Good is the enemy of great

The third shared value and belief of our district is Continuous Improvement. Good is always the enemy of great. We can never be content to be just good enough; we must always strive to be our best. As educators we must encourage our students and ourselves to continuously improve everything we do, we must aim higher, dream bigger and shoot for the stars.

We cannot look at our school improvement process as a plan to jump over a bar set at a specific height, because the bar keeps rising. We must set both short and long term goals for improvement and put systems in place that provide for constant upward movement.

The current goal of the New York State Department of Education is 100% proficiency of all of our students on all state assessments by 2012. This is an ambitious goal that the Watervliet City School District fully supports and intends to meet. In order to do this we must push to improve every day.

Even when we meet this goal, there will still be a need for continuous improvement. There will always be areas in which we can improve. Aside from 100% proficiency, we are working to see more students graduating on time, more students attending four year colleges and universities, more students making greater contributions to our community and country just to name a few.

As I said before, good is the enemy of great. It’s a little-known fact that a great white shark must always be moving forward or it will die because it is not getting oxygen from water flowing through its gills. I want all of our faculty members and students to “be the shark” and keep their forward momentum going throughout their lives.