A message from the superintendent - Lake Havasu Unified School ...

A message from the superintendentBy Gail MalaySuperintendent, Lake Havasu Unified School District #1Iwould like to begin by saying I havegreat respect for the community ofLake Havasu City. I have lived here since1977 and have witnessed many times ourcommunity doing really great things. As amember ourcommunity for thislong, life has broughtme ups and downs.During one of mydown times, mymother said to me:“The community willnot let you fail.” Shewas absolutely right.The reason I amSuperintendentMalaysharing this is because anything I say inthis column is out of respect, not criticism.Lake Havasu Unified School District hasdone several things to tighten our belts.Last year when one of our administratorsretired, we did not replace him. We redistributedthe workload among theexisting administrators. If any of youknow our administrators personally, youwill know that they are a hard workingteam that contributes many hours toinstructional improvement and themanagement of the school district.No one in the school district got a raiselast year. Administrators and classifiedstaff have been on a salary freeze for twoyears. Even in a challenging economy, it isstill difficult to find highly effective math,science and special education teachers.We have to keep our salaries competitiveor students will not have effectiveteachers. We almost had to open this yearwith two science positions unfilled at thehigh school. Math and science are criticalto our students and our nation’s future.Over the past two years we have cutthirty‐seven teaching positions. We havelost students but our class sizes aregetting larger. It is hard to give individualattention in large classes. Sometimesstudents can get by without the skills theyneed in large classes. This is no fault of theteacher; it is just having too manystudents. I had an opportunity to work inprivate business for three years. Duringthat time we would discuss how manypeople a manager could effectivelymanage and it was significantly less thanour teachers have in their classes.The District has worked very hard onenergy conservation. We had bothUnisource and APS do energy audits. Wehave replaced lighting and asked staff totake home energy demanding devices aswell as not work on Sundays. We arecurrently looking into the possibility ofsolar energy for the high school.Roger Burger, our athletic director, hasworked to cut down on transportationcosts for athletics; one example is, thisspring the regional track meet will be inLake Havasu.I hope this demonstrates your schooldistrict and Governing Board havetightened their belts during this difficulteconomy.We have focused on improving ourcurriculum and the instruction we deliver.Page 1 of 2

A message from the superintendentBy Gail MalaySuperintendent, Lake Havasu Unified School District #1We have been a good school district;however, we know that we must becommitted to continuous improvement.I have always been future oriented. Ourchildren need a more rigorous curriculumin order to be successful in a globaleconomy. A rigorous curriculum needs tostart in Kindergarten and continue untilgraduation. We are finding aroundtwenty‐four percent of our students needsupport to meet these expectations.We have worked hard with ourfunding to put in the neededsupports. We also want tochallenge our top endstudents. Our schoolsquickly found out youcannot earn an excellinglabel unless your topstudents are showinggrowth. Out of nineschools, six are excelling.We take the job of challengingeach of our students veryseriously.How do successful people deal withfailure? They figure out what went wrongand then they redouble their efforts tocorrect the problem. The school district isin the process of doing this.The State still has not settled on a budgetfor this school year. We have had to setaside $771,000 of our soft capital moneyin anticipation the State will ask for thismoney back. Soft capital is the moneyused for books and technology licenses.This generation has to be technically“How do successfulpeople deal withfailure? They figureout what went wrongand then theyredouble their effortsto correct theproblem.”literate in order to be employable. Thebusiness community understands theirfuture workforce is in our schools today;how well we prepare them will affect thebusiness community for years to come.In the coming days, the school district andGoverning Board will have to make someextremely tough decisions. We hope ourcommunity will support these difficultdecisions.We know we have a lot oftalented early retirees in ourcommunity. If you havesome time and would liketo volunteer at your localschool that would begreatly appreciated.It is easy to have opinionsand discuss what the schooldistrict should or should notbe doing during thesechallenging times; I just ask you,educate yourself by visiting one of ourschools and see what is going on. Talkwith the dedicated educators, most ofwhom have devoted their lives toeducating children, before you expressyour opinion.This article was published as a guestcolumn in the November 22, 2009 issue ofToday’s News­Herald, our local newspaper.Page 2 of 2