A third of this a third of that....

Does anybody else divide the school year into thirds? It is easy for me as we have three semesters and report cards just went out Friday. Next week we have 1/2 days as classroom teachers conduct parent conferences, and then we are off for US Thanksgiving. As a school district it feels like we are all taking one deep breath and saying "Phew". It is catch up time for me. Nobody is starting anything new, and I can look at my to do list and support tickets and clear the decks. Doing my special holiday backups that get archived off site, and generally pausing and taking that look back, and that look ahead.

I will do that look back and look ahead more formally at school, but in a general sense, the year with all of its frustrations feels good so far. Things that have not moved for years are moving ahead under our new IT structure (with lots more things to settle) but at least we are moving. Our new voice and video conferencing has great promise. My small steps that are introducing Web 2.0 tools are out there but not yet finding traction, but that will improve. The things that have not gone well are fixable, and with round one done in the new Progress Report system, we can attack the serious problems there in the next two months. The good thing is that some things went bad, very bad, so that the rumblings that came out my mouth months ago, are now all very clear and upfront in the minds of the people who should have been listening. Even though the last few weeks have been painful and stressful and could have been avoided with better planning and tighter management attention, the fiasco certainly seems to have focused folks attention. While we do not seem to do well at planning and thinking through problems, we are very familiar with crisis management and picking up the pieces after calamities. It seems to be a preferred management style, that I hope we can get away from.