Dear HHS Community Members,

My message is the same in SY 07-08, my third year as principal:  Let’s continue to “Change our Conversations!”  I want all of us – all members of the HHS community – to talk about what really matters in the 21^st century:  Math, Science, and College.  

We are in an era of dramatic, unprecedented, global change in… 

·    …business and economics (China will become the number one English-speaking country in the world by 2010); 

·    …medicine (sadly, the advances in health and medicine are without the ethics to support proper decision-making); 

·    …technology (technology is changing so rapidly that students starting a computer-related major this year will be studying technology that will outdated by their third year of college!); 

·    …meteorology (read or see Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth for data supporting the alarming rate of global warming). 

These are just a few of the many disciplines that are rapidly changing how we think, feel, believe, even behave in this first decade of the 21^st century. (Can you believe we are nearing the end of the first decade?!) 

The HHS administrators, teachers, and I have been thinking and conversing about how to improve the quality of education at Hackensack High School, so that all our students will be fully prepared for the competitive challenges of our 21^st century workplace, a workplace that is in flux as well. 

Preparing our students to gain successful employment in the US in the next ten years requires us to get our students ready for college.  As the educational leader at HHS, I will not stop yelling from the rooftops:  Graduating from college is the standard each person must attain in order to earn a viable salary in the US today (unless a person is independently wealthy or will inherit a family business). 

(REMEMBER:  College refers to any educational component after high school, from a six-month certification program to a six-year bachelor’s/master’s program.) 

To get our students ready for college – and ultimately to be marketable in this rapidly changing 21^st century workplace – we must improve their reading, writing, speaking, critical thinking, and math skills, skills that are essential to be successful in ANY career! 

And the careers we must start urging our kids to consider are CAREERS IN MATH, SCIENCE, or TECHNOLOGY.  Engineers who can redesign our failing infrastructure (so bridges don’t collapse) or who will develop a fuel-efficient auto (so the state of Michigan can recover from auto industry annihilation), environmental scientists who can wrestle with the complexity of the causes of global warming, medical researchers who will develop a vaccine for AIDs:  These jobs are just a few in 21^st century that require successful math and science thinkers.

Our children, the children of Hackensack, Maywood, Rochelle Park, and South Hackensack are capable of being successful math and science majors in college – and they can ultimately begin a great career and earn an excellent salary – only if we start talking about and emphasizing the importance of math and science at all grade levels. 

(Here’s an added incentive:  Universities and colleges are recruiting math and science majors!  There is so much scholarship money to be had if your son or daughter (especially your daughter!) learns to love math and science enough to major in either!)  

Parents, Students, Teachers of HHS:  Start talking about what really matters today – math, science, and college – and majoring in math or science (or both!) in college! 

Why not consider taking a math or science elective at HHS in your junior or senior year, an elective that will open a wealth of opportunity for you? 

Why not risk becoming the next great scientist?

Mark Porto

Principal

Hackensack High School

(The statistics in this message are courtesy of Howie DiBlasi, creator of “Did You Know” for the Durango School District, Durango, Colorado, original and revised “Did You Know” on YouTube; with thanks to authors and educators David Warlick, Thomas Friedman, Alan November, Ian Jukes, Ray Kruzwell, Angus King, Dan Schmidt.)