those in a way that helps us continue to grow as educators we're going to try seven minutes again how we doing josh can we send it out to the real world dr bozeman's ready facilitators are getting ready in this setting that'd be great i don't know that our our
055seven minute kind of shows this time but i'm gonna do in my watch so let's try this second section for seven minutes i okay we can finish up that seven minutes again facilitators thank you and thank you for all of you that are taking ideas and putting them in the process thinking about how to use them um it's funny because we don't know how things are going at north high school or north side central you know schmidt smith all those places but i will brag on this place there was a lot of laughter and there was even clapping during that seven minute breakout session i don't know why but it doesn't matter and it mostly came from that rowdy section back there and i don't know why but it doesn't matter anytime you can have
056a session where there's laughter and some clapping and some talking and sharing it's worth it to me so hope it's going well in all those other places and thank you for what you're doing as educators i found a video clip of steve jobs when he gave the commencement speech at stanford university in 2005 and i've watched it probably 20 times because it's really inspiring to me and in that clip it's a longer speech but in that clip there's about a two and a half minute section where what he says just brilliantly attaches to exactly what we're talking about today and that's what steve jobs looked like when he gave the commencement speech i'm telling you that because it's really interesting how twister moments show up in our lives and this morning at about 5 45
057when i was reviewing this slideshow one more time and i clicked on this brilliant thing that steve jobs is going to say to support what i've been saying i realized i had the wrong clip and i did that on purpose just to show you that the twister moments happened to all of us i tried to put a positive spin on that challenge i went out to amy who was drinking her coffee i said okay i got a twister moment i've got the wrong clip and it's too late for me to fix it and she's paused for a second she kind of worked her ear and she said i think you've got another twister moment coming i think i hear the dog throwing up in my closet this morning so there you go i caused those
058things on purpose let me just tell you what steve jobs would have said to you if i had the clip and they had done that uh the way i intended but steve jobs at this point was very very sick with cancer and he was talking about panicking the dots in life and this is what he said that i want to share with you he said in life you can't connect the dots looking forward you can only connect the dots of your life when you're looking back he said that's why you have to have faith in what you're doing and that you're doing the right thing his was a quick story about he dropped out of college because he wasn't doing well but he didn't leave the university because he loved to learn and so he
059slept on friends couches he wasn't allowed to be there he audited classes and one class that he audited was calligraphy you know the world's fanciest writing and he said in that calligraphy class he learned more about styles what became fonts serifs spacing between words and he said that class once he dropped out actually was a huge part of making computers so user-friendly in terms of what we looked at and he said if i never dropped out i never would have taken that course it wasn't in my major and it made a big effect so his point was we don't necessarily see those dots connecting looking forward but to see them what we see them looking back so thank you to steve jobs for for that and just a reminder that when you're not seeing them
060sometimes it's just about keeping the faith it's about searching in your head and your heart and your spirit that i'm doing the right thing for these kids every day and knowing trusting that those dots will connect as we all work together to make that process in every group i've ever spoken to there were always a few yawns in the morning because i think all of us no matter what we do we wake up sleepy we wake up tired but i will say that if we wake up sleepy but know what we're doing that day is valuable what we're doing that day is important it's just a little easier to get out of bed than if you don't and i know we think that know that i hope you know that i remember that as educators
061what we're doing every day is valuable and important and so i'd like to close with two stories about connecting the dots if you just bear with me on that and one is about a student that i had a number of years ago and his name was scott and i had him in sophomore english when he was a sophomore obviously but not so obviously i had him in sophomore english when he was a junior because he maybe hadn't passed it the first time that we were together but i liked him he was a great english student english wasn't his connection but he was easy going and he was funny and we'd laugh sometimes and we had a pretty good relationship i'm not sure if he passed it the second time either eventually he was out of
062high school again i don't know if he graduated or if he just moved on and i didn't see him for 20 10 or 12 years until one day i took my car in to have the oil changed and there was scott you know mr weiner how you doing he's working this oil change place that i went said scott doing great he said i i got you covered and so he started working on the engine and then he kind of came in quicker than i expected he said ooh mr weinheimer your serpentine belt here is shredded we're gonna have to we have to replace that and i was mad because a week earlier that belt had shredded and i just this was the replacement belt and i didn't know what was wrong they shouldn't be shredding
063in a week and so i was kind of growling about it he said i i'll take care of it i'll do that i'll do the oil and i'll get that belt fixed for you and he did that and he and he shut the hood and he came back and he said you wouldn't believe this but when i was changing the belt i noticed that just beside the belt was a screw and that screw was about a half a turn from being fully screwed in and he said that screw was catching on your belt that was what shredding these belts and so i just went ahead and i turned that screw all the way he goes you're good from now on and i thought man what an awesome moment i didn't teach him how to know
064that i didn't teach you how to notice that i didn't teach him how to pay attention to detail but some educators somewhere did and he saved me a lot of headache and heartache and those dots have all connected in what he's doing i was the benefit of it but wherever you are out there whoever worked with god thank you for connecting those dots and you may never see that you connected them with him but i got to see it and that was a neat moment i really really appreciated that and i'd like to share one more with you and this one is really fresh and so it's a little bit difficult for me to share but i think it's important i really want to share this with you a couple of months ago my mother
065died and um my father has passed away a number of years before that and so this was like the end of all the material possessions that people accumulate in other words when we cleaned her apartment this was it okay this stuff was going away and and that included some stuff that was really sentimental to me you know the dining room table that we've used ever since i was a little boy was going away uh the recliner that my dad used to sit in the coffee table they brought back from europe all these things were going away and so i was really nostalgic and sad as i sat in her apartment the day that the auction uh furniture people came and they came in the door they were real real good and polite three of them
066were probably in their 20s one of them a man was much closer to my age than he was to their age and they started working and they carried stuff out and there was a lot of it because my mom could accumulate stuff and uh and they took it out to the truck and come back in and carry in about the third time back in uh the older man that was working for them looked at my mom's apartment door where her name plate was and he just stopped for a minute he got kind of a perplexed look on his face and then he walked into where i was sitting and he said was gene weinheimer your mom i said yes he said gene weinheimer the social worker who works for work for children's bureau in indianapolis
067and i said yes and then there was this pause and he said she was my social worker she was my caseworker and for my sister your mom saved our lives and he went on to tell me that his home situation was unlivable and they've been assigned a children's bureau and my mom was their caseworker he said she found me a foster home she found my sister a foster home she would come pick me up at school once a week and we had this little routine where i'd get in the car and she would say hey you need anything and i'd say oh i'm sure i'm hungry and she takes me to get a big mac every week he said your mom drove me to michigan city and went in with me when i went to
068visit my father in prison and the rest of the day he told all his co-workers about this gene and he told the people that walked by the apartment my mom's friends about miss gene and what she meant in his life and at one point he said to me my sister and i have always wondered what happened to miss gene and now i know and they finished and everything was gone i was sitting in this empty place on a little you know like soccer chair little canvas chair because i had something to sit on and as they were leaving he stopped by and he had a little slip of paper and he got out his pencil and he wrote something down and he handed it to me and it was his name and his phone number
069and he said miss jean always made us feel like we were her favorite children to work with in the world he said i feel like you and i are family and he left but just outside the door he came back in and he had his phone and he said can i ask you a question could i ask you where your mom was buried he said my sister just sent me a text so you see his head yeah my sister just showed me a text she wants to put flowers on your mom's grave i thought about that for a long time you know that event had happened originally in the 1980s my mom has passed away now but you know what she connected some dots and those people's lives have changed he told me all about
070his current job he told me where his sister works he was so proud of what they've become he loved his foster family and all those docs connected and she'll i don't know never know that but man i know that and for me that was a real real special blessed moment to get that and so i wanted to kind of close with that to share with you there's a bunch of that that you do every day you are connecting dots every day because what you do every interaction you have with children is valuable and important and makes a difference it can be long lasting and i'm talking about 30 or 40 years from now and you may never you may never get a chance to see that you may never scott may not change your oil
071or you may not run into your you know your social worker from before but what you're doing is a valuable piece of all that and the most important thing i want to share with you this morning is that just a reminder that what you're doing is really valuable and even the days you don't see the dots connecting i want you to know they are connected do these things with your head and your heart and your spirit and do them in great faith because you connecting the dots is making a difference in people's lives every day i am really thankful to get to your time this morning thank you [Applause] [Music] rick thank you so much for being here with us today uh you are a gift to us have been for many years in our
072school corporation to continue to do that um [Applause] [Music] we have the screen up i have something on my computer but nothing else all right i'm just going to go from here um we're going to to wrap up a lot of things left for the rest of the pd day this is a break to about 9 35 i think dr bozeman will come up here in a second and help delegate tasks and responsibilities as we leave the auditorium around the district again you'll be staying in your buildings for the most part and getting to building specific things from 9 35 to 10 45 is building and program specific work uh that is tied to the strategic plan that i outlined earlier we then have a 10 45 to 12 30 and a prep lunch time
073period for much of the corporation and then from 12 30 or 3 as a continuation of that school building and specific needs again tied in to the strategic plan um additionally as we put up on the slide earlier there are many that have a variety of other tasks and responsibilities today things to go to sessions to go to so hopefully you know that scheduling but i'm going to bring dr bozeman up for this group and back in the buildings you should be able to work with your buildings and take your break and move on from there thank you [Applause] you