Tech Tiger Newsletter

March 24, 2017

PRIDE. RESPECT. RESPONSIBILITY. These terms represent the three pillars of student behavioral expectations at Tech High School. Every classroom, hallway, and common area of the school displays our three expectations and the meaning behind each. We’ve defined what PRIDE, RESPECT, and RESPONSIBILITY are in the cafeteria, classrooms, hallways, LRC, restrooms, and during extra-curricular events. And when we say defined, we mean what students are expected to do, not what they can’t do.
 
To reinforce our message of positive behaviors, a couple times a month during our Tuesday morning Homeroom time, teachers walk students through mini-lessons that often address PRIDE, RESPECT, or RESPONSIBILITY. One such lesson took place this past Tuesday, March 21. The neat part about Tuesday’s lesson is that it used a student-generated video to capture our three expectations. What better way to convey what is expected of ALL students than by using students themselves to get the message across to others? The students involved had fun creating the video, and best of all, data show these simple lessons and messages work with our students. As of March 21, 96% of Tech students had either 0 or just 1 office discipline referral and over 1400 students have zero office discipline referrals. That’s outstanding! This means our students understand daily what is expected of them. Collectively, our students understand how to get along with each other, especially among our diverse student body. 
 
As a Tech High School community, we should all take PRIDE in the exceptional behaviors our students display every day that help instill that tradition of excellence since 1917.
 
Charlie Eisenreich

Last month, one of the items the New HS Design Committee focused on was how the Media Center and the Learning Neighborhoods (classrooms) can function a bit closer together, particularly around technology. To assist with this process, Tech HS hosted a Technology Visioning Workshop on Feb. 28 in our current Learning Resource Center. School staff, parents, students, and a few community members had the opportunity to discuss what our vision for technology use in our new school could be. The biggest takeaway was to make sure we have a solid infrastructure in place to accommodate the ever-changing technologies that we will experience over the coming decades, and at the same time staying within our parameters. The workshop affirmed the work of the original taskforce in 2015 and the idea of a technology rich system.
 
We are moving closer to finishing up the schematic design phase of this project and will enter the design development phase. Beginning near the end of the April, we will gather program area subgroups together over the course of three days to discuss more specific layouts of spaces inside the building. The subgroups include CTE and Culinary Arts, Special Education spaces, Administration areas, Fine Arts, and so on.  These subgroups are similar to what was completed during the summer of 2015, and we plan to partner with Apollo’s staff once again.
 
Also, based on community input, some recommendations were made to the activity and physical education spaces to allow for potential future expansion. Basically, it means a redesign to the phy ed and activity wing allowing for future expansion by placing the fitness center and all purpose room above the locker room facilities.