First of all, my sincere appreciation to all of those who worked so hard to clean up the community, care for the displaced, and rallied to keep our great City moving.

Second, there have been hundreds of questions about whether or not we have to make up school for yesterday. The simple answer is “YES”. We must approve a calendar that shows 180 days of student attendance.

But what about an “Act of God” day? Those are only applicable after a District has used all 5 of its emergency days. We had only used 3 days prior to yesterday.

We are looking at what our options can be regarding our final day of school, but there will be some   form of a school day on Monday, June 7th. As soon as we have final details we will communicate that to everyone.

Over the past several months the news has been overflowing with reports from state budget woes, which translates to school budget woes.  This link will take you to a location on the Illinois State Board of Education’s website where you can see how much money the Geneseo School District should be expecting from Springfield this fiscal year.  You can check out other state revenue accounts and see what has been vouchered, but not yet processed by the State Comptroller.  You can see that in regular transportation reimbursements alone, we should be receiving over $1M this year, but it looks like we will be shorted half that amount.

So what does that mean?  Well, we will have to spend down our reserves or borrow money in order to make our busing payments.  It seems a real shame that we not only have to worry about how to pay for the essential curricular supplies and materials we need to educate students, but now we will have to borrow money just to transport our students to school!

GHS Art Students, under the tutelage of Mr. Logan Hamilton, have had a great year at area contests, displaying work at the District Office, and preparing for more spring showings.  What a wonderfully talented group of students we are blessed to enjoy!

We are finishing up ISAT testing, approaching the end of the 3rd Quarter, seeing some snow melt and starting to enter into Spring Sports seasons!

Here Jo Cheno “throws her weight around” indoor at a track meet in Sterling!

Every year our dance squad, the Maplettes, invites a group of senior boys to join them for a couple of home games.  This year they really decided to “shake things up” with a medley of songs about shaking!  As much as we appreciate the hard work instructionally that our students and staff put in during the year, these moments of FUN are what make the high school experience so complete.

Congratulations to Ms. Donaho and Ms. Wyffels for outstanding work with all these students!

The HS Varsity Scholastic Bowl competed Saturday at the Masonic Sectional. The students competed against 7 different schools.

No matter what business a person is in these days, it seems that children and adults have shorter attention spans and greater demands to be “entertained”. We often fight it, but I see it both in classrooms and in teacher inservices. We are not as willing to just “grind it out” anymore, but rather we expect something amazing to fill our days. That’s not necessarily a good thing. Perhaps this YouTube video best describes the current state of affairs as we interact with others.