Extracurricular Activities Update Sept. 2013

Marching band is preparing for their first competition at Ryle this weekend.  Good luck, Eagles!

Choral Boosters has begun a private lesson program at the high school to offer students voice and piano lessons.  Seventeen students from Milford have been accepted into the OMEA District 14 Honor Choir. Congratulations!

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Athletic Update Sept. 2013

The fall season shows all of our teams looking strong!   It’s exciting to be a Milford Eagle!

Football is off to a 2-1 great start (3-1 as of last night!) including a home victory on the new turf in triple overtime against Edgewood!  Dedication of the new field took place at halftime with a huge thank you to the Athletic Boosters and their community partners for their efforts.  Congratulations go out to Drew Ashcraft for being named the Ohio National Guard Football Player of the Week for his performance!  The Eagle’s are gearing up to take on Woodward tomorrow, at home, at 7:30 pm.

Highlighting one of our other outstanding teams, girls’ golf is ranked 1^st in the ECC and is undefeated at 14-0!   Junior Megan Creager is the ECC leader averaging 38.9 and Milford holds the top 3 averages for the entire league.  Way to go, Eagles!

Highlights from 9/19/13 school board meeting

The following are highlights from the September 19, 2013 school board meeting:

It’s election time again
Milford continues on path of academic excellence
SMART goals for 2013-14
New turf is welcomed by teams, students & community
New elementaries are on their way
Ideas for Milford Main are welcomed

• The district accepted donations from Milford Christian Church of school supplies for each grade level/each school.  This has become an annual donation that greatly helps many students and teachers in the Milford school district.  Thank you to Karen Tracy and Stacy McWhorter for this wonderful program!

It’s election time again

It’s hard to believe, but I’ve been writing this school board blog for four years now.  I started it in September, 2009 as I began my campaign for school board, and I’ve posted about the district virtually every month since.

That’s a lot of articles – if you visit my old blog, you’ll see the long list of them (and you’ll understand why I started this new blog!)

I have chosen to seek a school board seat again for the next four-year term.  I feel we have achieved a tremendous amount in this current term, and I’d like to help address some of the challenges and opportunities we will be facing.

I’ve chosen to run a joint campaign with Gary Knepp, who served on the school board from 2008-2011.  He left the board for two years as he finished writing a couple books, but would now like to return also because of what will be happening in the next few years.

Gary and I have also partnered with David Yockey, who has been a school board member for 12 years now.  Dave, Gary and I have developed a respectful, supportive relationship, with each of us bringing different skills, knowledge and perspective to the table.

The Knepp/Brady campaign website can be found here.  On it, you can see Gary’s and my backgrounds & accomplishments, the challenges we believe we are facing, and our blog.  Dave’s website can be found here. 

I will not use this site as a campaign site, other than this article to introduce my campaign and a few guest blogger articles over the next five weeks.  If you have any questions, please feel free to get in touch.  I ask for your support for Brady, Knepp & Yockey on November 5!

Milford continues on path of academic excellence

In the past six years, Milford has seen an upward trend in academic achievement by our students, due to a concerted effort among staff and teachers to find better ways to reach students, as well as improved teamwork between the district and families.

This year, the state released a new report card to evaluate how districts are performing:  instead of “Excellent” and so on, districts are now giving letter grades on different areas. The new evaluation structure is much different – and much more rigorous – than the past system.  In this first year, not all areas are measured; the new report card will be phased in over the next two years.

At the September 19 board meeting, Dr. Jill Chin, Director of Elementary Curriculum, and Mrs. Nancy House, Director of Secondary Curriculum, presented the results of the state report card and also our own Quality Profile which looks at a variety of factors in the education process.

SMART goals for 2013-14

SMART goals are annual stretch goals:  if achieved, they would take the district to a significantly higher level.

This year’s SMART goals are below.  Dr. Farrell and the administrative staff believe these are achievable based on specific opportunity areas they have been able to identify.  This year’s goals will also be helped by the additional pre-testing all districts are doing to be able to evaluate if they are meeting state student achievement requirements.  The testing will help us determine precisely where each student is at the beginning of the year, allowing teachers to focus on individual needs to achieve more than a year’s growth over the school year.

MEVSD 2013-14 SMART Goals

1. The district will improve achievement for all students by the end of the 2013-2014 school year.  We will target the goal of exceeding more than a year’s growth in student achievement in a year’s time for every student.We will improve student achievement by:*  Implementing pedagogy to meet the new learning standards and implement the aligned local curricula.
   *  Planning instruction for all students based on their pre-assessment data and intervening with all students as needed.We will measure student achievement in a variety of ways.  They include the following growth targets:

   *  Our Performance Index for the state assessments will improve to 107.

   *  All of our students in all groups will meet Annual Measurable Objectives as determined by the state of Ohio.

   *  Students in grades k-8 taking MAP and Pro-Core assessments will demonstrate more than a year’s growth in achievement in a year’s time.

   *  Students in grades 9-12 taking the ACT suite of tests that include the “Explore,” Plan” and “ACT” will demonstrate more than a year’s growth in a year’s time.

   *  Maintain current high numbers of students enrolled in Advanced Placement classes and increase passage rate to 76%.
   

2. The district will increase writing opportunities for all students to align with new local curricula across the curriculum by the end of the 2013-2014 school year.*  100% of k-5 students will meet grade level standards in reading and writing through the Ready Gen program.*  100% of grades 6-12 students will score at the proficient level on the district-created rubric for expository and argumentative writing, focusing specifically on ELA and social studies.

   *  100% of students in grades 6-12 will write an expository or argumentative essay in science that will be scored using the district rubric.

New turf is welcomed by teams, students & community

The new Milford Eagles football field with artificial turf

On Friday, September 6, 2013, the Milford Athletic Boosters (MAB) and Milford Schools christened the new artificial turf football field at halftime of the first varsity game of the season.  After a game that the Milford Eagles won in triple overtime, students stormed the field to celebrate the win and the turf with the team.  “It was a heck of a way to christen the new field,” laughed Dave Meranda, President of the MAB, at the September 19 school board meeting.

The turf is a 100% privately funded project by the MAB, and at $657,695, represents the single-largest donation the MAB has made to the district.

New elementaries are on their way

At the September 19 school board meeting, a representative from the Ohio Facilities Construction Commission (OFCC) presented different delivery methods for contracting public improvement projects.  The board then voted to use the “Construction Manager at Risk” option, which now allows us to seek bids on the first stage of the new elementary construction project.

In 2001, the Milford school district joined the state’s construction program that allows us to receive funds back on new construction.  The district was in need of new buildings as well as renovations to the high school and junior high; the original project included building four new elementaries; replacing Seipelt elementary; renovating Boyd E. Smith elementary; and renovating/expanding the high school and junior high.

Ideas for Milford Main are welcomed

This is my report on the Business Advisory Council at the September 19 board meeting:

At last month’s meeting (story here), Tom Rocklin, Chair of the BAC, presented some recommendations from the council on what to do with Milford Main.  Based on expensive building maintenance needs and the inability to use Milford Main for the district’s ongoing educational purposes (the cost to update the building to meet regulations is just too great to justify the investment), the Council recommended the district divest itself of Milford Main as soon as practical.

First, I’d like to stress that the BAC simply recommends to the board – the board can choose to act or not on what they suggest, and no decisions have been made or even discussed re: Milford Main.

Welcome to my new school board blog!

Hello, everyone!  If you have been reading my school board blog over the past four years, you’ve seen that it’s gotten a little out of hand.  I didn’t know how to structure a blog back then, and I jumped in using pages.  Now, with so many pages, it’s very hard to see what’s there.

Because of how difficult it now is to find information in that blog, I have started this new site.  You will be able to find posts via categories and tags, as a blog should be.  Of course, you can always search via keywords, but if you want to see information within a particular topic area, it will be much easier to find.

I also have a link back to my old school board blog as an archive; that link is in the right-hand column.

If there is anything you’d like to see in this blog, please let me know.  I’d love to hear from you!