October 17, 2008

The temperature is finally matching the color of the leaves and it feels like fall! Hope you’re enjoying this beautiful time of year.

Our District’s liability insurance is not one of the most exciting topics I deal with in my position, but this past Monday I did have the opportunity to have some fun with representatives from our insurance providers, Hill & Hamilton Insurance here in Bellefontaine and The Cincinnati Insurance Company. Five folks from Hill & Hamilton and two from Cincinnati Insurance spent an entire day touring a sampling of our Satellite and Main Campus programs to get a feel for what it is our students do. As you can imagine, they were amazed with the variety of programs we offer, the variety of school and community sites for our programs, and the wealth of educational opportunities our students are exposed to. Of course, they appreciated the culture of safety all of you have established in your labs, and they loved the enthusiasm! As one put it,

Thank you so much for the wonderful tour! We are so proud of your programs and of your students’ accomplishments! We saw the pride in both the teachers and students and that says a whole lot!

I love giving these tours. Thanks for all you do to make showing off our students, programs, and facilities such a pleasure!

Wednesday evening we held our fall Work Session with the Board to review our 5-year forecast and our district strategic plan. It always makes for good discussion as we look forward and take our best shot at predicting where we might be financially over the next five years. As Eric Adelsberger always says, these forecasts are “fiction” because it’s virtually impossible to anticipate all the forces that impact our financial picture. But it’s also exciting to estimate where we think we’re headed based on how far we’ve come! I think it would be fun to take our 5-year forecast from five years ago and see if this past year looks anything like what we predicted. I doubt it! On the positive side, we’ve grown more than we could have anticipated both on our Main Campus and particularly in our Satellite programs (since we were at zero then!) On the not-so-positive side, we’ve had some unpleasant surprises with funding cuts at the state level. But overall, we’re in solid financial shape and have every reason to believe we’ll continue to be so. Thank you for continuing to be good stewards of our public resources!

Thanks to all of you who attended our District In-Service this morning. We appreciate your suggestions and questions you raised during the security drill debrief. The Administrative Team and I were very pleased with the way the security drill went and we learned some things as well. We’ll just keep getting better at this! And as I said, I’d rather learn lessons during a drill than during the real thing.

I also appreciate your warm welcome for the family of Roy Angle. As we made the presentation, I thought about the many unsung heroes who must have worked behind the scenes to make Ohio Hi-Point “JVS” a reality. I didn’t realize until talking with Robert about Roy’s influence that the initial operating levy (which supports us to this day) didn’t pass the first time! So everyone involved worked double hard to put the issue back on the ballot to secure the funding for our school. Vocational schools were a new concept at that time, and I suppose the communities we serve had to warm up to the idea a bit. But I think you’d be hard pressed to find a member of our communities today who wouldn’t agree it was a great thing for our region! We hear it from parents, students, and employers all the time. (One great example is Steve Austin who spoke at our H.S. staff meeting in support of United Way this week. He went out of his way to thank us for the great job we do in preparing students for the automotive field!)

As I promised last week, at the right are the photos I took during the statewide Communicators Meeting here at OHP and the Culinary students preparing lunch for them. I think I’ve got this Blackberry transfer-of-photos thing down!

Have a great weekend and enjoy this beautiful fall weather. Remember--snowflakes are coming!