Earlier this week, I decided to take a trip to upstate New York while Dana Sorensen, PEBC Sr. Director of Client and System Services, was in town coaching at Westmoreland Central School District and the Oneida-Herkimer-Madison BOCES. The trip is roughly a five hour drive through some of the most beautiful and rural landscape the Northeast has to offer. In fact, the route takes you right through West Stockbridge, Mass., close to where my colleague Jessamyn Lockhart grew up and home of Shaker Mill Books, the bookstore owned by Jessamyn’s stepfather, Eric. This was the perfect place to stop and stretch and to pick up some maple syrup-making tips from the man himself – I highly recommend!
I was able to spend the entire day with Dana as she facilitated coaching sessions with instructional coaches and assistant superintendents from Westmoreland and Holland Patent school districts. We were even visited by our old friend Rocco Migliori and Kevin Healy from Westmoreland and the BOCES, respectively. At one point, I was standing off with Steve Polera from Westmoreland chatting. “I hear you have the best test scores in the region, nice work,” I said. Steve proceeded to tell me that they decided to make instruction a district priority, “and, we couldn’t have done it without Dana,” he said.
Dana has been traveling to Westmoreland for over 10 years now and I bore witness to the deep, personal relationships she has with the community. As we celebrated St. Patty’s day with the instructional coaches, they talked about their kids, their grandkids, their spouses, their colleagues…one of the instructional coaches brought Dana an extra ice scraper because she knew snow was coming in and she knew Dana most likely wouldn’t have one! I realized in that moment that our work goes way beyond our work in the classroom. The relationships our staff are able to build with clients is why they choose to work with us year after year, it’s why they refer us to their friends, and it’s why we have been so successful as an organization.
Next year, we are bringing a New York-focused version of the Phenomenal Teaching Institute to the area. It has been a long road to this point, but Westmoreland teachers will be opening up their doors to allow educators in from all over the state to see great instruction. We began this work over ten years ago with the hopes of someday getting to this point and here we are.
I was in a hurry to get home and I had a long drive ahead of me. The sun was rising, the temperature was cold, and I could barely see out the windshield of my rented mini van, but I was able to spend that time not only listening to Randy The Macho Man Savage’s biography, but in deep reflection of what it means to work for PEBC. I consider myself fortunate.
