Southern York County Podcast

Hello, and welcome to Southern York County Podcast – your podcast – being recorded from the Mason Dixon library in Stewartstown, PA. We’ll talk about a Math curriculum that some school districts around the state say is raising Mathematics scores and performance at the elementary and middle school level. This month we’ll talk to one of the people who literally wrote the book on the subject - Andy Isaacs from the Center for Elementary Mathematics and Science Education at the University of Chicago.

Before we begin, if this podcast is going to continue, I am going to need 2-5 more people to help write, host, and do research. This is a great opportunity to meet new people including the leaders of your community, county, and state. For college students, this would be a great opportunity to explore areas of interest including sports, political science, the environment, local history, community planning, the arts, and more. It is also a good opportunity for anyone who would like to get experience in broadcasting whether it be writing, producing, or hosting.

If you are interested please Email me at southernyorkpodcast@verizon.net and include your full name, telephone number, and the roles you want to participate as. The roles are host, writer, or researcher. The role of the host is obvious; writer writes scripts, pre-show notes, and show notes to be posted on the web site, and helps come up with questions for guests. Researchers become topic experts, help with questions for guests, as well as find and contact guests our topics.

Moreover, if you are at our web site viewing future show topics and you see an issue in which you are interested and believe you can contribute and want to be a guest, email me and let me know. You can also email me if you don’t want to be a guest but are interested in asking questions of the guests we have scheduled. The date, time, and location of the episode’s recording are posted on that episode’s blog. If you don’t want to show up during the podcast to ask questions of our guests in person, enter the question as a comment on that show’s blog and if it’s appropriate I’ll pose your question to any of the guests you indicate. Finally, you can always email me to suggest topics for future episodes. The website is southernyorkpodcast.podbean.com. The email address, from which there is a link on the site, is southernyorkpodcast@verizon.net.

I tried to get local teachers for this episode with the following results:

Southern York County School District refused to participate in any Southern York County Podcast Episodes at all indicating that they have their own cable television station and that is the only local information outlet district residents require. Well, wasn’t that kind of them to make that decision for families, students, and teachers in their district?

After learning that Southern refused to participate, I received an email from Dr. Tracey Shank indicating that South Eastern School District generally follows SYCSD’s lead in these matters and will also not be participating in the podcast – not that they ever have participated before mind you; and get this, as far as I know, SESD doesn’t even have its own cable television station. This podcast aside, my personal opinion is that if SESD is just going to take its marching orders from SYCSD anyway, this just begs the question: Why pay a superintendent at all? Let’s save tax payers some money and just combine the districts.

I’m always inspired by the great examples of leadership coming out of our school districts. Hopefully what our kids take away from this will be examples of how not to lead; and we could finally develop a generation of great leaders again.