News from the Superintendent: November 3, 2008

November 2, 2008

Dear APS Community Member,

I hope everyone got enough candy this weekend. We’re back on the bus for our final tour today, visiting schools in the East Mountains. We have traveled many miles through the district this fall and had the opportunity to show parents, community leaders and elected officials what our schools do. For the most part, I believe they have been impressed. At the very least, a number of people told me how the difference between driving past a school and actually stopping in to visit changed their perception of APS.

I want to thank Brenda Yager and the Board of Education Services staff for putting these tours together. They had to worry about a million mind-numbing details to pull off the tours, but their efforts paid off. It’s worth it to bring the public into public schools because there are so many positives happening every day. People could see that first-hand. Thank you also to the schools that hosted tour groups. Everyone appreciated the warm welcome we received everywhere we went. Students did an outstanding job with their polite, friendly greetings.

From what I have heard, mock elections at schools were successful. Unfortunately, we’re going to have to wait until late today to find out the results from the high schools from the county clerk, but it sounds like students learned a lot and were enthusiastic about the process.

Tomorrow is Election Day for the adults and I encourage you to exercise your civic duty to vote, if you haven’t already done so. Staff members are allowed to take up to two hours’ leave with pay to vote if they didn’t participate in early voting, and supervisors are asked to accommodate those employees.

I promised to share more about the professional training the Board of Education and I received the week before last, so I would like to do that here. We all came back re-invigorated and feeling very positive about what we can accomplish in APS. Running a district the size of this one is a huge responsibility, and I think the eight-point plan we’ve outlined addresses most of its needs.

We looked at five case studies of issues that have come up in other urban districts and considered how we would handle those situations. There’s a line where the board’s responsibility ends and the administration’s begins. It’s a pretty fine line, and it takes a certain amount of negotiating to figure out exactly where that is. The bottom line is, the board is responsible for policy-setting and governance, while the superintendent implements policy and manages (juggles) resources. I feel comfortable that we have now worked together long enough that we can see that line. I hope you can see that it was critical for us to work this out with the help of a facilitator in an environment free of ringing phones and beckoning schedules.

If you have not yet joined us for one of our Celebrate the 8! conversation series sessions, we have one coming up at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at Valley High School.

Have a great week.

Sincerely,

Winston Brooks, Superintendent
Albuquerque Public Schools