School Highlights For The Week Of Nov. 29 Through Dec. 5

Woonsocket High School has many innovative alternative programs in place to help students succeed and graduate.  One that is very special to me is the Feinstein e-Learning Academy where the motto is "The alternative pathway to graduation".  If you look closely you can see the motto on wall of the computer lab.

I am particularly fond of this program because in my previous position, I organized a site visit in Massachusetts to look at a virtual learning model with some of my Northern Rhode Island Collaborative (NRIC) colleagues.  Although I was not able to implement virtual learning in my previous district, I was pleased that Michael Ferry, Coordinator of Instructional Technology in Woonsocket, was the first to start a hybrid program in the state that has continued to flourish.

Over the last 6 years, this hybrid virtual learning community has been refined and developed to be the model in the state of Rhode Island.  Initially it was seen as financially beneficial because of the potential to reduce recidivism and dropout rates thus reducing costs.  When used as a credit recovery program it actually saves money by helping students graduate or move on to the next grade level.  Last year 56 high school seniors utilized the e-Learning Academy to recover enough credits to graduate.  Also, nearly 100 juniors recovered enough credits to become seniors. Overall, 516 online Nova Net and Virtual High School courses were completed.

The e-Learning Academy has also been used as a program to help students who have needed out of district placements but instead were placed in this alternative setting with the goal of being transitioned into the high school.  The e-Learning Academy gives them a highly personalized program within the walls of a much larger school where students can begin to become comfortable in their larger school community.

However,  most importantly, we have students who are physically unable to attend any school or alternative programs.  The e-Learning Academy has provided a much richer experience than they could have ever gotten with home tutoring.  One of our greatest success stories is one of our brightest students' who has been physically unable to attend a traditional school.  He was regularly in and out of the hospital.  He completed his middle school years with a home tutor but realized that this would not be possible for high school.  Through the e-Learning Academy, he will be the first student to have completed all four years of his high school education through the e-Learning Academy and will likely be graduating in the ten of his class this year. 

As you can see this is a program that not only saves money but also provides a high quality education and alternatives for students to accelerate their learning.  Even though we have such incredible islands of success, when I came to Woonsocket over two years ago, I actually had a very disheartening experience in regard to district wide technology.  I attended a NRIC meeting about joint purchasing of technology software.  The 11 communities in the NRIC were investigating what computer software all of the districts used so that, as we renewed our contracts, we could try to purchase these items as a group and save money with the buying power of larger groups.

The representatives from the 11 communities began listing the programs they had including some of the following:

1.     School Spring online educational advertising.

2.     District Wide Employee Email Addresses.

3.     Connect Ed, which is a parent emergency calling system.

4.     Student Information Systems (SIS), that is capable of allowing students and parents to go online every day to find out their grades and assignments.

There were probably a half a dozen other programs including online substitute calling, etc. that I cannot remember at this time.  To my astonishment, all of the other communities had all of these programs and Woonsocket had none!  I could not save money through joint purchasing on services that we did not even offer.  In the last two years Jonathan Gallishaw, Director of Technology, and his staff including Adam Stanley, Tom Conners and Mike Ferry have worked to implement less expensive technological alternatives with similar results that other districts achieve.

The School Spring online educational advertising program is subscribed to by every district in the State of Rhode Island except Woonsocket and West Warwick.  Fortunately, the Rhode Island Department of Education has found enough grant money for the next two years for us to use a rival online advertising program called Teachers-Teachers.com. 

In other districts, they use companies to organize and maintain district wide employee email addresses.  In Woonsocket, we use Google Apps to create and maintain district email accounts.  As soon as this was implemented, we saw a drastic reduction in copy paper consumption as all communication within the district can be electronic.  This upgrade cost nothing to the district.  

Some of the fancy and expensive Student Information System programs that other district could afford provide web based systems that allow Parents, Teachers and Counselors to access their Student Information System outside the network.  In our district we have implemented Student/Parent Portal (Star Portal) which is an in house developed program that is compatible with our student information system to provide our school community online access to the same information.

Connect Ed charges a per student cost to provide districts with instant electronic parent messaging.  We found a less expensive alternative with Parent Link.  Our parents and students have just as much right as students in every other district in the state to immediately know electronically when there are emergencies and to be updated daily on students' absences.

As you can see, The Woonsocket Education Department has come a long way in the last two short years in providing our community the same technology that other neighboring districts have had for many years.  We are also very proud that we can accomplish this on a shoestring and provide these services in the most frugal way for the taxpayers in Woonsocket.

Sincerely,

Robert J. Gerardi, Jr., Ph.D.

Superintendent of Schools

Woonsocket Education Department

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results" 

Albert Einstein