I think back to bringing immersion into the district and you know reallocating staff and training staff and bringing up A New Concept for the district and for Chinese and Spanish Immersion there's a lot of districts that can't get off that ground and stay with that because you need constant Community Support not detractors and um what I think the Magic in Minnetonka is that the willingness of the community to say wow you've done some great things for our kids we've seen it pay off what's the next thing

this district has has defined Excellence as every student deserves an excellent experience and striving to meet Excellence for every student

we've been able to create all kinds of different Pathways and opportunities from bringing the language immersion program all the way through to 12th grade to us expanding uh thing into things like Vantage and momentum for all of our different types of high school learners

it's incredible to think of a district that's funded at about the 50th percentile across the state and yet hasn't made a budget cut in over a decade it's a a strong statement to the strength of the board and the supportive Community because that is that's really unheard of

Vantage has been a big thing that had helped me in high school transitioning into college and that's something that I've noticed for sure that students without that experience um are just don't have as much of a head start

I think that Minnetonka does a great job of you know inspiring excellence in those programs but really like in all all aspects of every school as well I'll talk about the high school especially and just does a great job of ensuring that students are supported as the whole student instead of just you know with their academics

storytelling is one of the biggest things that we do on our team and we tell it in so many different ways and it's really exciting to be able to now have a podcast as an additional way for us to tell the amazing stories of what our students and staff are up to

I came from higher ed and we used to wonder why we didn't get more students from Minnetonka it's good school but I worked at and why wouldn't we and I learned about our Minnetonka research here collaborative research and at the school I was at which was really Advanced when it came to collaborative research we offered it for juniors and seniors in college and the case studies that our students are doing in Vantage are things that our MBA students were doing their final semester

one student said it very clearly to principal Erickson if you're just going to add a class here or there and kind of beef up what we already have just call it Minnetonka trades because that's what it's going to be but if you're going to do something that really takes us to a new place call it momentum and Jeff said we're doing momentum

we we've really spent a lot of time taking that vision and talking about the importance of excellence in a lot of different areas and the vision actually chunks it out and everything from facilities to finances to community our goals this year we've we've spent time talking about excellence in student learning and looking at the important ways to focus on that the second one is excellence in well-being connection and belonging so making sure everybody has that that place and feels connected and feels valued and seen

I think there's deliberate um programming and involvements that you can get involved in there's like principals advisory council at the high school level Innovation teams other activities as well but I think there's just this kind of General feel and vibe that the students kind of are really involved in what goes on

we've spent a lot of time as board members we're assigned to different committees and so we get to go and interact with those different committees at the district level to hear what the parents and the staff members that are involved in the Committees are doing and and ask them questions have them have a chance to have a relationship with us

there are students at mme that in a class created solar suitcases they learned how to build these and they're sent to Uganda so that families and a school can be powered by these so they they light up areas of that I mean incredible that kids are building this in middle school and then it's helping a community