After a successful school year featuring its share of milestones, summer is finally here. This hopefully means more time to spend with family and friends outdoors enjoying all of the beauty that Michigan has to offer. On behalf of the entire Niles school community, I extend best wishes to everyone for an enjoyable summer. Throughout this school year, our students (and staff) worked extremely hard and deserve the break.

I encourage our children to enjoy their time off, but I would also encourage them to keep up with their learning. Research shows that teachers spend up to six weeks re-teaching lessons from the previous school year, which means it is vital that children remain engaged in learning activities during the summer. Please encourage your children to continue reading regularly over the break and look for opportunities to engage them in fun, educational activities to ensure learning continues over the summer.

For me, the summer months are a perfect time to make preparations for not only the upcoming school year, but also for the long term direction the district will take in subsequent years. Our primary objective is, and always will be, student achievement. As such, we will briefly reflect on this last school year and outline our instructional and non-instructional activities for this coming fall to further strengthen student performance.

As you are probably aware, this summer at Niles Community Schools will feature improvements at our buildings as part of the bond initiative passed in May 2015. We recently held groundbreaking ceremonies at Howard Elementary and Ring Lardner Middle School and work has begun to improve energy efficiency throughout the buildings and upgrading the technology infrastructure so that Niles students are on equal footing with peers across the region.

In addition to work at Howard and Ring Lardner, we had expected remodeling efforts to begin at Eastside Connections and Ballard Elementary this summer. Unfortunately, after reviewing and evaluating 38 and 30 bids for Eastside and Ballard, respectively, we have determined that the bids received were significantly over the bond construction budget. In our continued commitment to be fiscally prudent, we have rejected the bids and will re-bid these projects in September and October, altering the scheduled start time to April 2017 and expected completion to September 2018 for both schools.

I’m sure you are disappointed by this news – and we are as well. Upon conferring with the project manager for this initiative, we believe the reasons for receiving bids that far exceeded expected costs were the time of year in which the call for bids was introduced (March 2016) and the competition for construction companies available for the projects — basically supply and demand. We are confident that by calling for bids in September and October that we will be ahead of the pack for construction projects in 2017.

I understand that community members may have questions regarding the bond initiative. I encourage those who do have questions to attend one of our public board meetings over the summer so that we can address your concerns. If you are unable to attend a public meeting, do not hesitate to contact my office. Regular construction updates and a list of board meeting dates can be found on our website, www.nilesschools.org.

While 2015-16 was a great year for Niles Community Schools, there is plenty of work still remaining to reach our strategic plan goals. As we prepare for the 2016-17 school year, everyone at Niles Community Schools looks forward to continuing to work closely with you as our partner in your children’s education.

Have a wonderful summer.

 

Dr. Dan Applegate is Superintendent at Niles Community Schools.