On February 27-28, 2007 over 200 people came together for a School Community Workshop co-sponsored by the Coleridge, Laurel-Concord, Newcastle and Wynot school districts. These 200 people represented a cross section of all the communities (including students). Faced with a budget shortfall, these communities came together to proactively explore various options for how they might work together to continue maintaining a school in each community while at the same time improve educational experience for everyone involved. It became clear and is well understood that continuing to operate as is currently will not be sustainable. Change is required in order to deliver the kind of educational experience young people need and deserve.

During the workshop participants discussed a wide range of topics. By the end participants identified changes that could be made in ten specific areas that hold the potential to provide a better experience for all. These areas are:

• Technology/Distance and Web Learning
• Finance and Budget Solutions
• Academic Programs
• Extracurricular Activities
• Sharing Resources
• Scheduling
• Revenue Generation
• Involving the Community
• Staff Development
• Communication with the Community

They also explored various administrative models to understand how they might affect each community if they chose to adapt one of them.

Thanks to the students who volunteered to help us make this session happen!

Closing Comments

• I'm very excited about this. I haven't been disappointed in this session. I knew that you were all professionals and this just proved it. We saw a lot of small issues that we can solve with minimal effect on our schools. There are other things that require a lot of change, but we can make that work. If we follow the road of incrementalism I think we'll see the change is best for us. This will be a credit to you for doing it and a credit to our communities. We talked about some things, such as moving our kids around. Our kids will love it, but what about our parents? We need to think of them too.

• Together we can be better.
• This is one of the most interesting and impressive things I've seen. We have so much diversity in our schools. We have independently and separately done our own things, but to bring all of us together and make this happen is very impressive. I'm very proud to be associated with everyone in this room. From my point of view, some of people in our communities wonder if our schools are going to survive. We're not about survival. We're about excellence.
• I'd like to encourage the administration and board members to make these decisions and know that our communities support them.
• I'd like to thank all the people who wrote on the boards and got up to speak so I didn't have to.
• I didn't hear any "me" or "I", it was all about the teams.
• Everybody is working together and being nice because we need each other. I think we've gotten past that. i think a lot of us here are not thinking about our individuals grudges but what's going to happen to us collectively.

Real Time Record
This web site is a record of the event in South Sioux City, NE as it happened - captured in real time and presented here in this web site. The documentation of the session includes text and images that were captured throughout the course of each day of the session and is chronological (in the order that things happened). The text is not a transcription of the event. Rather, it represents the documentor's synthesis of the team reports and group discussions.

This record is intended as a reminder to the participants of the conversations that took place during the conference, as a stimulus for further conversation and it serves as an artifact of the group's work.

For anyone who was not present at the event reading this, you may lose some of the energy and creativity the participants expressed - and some of the ideas may not translate completely without that context. If you have any questions about the content or anything that is represented here please speak to someone that participated in the process or contact Michael Kaufman at InnovationLabs.

Images
Photographs of participants and their work are included throughout the Real Time Record. To view a larger version of a marker board or chart page, click on the thumbnail image. The larger image will open in a new window.

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