Brian M. Stack's School Leadership Blog

Dear Parents in the Sanborn Community, As many of you already know, today my administrative staff and I placed the school into a lock down while we worked with local law enforcement on a potential safety concern on our school campus. While I am not in a position to share with you the details of this safety concern, I do want to take a moment to thank all of you for your cooperation during today's incident and share with all of you some information regarding school safety in general. First and foremost, I want all of you to know that our school has a comprehensive crisis management plan that we use anytime we have an issue that could threaten the safety or well-being of people in our building. For security reasons, the details of that plan cannot be published or shared with the public. Our teachers and students have a set of "need to know" procedures that they follow as they are directed to during a crisis. We are very fortunate at our school to have a school district ...

My Uh-Huh Moment Over the summer I spent the day with my math team as we prepared for the implementation of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics into our school. We were working on an intense math problem when I had one of those uh-huh moments – the kind I used to describe to my students when I taught high school math in Andover, Massachusetts. The problem was a simple one to understand, but it had many layers of complexity to it for math teachers: Imagine you are a peasant, and your ruler told you that you could have as much land as you could mark off by walking in one day. What is the most amount of land you could reasonably claim? Give your answer in square miles and be prepared to support and defend your work. Among the questions that came to mind when thinking about how to solve this problem were these: How many hours can a peasant reasonably walk in a day? How fast can a peasant walk? How many breaks will the peasant need to take? Are their hills, m...

I have asked my staff to consider a proposed bell schedule change that would impact students in all four grades beginning with the 2014-2015 school year. I know it may seem odd to be thinking of next year when we have just started this year, but believe it or not the time is just right for this discussion. New bell schedules have potential staffing, curriculum, and budgetary implications that have to be worked out in the fall. The search for a better bell schedule is not a new project at Sanborn. Actually, in the eight years I have worked for the school we have always talked about the need to look at how we structure time for students. We were convinced that our schedule wasn't perfect, but our biggest problem was that until recently, we really didn't know what we needed to change in order to make it better for students. In the 2009-2010 school year I was directed by the School Board to work with a committee of teachers to address this issue. We researched...