Inside TSD October 2023
The October 2023 episode of Inside TSD is now available for listening! Also find the transcript below.
Hello and welcome to Inside TSD. I'm your host, Superintendent of Schools Dr. Rich Machesky. Happy Friday the 13th, hard to believe we're already well into October. So glad to be with our listeners today to talk about the great things happening across the Troy School District during this month. First and foremost, I'd like to point out that we have launched our portrait of a learner initiative, the much anticipated portrait of a learner started last spring as our Board of Education was interviewing pre-K students all the way through high school, they put out a survey they asked for information, responses from our community, from staff, they gather all that information, we synthesize all that information, and finally brought forward our portrait of a learner graphic, which includes the six C's. What do we want to focus on in terms of helping develop graduates from the Troy School District? We want students that demonstrate character, creativity, collaboration, communication, citizenship, and critical thinking. Thanks to our Board of Education who took on this initiative. thanks to everyone who was involved in helping support and provide information. We look forward to sharing this information with our community during our fall update.
Pleased to say that we have started meeting with our student advisory board. The Superintendent Student Advisory Board has started up again this year. We really love providing this leadership opportunity to our students. 50 plus students are part of this superintendents advisory board. One of the biggest things that our advisory board does on an annual basis is plan our Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service, they'll be doing that, as well as several other service related initiatives this year. Pleased to be joined by co-presidents this year, Marlien William, senior at Athens High School, as well as Aanya Shah, senior at Troy High School. They will be leading us, leading our superintendents advisory board this year, thanks to those two and our new Executive Board.
Another new initiative across the school district, many of you may have already seen it, is the district's weekly newsletter, the updated weekly newsletter. This will be emailed to families every Friday. You should have already seen a couple editions of our newsletter. If you have not, please make sure you're checking your email mid to late Friday afternoon, that's when you'll see an email from Kendra Montante, our new Director of Communications and Strategic Initiatives. Thanks to Kendra and her team for putting that important newsletter together.
Some up coming events that our community will want to be aware of, I've already mentioned our fault updates are underway. I'm very fortunate to be able to visit every staff and every PTO or booster group, both at the beginning of the year for a fall update, as well as the end of the year for a spring update. These are very important opportunities for us to get out and share what's happening across our school district, important initiatives, as well as other additional information that people need to know about what's happening in our school district. This year, our fall update focuses on an update around enrollment, budget and staffing as well as Bond updates, and the previously mentioned portrait of a learner initiative. So if you can make it out to our fall updates, please do so, check your local school or check your children's schools PTO meeting schedules for when district representatives will be providing that fall update.
Another important initiative that is new this year, we are launching our career accelerator program for juniors and seniors. This is a partnership with the Troy School District and local businesses to provide students with real world on the job experience. This is a pre-internship opportunity if you will, be watching for an application coming out soon, if you have a junior or a senior who may be interested in this opportunity. This is gonna be a great—this is gonna be a great way for us to connect our students with businesses across the city of Troy and surrounding area. We started talking about this a couple of years ago when we brought together our Troy education roundtable, Troy business and education roundtable and it has led to this important initiative. So again, if you have a junior, senior that may be interested, please be looking for that email from Kendra and her team.
Also we will be starting a new initiative which is Coffee with the Superintendent. Our first Coffee with the Superintendent will be November 29. You can put that on your calendar now. Please be looking for additional information as we get closer to that time. This is just an opportunity of casual conversation and update on what's happening across our school district, initiatives as well as new and emerging information that our community members may be interested in knowing more about.
Congratulations to Troy High School who completed their homecoming this past Friday, it was a great success. The parade went off without any hitch from the weather, although it did start raining right before the game, but they did get the game in and it was a big win by the Troy Colts, so congratulations.
On that same day of Homecoming, we had another very important activity going on at Troy High, and that was the ribbon cutting, the grand opening for three new classrooms that were made available to us through the SME PRIME grant. This is an opportunity for our students to interact with state of the art technology. Hundreds of 1000s of dollars invested in technology and those classrooms to give students a real world, hands on experience. Working with the latest in technology and so forth. We had students on hand for that to talk about how they value the opportunity to interact with that state of the art technology. We also had on on hand Congresswoman Haley Stevens who spoke as well as the Michigan State House Speaker Joe Tate and our own local representative Sharon MacDonell. They talked about the importance of this SME PRIME grant and the opportunities that it’s going to provide and will continue to provide for the students across the Troy School District. Thanks to those individuals who participated.
Shout out to the principals! All of our principals across the Troy School District. Join us in celebrating October as National School Principals Month. So we thank all of our principals, the leadership that they provide across the Troy School District. We're very fortunate to have exceptional principals, assistant principals. We've been very fortunate, last year we had Assistant Principal of the Year Brian Zawislak. This year, Melissa Curth, assistant principal at Troy High School was identified as a nominee for Assistant Principal of the Year as well. So again, thanks—if you get a chance to say thank you to those individuals, please, please do so.
We also had an opportunity both at Troy High and Athens to host the Michigan's band and orchestra, marching band festival or competition I guess I'd say rather earlier this week, both Troy High and Athens participated in MSBOA activities. Both earned division one ratings, congratulations to both Troy High and Athens bands.
A couple of other things that I think our community might be wanting to know, this is crosstown rivalry week in Troy. The Red Hawks and the Colts have squared off at a number of activities, athletic events this week. Our cross country teams squared off against one another, volleyball teams, soccer teams. Friday, of course, is the crosstown rivalry football game that will be hosted at Athens seven o'clock tonight. And our bands will be performing. So it's a great opportunity to see both high schools playing as well as our bands performing.
Congratulations to Ava Weeks who was one of our Athens girls golfers who placed fifth I believe it was in division one at regionals. She was a medalist and qualified for the state tournament. So congratulations to Ava.
Just one closing thought. This is an opportunity in October to thank the Troy community for their support. If you remember it was about this time last year that we were talking about the 2023 bond initiative and we were getting the word out about the importance of voting on the bond initiative and how the bond projects that we hope to be able to do would impact generations of students in the Troy School District. We thank each and every one of you that supported that initiative. 60% of our of our community supported that initiative. We wasted no time. After passing that initiative in November, we sold those bonds. And we have started work, we are almost a year into preparing for work to be done on that bond initiative. We're of course going to be talking more in depth about the bond plans and the bond projects during our fall updates. But just so our community knows we have been focused over the past year thinking about new furniture across our school district, playgrounds across all of our elementaries, we have been focused on outdoor athletic facilities at both of our high schools. It was really important for the board and for administration to make sure that our community had a chance to see there—the support and those dollars in action. Of course the biggest project that we're focused on right now is Smith Middle School. We are on track to break ground for the new Smith Middle School in the spring of 2024. As soon as the thaw breaks, we will have shovels in the ground, I guess I should say, at Smith in preparation for the new Smith Middle School, which is scheduled to be opened fall of 2026. And beyond that, we'll be starting our planning for the academic wing at Athens High School. So, so much going on. Just an opportunity to say thank you again to all those who supported that bond initiative. Your dollars are already being put to work and will again impact future generations of students across the Troy School District. So we thank you for that.
So as always, October is a busy busy month in the Troy School District. We thank you for tuning in to Inside TSD.