There’s much excitement in the air. Can you feel it?
The first serves and volleys, kicks, trots, races, and jumps of the fall athletic season recently commenced. The marching band perfected their steps. Students picked up their schedules, visited their teachers, met their classmates, and found their lockers.
School starts on Tuesday, Sept. 6. Teachers and staff returned to work on Monday, Aug. 29. I’m expecting to experience our best year ever!
We welcome new leaders at Springfield Plains, North Sashabaw, Clarkston Elementary, in our nutrition department, and at the high school (assistant principal).
We’ve hired three new interventionalists, who will serve students at each of our secondary buildings. We’re also excited to welcome our new teachers, support staff members, and social workers.
You’ll remember that last year, our district adopted new vision and mission statements and a learner profile.
Additionally, we’re thinking beyond possible, serving as a partner within the community.
Soon, you’ll see updates of intersections around the high school, which will happen in partnership with Independence Township and the Road Commission.
Our Career and Technical Education programs are developing new partnerships and learning opportunities with local businesses and Oakland University.
We plan on facilitating regular meetings with civic, not-for profit, governmental, and health care providers to build additional partnerships.
When your business, agency, or school encounters a need, think of the Clarkston Community Schools as your partner and ask us how we can serve you! Contact me please, so that we can think things through!
We expect to continue to expand our educational partnerships and horizons so that each of our students experiences a digitized, globalized, personalized, and customized education.
One example is a college class we’ll offer this winter at CHS in partnership with Oakland Community College. CHS and RHS students can take this study-skills course for dual credit.
Another is CCS working in conjunction with Central Michigan University (CMU) to develop and deliver technology-based professional development to teachers.
The goal of this PD is to increase the technical literacy of the CCS staff while providing college credit to staff members who require it for re-certification.
Other partnership examples include potential connections with Everest Academy, Oakland Christian School, and Our Lady of the Lakes Academy in Waterford.
With 13 other Oakland County school districts and the Oakland Schools, we will begin this fall a Cultures of Thinking initiative with Harvard University.
This includes leadership sessions in the fall and teacher professional learning in the spring.
Several of our schools will pilot technology initiatives this year, including iPads, Netbooks, student response systems, and wireless environments.
Throughout the year, you can expect to hear about a possible technology bond that would enhance instructional technology across the district.
You’ll also notice some dirt moving around the high school as the stadium and tennis facilities undergo some updates.
Finally, you’ll want to tune into the Blessings in a Backpack initiative at Andersonville Elementary, which when fully operationalized will provide food to students on the weekends.
These initiatives will seek funding support throughout the year.
Our primary focus areas for continuous improvement this year include literacy, higher order thinking, using technology to enhance learning, and using data to inform instruction.
Much of this will take place as teachers work in grade-level and subject-area teams during our delayed-start Wednesdays.
Beyond this, we will work very hard to balance our budget; update our policies; improve efficiency and effectiveness of operations; measure the effectiveness of programs; evaluate teachers and administrators; support all learners; implement new laws and regulations; safely transport our students; and enhance our nutritional, athletic, human resource, special education, business, instructional, early childhood, and custodial and building and grounds services.
We seek to continuously and transparently communicate with you throughout the year. Please read the LINK, school newsletters, e-blasts, and other print communication that we send; check out our website (www.clarkston.k12.mi.us/education/components/scrapbook; follow my blog (rodrockon.blogspot.com) and tweets (@rodrock1); and attend school events and/or board meetings (or view them through our website).
Please also watch for community forums, which I intend to host at several locations during the year.
Our theme for this year is taking it from the top…, which has two meanings:
(1) the feeling of engaged learning is similar to the feeling of descending a sand dune, whereby our energy and momentum pull us forward, revealing new possibilities along the way; and
(2) deep learning is processed in our brains (at the top) and is a social, emotional, full-body experience wherein the heart rate increases, many areas of the brain light up, the eyes see, the ears hear, the nose smells, and the skin feels.
As we engage together in learning this year, our collective energy’like running down the hill’and the culture we co-create for learning’a culture of thinking and learning that engages the entire brain and body’will determine much of what gets learned and what gets learned about learning. Taking learning from the top’with parents, community members, instructional leaders, learners, staff, and faculty’each of us will experience an incredible school year.
I am here to serve the children, district, staff, parents, and community. Please feel free to contact me at rdrock@clarkston.k12.mi.us. I look forward to seeing you throughout the year!
Rod Rock, Ed.D., superintendent of Clarkston Community Schools

Picture in your mind a summer afternoon in your youth, fishing on a lake with your grandfather.
You’re in a small boat, with no engine. You are using bamboo poles. Grandpa is wearing a large, strawbrimmed hat, with fishing lures pinned to it, and a collared shirt. You’re fishing with earth worms ? the big, dirty, slimy variety. In the stillness of the day, you hear in the distance a screen door slamming, but you can’t see it.
The water is warm, as is the air. The sun is dimming to the West, over the woods on the other side of the lake. You and grandpa aren’t talking. The fish are biting. A hefty one bites your line ? the one you’ve waited all day to catch. Your line breaks. As grandpa ties a new line onto your pole, the hook lies precariously in the water, and a fish bites it.
Simultaneously, you and grandpa gasp. You catch a glimpse into his eyes and you can clearly sense the significance of the moment ? that something extra special is happening there on the lake. There are no words to describe the feeling, only a sense of the essence. No one else can tell you how it feels, no matter the eloquence of the words. A picture or written account of the experience is somehow insufficient. Even long after grandpa is gone, the feeling persists ? you want to live it again.
An education, lived in small moments, embedded in genuine relationships, and personally significant, is what we hope our children will experience. We wish for our children challenges, meaningful friendships, limitless opportunities, and utter hopefulness. We build gymnasiums, stadiums, band rooms, science labs, auditoriums, and classrooms because we believe in the educational process.
We install computers, wireless networks, and outlets because we have faith in educational systems.
We set policies, goals, proficiency targets, and standards because we believe that these elements, taken collectively, represent the best possibilities for a better life, for all children. Once we’ve constructed the schools, the paint and asphalt dry, and the students move in. They sit behind desks, poised for learning.
What happens next isn’t up to them, it’s dependent upon us’teachers, principals, superintendents, school boards, schools of education, parents, community members’working together to ensure a meaningful educational experience. Each student possesses his or her dreams, and our hopes. Each is completely individual, yet wholly dependent.
Picture in your mind a fall afternoon in the current life of a young girl. Can you see the student, sitting in a classroom with her classmates and teacher?
It’s a well lit room, with a Smartboard. The teacher is comfortably dressed, with a dry erase marker behind her ear. She invites the child to share her thoughts, to explore her ideas, to make connections, to wonder. She then gives the students time to think; to develop their thoughts.
Despite the equal eagerness of those around, the student’s concentration does not waiver or wane. She’s leaning forward in her seat, anxious, yet willing to hold her response until her thoughts become clear. The teacher displays on the Smartboard colorful pictures and diagrams, asking students to take a position, to expand their perspectives. As the students reason with evidence, the teacher asks them to go deeper, to contemplate an alternative point of view. In their hands are cell phones with
Internet access, which they skillfully use to explore the complexity of the topic at hand. Near the end of the class period, the teacher asks the students to gather into small groups with classmates to summarize their learning for the period. In ten words or less, the young girl’s group reflects on the learning objective displayed for the entire class period, on the Smartboard. When it is almost time to depart for lunch, the teacher selects this group to share their summary.
Simultaneously, the girl, her classmates, and the teacher gasp. The girl catches a glimpse into her teacher’s eyes, and she can clearly sense the significance of the moment; that something extra special is happening there in her classroom’the group’s collective thinking is going much deeper than expected. There are no words to describe the feeling, only a sense of the essence. No one else can tell her how it feels, no matter the eloquence of the words. A picture or written account of the experience is somehow insufficient. Even long after she’s completed her formal education, the feeling persists’she wants to live it again.
As we attempt to reform education with policies, charter schools, teacher evaluation and student achievement, and merit pay’the impersonal parts, we risk missing the essence’the personal whole.
We believe that improvement is simple, direct, clean, and obvious. Our educational systems have taught us that academic growth is always measurable, quantifiable, and comparable. Herein, we miss the complexity, the nuance, the essence.
To fundamentally improve schools for all children, we must alter the way it feels’for students, teachers, parents. In its entirety, we must make learning personally meaningful.
We must do all that we can, every day, in every school, to take students more deeply into their own minds and the minds of their classmates. We must teach them to make sense, to figure things out, to inquire and expand. We must make learning a more personal, organic, intuitive, qualifiable endeavor.
When we talk about education, long after we’ve left the schoolhouse, we must remember how it feels’longing to live it again. Tangibly, we have to recall where the learning took us, what it taught us about ourselves and learning in general. It has to affect us deeply, personally, longitudinally. Any policy or reform that does not affect how students and educators feel, what they sense and notice, is in fact, no reform at all.
Rod Rock, Ed.D., is superintendent of Clarkston Community Schools