Work, work, work!

Mr. January has many technology needs that Chris Blake, Mark Phelps, Bryan Abernathy, and I are trying to meet. Chris completed a Power Point of the school profile. Mark helped by taking photos of the photos they had in hard copy and saving them as jpeg files so that Chris could upload them into the presentation. Mr. January was able to use this presentation at the principal's meeting he attended today. I am working on compiling the school history which, at present, is in a journal of sorts with the photos glued to the pages. Mark has taken photos of all of the hard copy pictures in the journal/scrapbook and I am uploading them into a Microsoft Publisher Newsletter along with the other school history that I had to type. Bryan has created a fire drill plan (complete with visual map) for the school and he is working on writing this up in document form. We are also going to help them create a finance policy document which will provide some clarity on their procedures for procuring vendors and using the petty cash fund. We also have been asked to do a website for the school, so we will start on that next week.

Yesterday, we attended the Peace Promoting Schools award ceremony. This ceremony was designed to honor the 21 schools that completed the peace projects through the GM foundation. We met Mr. Ntsiko, the Port Elizabeth district office representative in education. He provided some startling statistics and ended by saying that "peace should be in our blood, we should not just preach it, we should live it." Mr. Roger Matlock from the GM Foundation read excerpts from an interesting article in Time magazine that talked about the collapse of the U.S. educational system. He was trying to show that education is complex; even the U.S. is struggling to get it right.

As a side note, there was a word scramble competition and one of our groups won (we had to split ourselves into two groups). I was a little afraid that the other schools would not appreciate us beating them, but the ladies in our group were quite competitive and the other teams were good sports:-) Hats off to Mary Fincannon, Lindsey Deans, Maria Johnson, Emily Farmer, Ashley Flynn, and Chelsea Maser for beating all 20+ teams!