PowerWalks Hurricane Relief Challenge - October 20, 2017 Update

To assist schools in Florida, Puerto Rico, and Texas dealing with the aftermath of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria for every PowerWalks classroom observation conducted between October 1, 2017 and October 31, 2017, Lead Your School will donate 5¢.

As of today, there have been 29,678 October PowerWalks completed. This means that the current donation total stands at $1,483.90.

But that is only the October part of the story.  The Hurricane Relief Challenge was first issued on August 25, 2018.  Since that date we have now raised over $3,260.00.

As proof that the LYS Nation is going above and beyond to meet this challenge, we’ll share some historical numbers.  From August 25, 2016 to October 20, 2016 there were a total of 44,177 PowerWalks conducted by LYSers.  Now that is an extraordinary number of classroom observations that no other group of schools can match. Unless the comparison group is made up of motivated LYSers. 

Because LYS Nation, from August 25, 2017 to October 20, 2017 you have now conducted 73,965 PowerWalks!!!

Don’t stop now, we still have 11 remaining in October.

Keep Stepping Up!

The Challenge of Campus Leadership

Recently, I met with a group of current and aspiring campus administrators at a state conference.  The format was Q&A, and one of the first questions I was asked was, “What are the "hot topics" or issues facing campus administrators?”

This is a good question with a myriad of correct answers.  Campus administration is a complex endeavor with potentially thousands of moving parts.  Which is why I believe that the overriding hot topic has to be, “Meaningful simplifications that leverage teaching and learning.”

“But what about safety, budget, politics, staffing, etc., etc.?”

All important, but the bottom line is that teaching and learning must occur and it must continuously improve. If this is the case, the school survives and has a chance to flourish.  If it is not the case, students are being underserved and the employment of staff becomes at-risk.  

So, that makes my case for “teaching and learning,” but what about, “meaningful simplifications.”

For professionals who work in complex, chaotic environments, leadership must endeavor to reduce unnecessary steps and distractions so that the professionals can focus their attention and talent on effectively and efficiently completing the task.  This is true of surgeons, pilots, professional athletes, and should also be true for teachers. For every unnecessary step we can delete, for every non-essential task we can remove, teachers have additional attention and time for what is most important, TEACHING.

And if campus leadership isn’t studying the actual work of the organization to streamline processes to maximize the instructional dynamic, there is no one to step in and fill the gap.  Because the teachers are busy teaching and central office is busy dealing with the “Big Picture.”

Think. Work. Achieve.

Your turn...

• Call Jo at (832) 477-LEAD to order your campus set of “The Fundamental 5: The Formula for Quality Instruction.” Individual copies available on Amazon.com!  http://tinyurl.com/Fundamental5 
• Upcoming Conference Presentations: The Fundamental 5 National Summit (Keynote) 
• Follow Sean Cain and LYS on www.Twitter.com/LYSNation  and like Lead Your School on Facebook

This is What Leadership Sounds Like

I’ve had the good fortune to spend sixty years in service to this wondrous land. It has not been perfect service, to be sure, and there were probably times when the country might have benefited from a little less of my help. But I’ve tried to deserve the privilege as best I can, and I’ve been repaid a thousand times over with adventures, with good company, and with the satisfaction of serving something more important than myself, of being a bit player in the extraordinary story of America. And I am so very grateful.

What a privilege it is to serve this big, boisterous, brawling, intemperate, striving, daring, beautiful, bountiful, brave, magnificent country. With all our flaws, all our mistakes, with all the frailties of human nature as much on display as our virtues, with all the rancor and anger of our politics, we are blessed.

We are living in the land of the free, the land where anything is possible, the land of the immigrant’s dream, the land with the storied past forgotten in the rush to the imagined future, the land that repairs and reinvents itself, the land where a person can escape the consequences of a self-centered youth and know the satisfaction of sacrificing for an ideal, the land where you can go from aimless rebellion to a noble cause, and from the bottom of your class to your party’s nomination for president.

We are blessed, and we have been a blessing to humanity in turn. The international order we helped build from the ashes of world war, and that we defend to this day, has liberated more people from tyranny and poverty than ever before in history. This wondrous land has shared its treasures and ideals and shed the blood of its finest patriots to help make another, better world. And as we did so, we made our own civilization more just, freer, more accomplished and prosperous than the America that existed when I watched my father go off to war on December 7, 1941.

To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain “the last best hope of earth” for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.

We live in a land made of ideals, not blood and soil. We are the custodians of those ideals at home, and their champion abroad. We have done great good in the world. That leadership has had its costs, but we have become incomparably powerful and wealthy as we did. We have a moral obligation to continue in our just cause, and we would bring more than shame on ourselves if we don’t. We will not thrive in a world where our leadership and ideals are absent. We wouldn’t deserve to.

I am the luckiest guy on earth. I have served America’s cause — the cause of our security and the security of our friends, the cause of freedom and equal justice — all my adult life. I haven’t always served it well. I haven’t even always appreciated what I was serving. But among the few compensations of old age is the acuity of hindsight. I see now that I was part of something important that drew me along in its wake even when I was diverted by other interests. I was, knowingly or not, along for the ride as America made the future better than the past.

And I have enjoyed it, every single day of it, the good ones and the not so good ones. I’ve been inspired by the service of better patriots than me. I’ve seen Americans make sacrifices for our country and her causes and for people who were strangers to them but for our common humanity, sacrifices that were much harder than the service asked of me. And I’ve seen the good they have done, the lives they freed from tyranny and injustice, the hope they encouraged, the dreams they made achievable.

May God bless them. May God bless America, and give us the strength and wisdom, the generosity and compassion, to do our duty for this wondrous land, and for the world that counts on us. With all its suffering and dangers, the world still looks to the example and leadership of America to become, another, better place. What greater cause could anyone ever serve.

-Senator John McCain

Think. Work. Achieve.

Your turn...

• Call Jo at (832) 477-LEAD to order your campus set of “The Fundamental 5: The Formula for Quality Instruction.” Individual copies available on Amazon.com!  http://tinyurl.com/Fundamental5
• Upcoming Conference Presentations: The Fundamental 5 National Summit (Keynote)
• Follow Sean Cain and LYS on www.Twitter.com/LYSNation  and like Lead Your School on Facebook