Inside TSD April 2024
The April 2024 episode of Inside TSD is now available for listening! Also find the transcript below.
Hello OneTroy and welcome back. This is Inside TSD with your host, Dr. Rich Machesky. We hope that spring break was a restful opportunity for you, your family, friends, you had an opportunity to connect. Some of you may have had an opportunity to get down south, some of you had staycations. Regardless what happened, we hope that you are back, refreshed, and ready to go for the stretch run here across the Troy School District as we lead, or head toward summer.
We had the opportunity earlier this week to welcome the class of 2037, incoming kindergarteners, to kindergarten round-up. We welcome those youngsters and their families to the Troy School District. Again the class of 2037, hard to believe, but they're going to be here in the fall and we welcome those youngsters.
As far as recent news across the school district, TSD will have 56 students who qualified and will compete at the DECA International Conference. For those of you not familiar with DECA, DECA is the premier career and technical student organization for business marketing, finance, hospitality, and entrepreneurship, and the Troy School District and its students have had a stranglehold on DECA competition across the state of Michigan. We've had multiple students compete at the state level and qualify for the International Conference. I'm confident our students will continue to do extremely well, best wishes to those students competing.
We've had an opportunity now across the community to host two Coffees with the Superintendent. They've been well attended and we encourage the community to look forward to the next Coffee with the Superintendent in May. The date in May and details will be forthcoming, but we certainly encourage everyone who has an interest to come on out, hear about what's happening across the school district if you have questions, those great opportunity for you to ask those questions of the superintendent at that time.
Our CAP students, or Career Accelerator Program students, are now in their pre-internships. You've heard me talk about this program earlier in our Inside TSD podcasts, but we just couldn't be more excited to have 28 students participating in this pilot program. Our interns are in the community, they're working with the various companies across the Troy community and one of those individuals, Jackson Alcorn, will be interviewing me for my next leadership podcast. Jackson has been appointed to be an intern here in the Troy School District's communications department. So we welcome Jackson and he'll have an opportunity, you'll have an opportunity to hear from him a little bit later.
As far as upcoming news is concerned, we are in full blown celebration season. We're thrilled to be able to recognize students and staff at this time of the year. We look forward to recognizing our Teachers of the Year at a reception on April 9, for those individuals and their families. We are excited to surprise our Support Person of the Year on April 17, and then celebrate those individuals on April 30 at a reception.
Our high schoolers will begin testing PSAT, SAT, and other spring tests in the next few weeks. Best wishes to all of our students who will be testing this time of the year.
Some congratulations are in order. Let's start with Mr. Jansen, principal at Wass Elementary. Matt has been appointed as our new Director of Athletics, Enrichment, Continuing Education and Wellness. He will officially take on that role beginning July 1. We welcome Mr. Jansen to that position. And we say thanks to Mr. Fulcher, who will be leaving the Troy School District at the end of the school year. Mr. Fulcher served as Assistant Principal, Principal across the school district as well as the current Director of Athletics. So we wish Mr. Fulcher well, and we celebrate Mr. Jansen and his new position.
Also a new position to recognize, Mr. Mike Munaco, who currently serves as Assistant Principal at Athens, he will be appointed as our new Supervisor of Career Readiness and Technical Education. We welcome Mr. Munaco into that position.
We are excited to celebrate a couple of state champions across our school district, the Athens Girls Powerlifting team and the United Synchronized Swim teams both earned state championships this year. Congratulations to our students, coaches, and families who support our students and those endeavors.
We also want to have a huge shout out to Aryan Khedkar. His name is not new to the Troy School District. Aryan is an eighth grader now at Baker Middle School, you might remember that Aryan last year was on the final stage for the National Scripps Spelling Bee. He made it, I believe he was out number five last year, he made it to the final grouping, didn't quite get there. But Aryan is back this year, he has won the Oakland County Spelling Bee. He is off to the nationals, we wish Aryan all the best as he continues to compete.
In closing, I thought it might be nice for the community to know some work that we're doing across the school district to support our students with special needs and our English language learner students. We have been engaged over the course of this school year with a group called New Solutions K12. We brought them aboard as thought partners in helping us think about how we support students. During this year, they have worked collaboratively with us: they have looked at our data, they have observed students in our classrooms, they have talked to staff across the school district to get a sense for how we provide supports for students. This is work that they have done across the nation, and we have sincere interest in knowing how we can be better in the Troy School District, we always seek to be better. We want to learn from those that are doing things better than us. We want to use best practice, so we just thought this was a great opportunity to enhance our learning moving forward. The end product was a report that I would encourage anyone who has an interest to take a look at, it can be found on our website under academics, if you scroll all the way down you'll see a link to a report from New Solutions, encourage you to take a look at that. In that report, it essentially suggests some things that we're doing really well in our school district, but it also suggests some things we can do better. And based upon the five recommendations that New Solutions provided, we've identified two, we prioritize two of those. We have a guiding coalition now, about aproximately 40 individuals there. This includes staff, this includes administrators, this includes support staff, coming together quarterly to think about a plan that incorporates the recommendations over the course of the next three years. And so, we're in planning phases now, the three year plan will begin next fall and we look forward to reporting back to the community how we're doing and the things that we did, the specific changes that are being made across our school district to help support all students. Thought that would be nice for folks to hear.
So with that in mind, we thank you so much for your continued partnership. We look forward to finishing this year as strongly as possible. And it is my pleasure to continue to provide updates as part of Inside TSD.