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The Vision of the District is is a mental picture of what we want to be when we are operating at our best, it is future oriented. We want our students prepared for the 21st century. According to Thomas Friedman, author of The World is Flat; students today need to be collaborators, orchestrators, synthesizers, explainers, leveragers, adapters, and localizers. They need to be versatile in everything that they do. In order to be a collaborator they need to operate in, mobilize, inspire, and manage a multidimensional and multi-cultural workforce. For them to be a great synthesizer they will need to bring people, positions, and diverse groups together. Great explainers can see the complexity in things but explain it with simplicity. People who can leverage technology with the best that humans can do are people who can catch a problem, come up with a solution, and fix the problem for good. We want our students to be great leveragers. Students must be versatile to survive in the 21st Century. We want our students … “to prepare like someone who is training for the Olympics but does not’t know what sport they are going to enter.” They need to be like a Swiss Army Knife, a tool for all of the problems they will encounter. They will need to have a personal touch. Many jobs will require a personal touch that will turn a vanilla job into something special.

 

Our vision is to prepare our students for a future that is unpredictable and ever changing. Our staff must understand that in a society that has demanding accountability on standardized tests, we need to also prepare them for a future where tests are not the sole accountability measure. Our staff must also be all of those things. They must adapt to ever changing student populations and diversity, whether it be economic, social or academic. Technology will be the driving force for these students and their learning and our staff must embrace the use of it for student learning.

Along with those skills, students need to have mastery of core subjects and 21st Century Skills. Those core subjects include, English, Reading, World Languages, Arts, Mathematics, Economics, Science, Geography, History, and Government and Civics. The Ellwood City Schools must also promote understanding of academic content at much higher levels of interdisciplinary themes and weave them into core subjects. Those interdisciplinary themes include: Global Awareness, Financial, Economic, Business and Entrepreneurial Literacy, Civic Literacy, Health Literacy and Environmental Literacy.