Sanford S. Williams - My First Blog Post

My name is Sanford S. Williams and I have been blessed to be a member of the Manassas City School Board since 2010.  I will be blogging periodically about issues pertaining to the School Board, Manassas City Schools, and anything else the Manassas Patch lets me blog about.

I thank the Patch for the opportunity to blog about our school system.  Manassas City Schools are not perfect.  However, there are a lot of great things going on in our schools that are not noticed and not appreciated.  And we have many great teachers, staff and administrators who pour their hearts into working for our kids.  My goal is for this blog to represent an honest evaluation of our system, while helping bring some of those great things and people to light.

For example, on the School Board side, 2 weeks ago members of the School Board and Superintendent Gail Pope travelled to Williamsburg to attend the annual Virginia School Boards Association (VSBA) Conference.  We networked with members of other School Boards in Virginia, met with representatives of the Virginia State Board of Education and attended seminars.  The Manassas City contingent was invigorated and inspired to improve our school system.  I was especially intrigued by a seminar about social networking (such as Twitter and Facebook), and its use by school systems.  So many people participate in social networks, school systems must evaluate if they will use these tools to communicate with students, their families and the community.

There is always a lot going on in our schools, especially this time of year. Yesterday, our Scholastic Bowl team was scheduled to compete at Stonewall Jackson High School.  Over the next week, there is a Winter Music Concert at Metz at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, December 7, a Winter Choral Concert at Osbourn at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, December 8 (the Fall Concert was phenomenal), and a plethora of Osbourn sporting events (congratulations to Mikal Johnson for scoring her 1,000th career point in a girls basketball victory over Brentsville this week), Girls Basketball games at Metz and many other events.  Please come out and celebrate our students.

Finally, I think we can learn something from quotes, so I leave you with this:

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.  Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." George Bernard Shaw - from his play "Man and Superman"