Brian M. Stack's School Leadership Blog

This article appeared in the October Sanborn Voice student newspaper: On Saturday morning, after all of the Homecoming skits and dance routines had been performed, the gym was so quiet that you could hear a pin drop. Family & friends, students, and teachers were waiting anxiously to hear the results of Homecoming. Everyone was wondering which class would win the coveted trophy. Would the seniors pull out their usual victory? Is the competition fixed? Would another class cause a big upset this year? It had been quite an eventful week leading up to the big announcement. Just like last year, the freshmen showed they had quite a bit of school spirit. Dressed in jungle attire, they came with an army to the parade, the most students of any class. The sophomores also showed a significant amount of pride, staying right with the upperclassmen in most of the pep rally competitions. It was the sophomore bird banner that won the top prize. The juniors had a strong showing in most of the...

This is a copy of the speech I gave to the new inductees to the National Honor Society on 10/22/2012: Good Evening. Tonight, I will be speaking to you about leadership, one of the four pillars of the National Honor Society. You all sit on this stage tonight because you are all leaders in your own right. You have proven yourself in your ability to lead by example, be it at Sanborn or elsewhere. As you prepare to be inducted in the National Honor Society this evening, I offer you some thoughts on how I would like to see you use your leadership skills for the betterment of all. I would like to start by reading to you the parable of the five gorillas. Perhaps you have heard this story before in one form or another: The Parable of the Five Gorillas A scientist, according to the story, did an experiment with five gorillas housed in a cage. The scientist hung a bunch of bananas in the cage where the gorillas could not reach them. Then a large tree branch was put up against th...

Last week, Assistant Principal Ann Hadwen and I had a unique opportunity to present at the 2012 Showcase of Model Programs Conference sponsored by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC). NEASC is the organization that accredits public and private high schools all over New England and beyond. If you have been an active part of the Sanborn Regional High School community over the last ten years or more, you can understand what a dramatic turnaround it is for SRHS to be invited as one of only twelve schools to share their work at this conference. Just ten years ago, Sanborn would have been one of the last schools considered for this event. NEASC updates the accreditation status for schools according to a ten year cycle. On their website , NEASC describes the accreditation process in this way: “Accreditation of public secondary schools by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges indicates that the educational institution has conducted a self-evalu...

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From time to time, I write for a national blog on competency-based  grading. You can visit that blog at this link: www.competencyworks.org . Here is the most recent post I made on that blog: My school, Sanborn Regional High School in Kingston, NH, made the shift to a competency-based grading and reporting system about three years ago. For those of you who have recently made the switch, as well as those of you who are planning one in the near future, I can tell you that once you go down the “competency road” it creates a chain reaction of other proposed changes – some you would anticipate, some you would not. For us, we weren’t too far down the path before the question came up of what we should do about class rank. Like most traditional high schools, we have always used a weighted grade point average (G.P.A.) to compute our class rank. We also have always engaged in traditions such as holding a banquet for students who were ranked in the top ten percent of the gradua...