To: ISD 300 Board of Education and Superintendent Cardille From ...

To: ISD 300 Board of Education and Superintendent Cardille From: Beth Theede, Director of Community Education November 2015 Report We hosted the Tri-County Community Education Director’s group for our first meeting of the year last week. Directors from Houston, Fillmore, and Winona counties attend these meetings to share ideas and resources. I facilitate these meetings, and the group continues to find value in gathering quarterly. At that meeting, several of the schools not currently offering online registration asked what the benefits are of offering online registration and credit card option payments. I was able to quickly pull our data from the past summer and report that 65% of the summer registration fees were paid with a credit card and 23% of all registrations were made completely online. This tells us that these services are valuable to our community. Unfortunately, this past month, I have had to spend a significant amount of time working with our online class registration service provider to get assistance in working out “bugs” that are still coming up in the upgrade we were forced to make over the summer. We are beginning to explore other options to make sure there isn’t a better fit out there to help us meet the needs of our customers. There are many pros and cons to a provider change, but we want to be sure we have all current information. Our early childhood team hosted a learning opportunity at their PLC last week. An occupational therapist came to speak about the importance of developing fine motor skills with practical tips that our staff can implement. We invited representatives from all preschools in our district as a way to share the information with the people serving all of the preschoolers within the district. We have scheduled the official “re-boot” meeting of the Marketing and Outreach Committee now that our Communications Plan is completed. We are excited to reconvene and share all of the information we learned during the communications audit and planning process. The important step of clearly defining what project areas that committee may freely work on is a key step in moving ahead in a meaningful and productive manner. I attended the annual Minnesota School Public Relations conference in Minneapolis last week. The presentations were very beneficial and there was an emphasis on small, rural districts, which was certainly welcomed by many of those attending from out state. There were many great ideas for easy and immediate implementation, as well as some very helpful strategic thinking information that was presented regarding thriving in the social media world.