Summit on School Climate and Culture
On August 13 -14, over 50 Ames CSD staff attended the 3rd Annual Summit on School Climate and Culture. The event is put on by Des Moines Public Schools and “is designed help educators improve school climate and culture through professional development, skill building and application of best practices and research.” The event allows educators to “engage with leading experts in education and school improvement on how a positive school climate and culture is key to student, school and district improvements.” Director of Student Services Dr. Anthony Jones, said, “The Summit is important for us because I believe the topics (Climate, Culture, Inclusion, and Equity) discussed there address a missing piece of professional learning for our district's success.”
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Social Media Accounts
As we kick off the new school year, we want to encourage you to interact and follow some of our many social media channels. Below…
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Welcome Back Message from Superintendent Risner
My transition to the Ames Community School District has been a wonderful experience and living in the Ames community has given me…
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Ames CSD Ranked Best District in the State for 6th Consecutive Year by Niche
Niche recently released their 2019 K-12 Rankings of the best schools in the country. For the sixth consecutive year, the Ames Community…
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Ames CSD and Ames Police Department to put on Active Shooter Training for Staff
On August 21-22, all Ames Community School District staff will participate in an active shooter training within one of our schools. Due to the content of the training, it was important for us to get it completed before school begins, and to ensure that no students would be present in the buildings during the time of this training. The training will be conducted by officers of the Ames Police Department and will include an ALICE refresher segment followed by unknown scenarios that staff must respond to, and will conclude with debrief sessions with officers. We understand that this work is never done and we, as District leaders, need to constantly ensure that our buildings are safe and that our staff are adequately prepared for a variety of situations. Our goal is to make this training as applicable as possible, and that all staff walk away from it feeling prepared. But we also understand that this content can be unsettling. We have encouraged our staff to reach out to us at the District level, or to their building principal with questions or concerns.
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Dr. Tim Taylor: Superintendent Retires after 46 Years in Education
This story was originally published in Volume 3 of Amazing Magazine that you can download here. Superintendent Dr. Tim Taylor announced his retirement at the November 20, 2017 school board meeting. After 46 years in education, 26 of those years in the Ames CSD, and the last 8 as Superintendent, his last day within the Ames CSD will be June 30, 2018. The next day, he will take a much needed and well deserved golf vacation to Scotland to kick start the next chapter of his life. The IPERs Rule of 88 says that an individual has qualified to retire when their age plus years of service has reached “88.” Dr. Taylor has reached 115. Taylor grew up in Iowa Falls and is proud to be an Iowa kid. His first teaching job was in Janesville, Iowa, near Waterloo, and later he taught and coached boys basketball in Winterset. After he finished his Ph.D. at Iowa State University in the early 1990s, Taylor began working with the Department of Education in Human Resources. “I had been involved in graduate school and been a graduate assistant for years at Iowa State University. So I lived in town and commuted to the Department of Education. As a graduate student, I fell in love with the community and wanted to be a part of it,” he said, reflecting on his collegiate days.
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School Board is Accepting Applications for Vacant Seat
School Board Applicants: Allen Beirbaum Joan Bolin Bettis Amy Edwards Latifah Faisal Randal Fitzgerald John Hascall Frederick Lloyd Jeanne Paskach Aaron Rodriquez Jintao Wang…
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ISPRA Communications Awards 2018
The Iowa School Public Relations Association (ISPRA) held their annual communication awards the evening of Thursday, April 19. The Ames Community School District submitted materials in 8 of the 20 competition categories that included Bond Campaign, E-Newsletter, Excellence in Writing, Magazine, Social Media, and three Video categories. This year, there were entries from 20 different school districts. The Ames Community School District won two Blue & Gold Awards as best in state for the Amazing Magazine (magazine category), and the district’s Facebook page (social media category). Ames was also awarded the prestigious Department of the Year award based on the quality of work across many categories.
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Jenny Risner named the Next Superintendent of Ames Community Schools
The Ames Community School Board is excited to announce Jenny Risner as the next Superintendent of the Ames Community School District. Jenny stood out of an applicant pool of 69 individuals from across the country after participating in two rounds of interviews with the school board and a variety of representative groups that included teachers, community leaders, former board members, parents, and District staff. Ms. Risner currently serves as the Superintendent of Ocean Beach School District in Long Beach, Washington where she has been the superintendent for the past four years. Ms. Risner has been an educator for over 20 years and has served as a director of student services, director of special education, secondary principal, assistant principal, instructional coach, and elementary and middle school teacher. She received her superintendent credentials in 2013 from Washington State University, where she also received her MA in Education Administration in 2001.
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Education in the Cloud
This story was originally published in Volume 2 of Amazing Magazine that you can download here. In December, Google visited the Ames Community School District to gather promotional materials that highlight some of the many ways in which our classrooms leverage Google Chromebooks. A group of three representatives visited classrooms in Ames Middle School and Edwards Elementary and witnessed first hand how their next generation Chromebooks were being utilized. The promotional materials that they gathered, namely photos and stories, were used in January at the British Education Training and Technology (BETT) show in London, England. During the visit, their first stop was in Robyn Reisetter’s 7th grade math class where students were completing assignments with a stylus on the Explain Everything app. They then moved over to Willie Lodermeier’s 8th grade Technology Exploratory class where students showed off their TinkerCAD skills as they created models to be made in 3D printers. After lunch, the Google team visited Amy Simonson’s kindergarten class where students were engaging with math principles on their Chromebooks thanks to software provided by an Iowa company, PearDeck. Students in Kimber Spaulding’s first grade class were coding using the Scratch app. Finally, a group of 5th graders, under the direction K-5 Technology Teacher Librarian Teresa Green, were having a blast with their “maker space” time. Some students were coding Sphero balls, others Hummingbird boards, and another group was working with LEGO EV3 Bricks.
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