Brian M. Stack's School Leadership Blog

This article appeared in the November issue of the Sanborn Voice , the student newspaper for SRHS. One of my personal goals this year as your principal is to do a better job communicating all of the positive things that our school is engaged in to the community. This need for increased communication comes a recommendation that a group of students, staff, and parents made last spring after reviewing the data from the culture survey that most of you took last fall. Undertaking this goal has taught me quite a bit about the latest effective marketing strategies that companies and political organizations use to get their word out. I almost wish I had actually taken some more business courses when I was in college because they would have come in handy for this project. I have come to realize that as a building principal, communication can either be my best friend or my worst enemy. People need information in order to make decisions or form opinions about the school as it relates...

“The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.” This ancient Chinese proverb sums up my view on why just three years ago it was time for my school, Sanborn Regional High School in Kingston, NH,   to stop “talking” about making the change to a competency-based grading and reporting model and why it was time to start “doing it.” With a leap of faith in support of the latest educational research from authors Colby, Marzano, O’Connor, Reeves, Stiggins, and Wormeli, our school community “jumped into the deep end of the pool” of high school redesign. Looking back on this now, I firmly believe it was the best thing we could have done. While we haven’t solved all of our issues yet, I think we are well on our way toward realizing our vision of “learning for all, whatever it takes.” As you might expect, our leap of faith into the deep end of the pool didn’t happen without some advanced strategic planning and groundwork. In the years leading up t...