Brian M. Stack's School Leadership Blog

My public high school in southern New Hampshire is not unlike many schools in our country that seek to offer a wide-range of college credit-earning opportunities for their students. These schools have come to recognize that providing high school students with an opportunity to experience early college success can positively impact the overall achievement rate of students when they finally get to the college level. For the past two decades or more, the most popular way to provide such opportunities was provided by the College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) program. In the last several years, for a variety of reasons, AP has come under criticism for limitations it places on students and schools. Two years ago, in an exclusive article for Multibriefs , I asked, will changes to AP courses save them from becoming obsolete ? In that article I discussed some of the limitations and shortcomings of the current AP system, things like the superficial and mechanical traditional AP ex...

In quiet New Hampshire, among the beautiful autumn mountain backdrop and the New England seacoast towns, a silent killer known as opioids are making their way from family to family and from community to community, sending shock waves throughout the state and leaving family and friends to question themselves on why they couldn’t (or didn’t) act sooner to saved the lives of their beloved who are succumbing to addiction at an alarming rate. According to a September 2016 report by the New Hampshire Drug Monitoring Initiative , 2013 to 2015 showed a 128.6% increase in the number of drug-related deaths. It is projected that by the end of 2016, there will be close to 500 drug-related deaths, a number that is over four times what it was in 2012. New Hampshire’s story is not unique as drug-related deaths are rising in many parts of our country. Experts attribute much of the drug use, particularly with teens and young adults, to mental health disorders that are going un-diagnosed, untreat...