Brian M. Stack's School Leadership Blog

My seventh grade son Brady informed me the other day that with the change to bus routes this year, he is now on the bus for nearly 45 minutes each way to school. At first, I was surprised. We live in a small town of about 10 square miles, and it would take less than 10 minutes to drive from our house to the school. Yet, he was right. He is one of the first students picked up in the morning, and one of the last to be dropped off in the afternoon. Each day, Brady, like millions of other children from coast to coast, deal with one of the great inefficiencies of our education system - bus transportation routes. Inefficiencies develop as communities try to plan out how to weave buses through neighborhoods and winding roads to pick-up and drop off children at strategic locations for school. This costs money. According to this report , Americans spend more than $17.5 billion dollars to bus more than 25 million children to school. That equates to an average cost of almost $700 annually

In any profession, you have to know the audience of the people you work with, or serve. As educators, what do we really know about our current students who are members of Generation Z? How can we use that as school leaders to promote effective instructional strategies to meet their learning needs? To explore this topic more, we first need a common understanding of what the generations are. According to this ThoughtCo article , they are defined as follows: ●        Generation Z: Born in the Late 80’s to about 2010 ●        Millennials (aka Generation Y): Born between 1980-Late 90’s ●        Generation X: Born between 1965-1979 ●        Baby Boomers: Born between 1946-1964 ●        Silent or Greatest Generation: Born in 1945 or earlier To know how to educate them, we have to understand how a Generation Z’er is different from a Millennial. They represent about 25% of our population. They are a group that was born in the era of smartphones, and those devices have b