Conference Prepares
Students for Business Careers
Motivational speakers, industry experts, admissions officers and even college professors came together recently at the Broward County Convention Center to provide the 1,200 students enrolled in the District’s Academies of Finance, Hospitality & Tourism and Entrepreneurship with an interesting perspective of the business world. Together with teachers from 17 of Broward County’s high schools and various business partners, they collaborated to increase student knowledge for career preparation in such fields as entrepreneurship, finance, hospitality, information technology and tourism.
Dubbed “Focus on Your Future” and coordinated by the District’s Career, Technical and Adult/Community Education (CTACE) Department, the event was held in cooperation with CitiGroup, DeVry, American Express, the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention and Visitors Bureau, State Farm and Citrix. Breakout, roundtable and panel presentations took place, focusing on topics such as:
• public speaking and persuasion;
• IT careers for women;
• personal and professional growth; and
• transitioning from high school to college.
Exhibitors were also on hand to offer networking and internship placement opportunities. According to Tera Faso, Academy Facilitator for CTACE, “This event allowed students to experience what a real professional conference is all about while practicing their business etiquette skills.”
Ramblewood Elementary
School Honored
Ramblewood Elementary School has received the 2006 Governor’s Sterling Award, the first school in Broward County to be so honored. The Governor’s Sterling Award recognizes organizations and businesses in Florida that have successfully achieved performance superiority within their management and operations. Each winner undergoes an in-depth assessment including an on-site review of the organization’s management structure, systems and organizational performance results. The award was established in Florida in 1992.
Four Broward Schools Make
Newsweek’s Top
High School
List
Deerfield Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Nova and Stoneman Douglas high schools are included on Newsweek magazine’s 2005/06 list of Top 1,000 U.S. Schools. According to Newsweek, the list is calculated using indexes and rankings based on the job a school is doing in preparing average students for college and how committed a school is to helping students take college-level courses. This is the third time Stoneman Douglas has made the list, and the second consecutive year for Deerfield Beach. It is also Fort Lauderdale High’s second consecutive year. Fort Lauderdale High made an impressive jump from 604th last year, to 318th this year – an increase of 286 spots. This is Nova High’s fifth straight appearance on the list. |
One Voice Plan In
Superintendent’s Schools
Spells Successful Collaboration
While we’re still awaiting the results of the state’s annual student assessment testing, at least one shining success can be attributed to the District’s One Voice Plan, as it is implemented in our 32 designated Superintendent’s Schools. The program has been successful in bringing together support staff from various divisions and departments to directly support academic improvement in these schools.
Employees from Human Resource Development, Instructional Staffing, Core Curriculum, Exceptional Student Education (ESE), English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) Research & Evaluation, Strategic Planning and Communications & Media Relations, just to name few, regularly come together at school sites to assist in implementing and assessing the One Voice Plan.
“These employees not only readily offer their support and counsel; they become active members of the team, and we’re at the table at school sites with school-based personnel working the plan,” said Marcia Baldanza, Principal on Task Assignment for the Superintendent’s Schools. “The problem-solving nature of the group enhances the connections and brings everyone together around a single purpose - improving teaching and learning,” she said.
The success of this collaboration has apparently caught the attention of principals at some of the District’s high-performing schools, as they are seeking similar District-wide support for their efforts to maintain and escalate student performance.
“Several of our A and B schools have noticed the gains our schools are making and are asking what we were doing and how they can tap into what is working,” said Baldanza. “They want to incorporate into their programs some of the strategies that seem to be working in the Superintendent’s Schools with typically challenging populations.”
Use of the mini-assessments combined with Broward Achievement Testing (BAT) testing puts teachers and principals in a position to know how individual and groups of students are performing on a regular basis at the end of a taught benchmark. The mini-assessments (4-6 questions per benchmark) are conducted as often as every two weeks, while the BAT is taken by students in the fall and again in the winter.
Regular assessments of individual students help teachers identify student learning deficiencies and successes based on the established benchmarks for the curriculum being taught. This allows teachers to focus their efforts on those students and the specific benchmark areas that require more attention.
The regularly scheduled classroom walkthroughs provide additional “sets of outside eyes and ears” to assist principals in monitoring and evaluating classroom instruction, based on established models of what effective teaching and learning look like and sound like in individual classrooms at individual schools.
“The proof of the pudding in all of this is, of course, the results of the state standardized student tests due out later this school year,” said Baldanza. “But we already know that the collaborative aspects of the One Voice Plan in our Superintendent’s Schools, along with the ability to turn school improvement theory into practice in the classroom, have been a successes.” |
