Email  Print

Our Schools page debuts on Aug. 16

 

The Index-Tribune will launch an ambitious effort, beginning Aug. 16, to present a wide range of information about our Sonoma Valley schools.

Our Schools will be the name of a weekly pair of pages in the printed paper, appearing every Tuesday, and a comprehensive education channel on our award-winning website, sonomanews.com, that will be designed to help both adults and students understand and access the educational resources, the opportunities and the problems in each of our schools.

Administrators, teachers and students will contribute to the variety of information provided, which will range from comprehensive calendars, important announcements and events, honors, awards and significant milestones, to in-depth articles on issues in education, outstanding teachers and students, profiles of programs and analysis of educational problems all schools confront.

There will be information on best practices from other schools, enrichment ideas, surveys and studies, national trends and hot topics in education. Feature stories by staff writers will be included, along with periodic columns by Sonoma Valley Unified School District Superintendent Louann Carlomagno, the Sonoma Education Foundation, the Boys & Girls Clubs of Sonoma Valley, the Mentoring Alliance, as well as works from student reporters and photographers.

We anticipate and hope that members of the community, and members of the school system, will contribute significantly to this effort. As the school district initiates a major effort to raise the academic achievement of high school graduates through the A-G program, we hope we can help make that effort a true community collaboration.

Coordinating Our Schools coverage will be Lorna Sheridan, a Sonoma resident who has been professionally and personally active in education for the past 15 years. Thanks to a series of corporate relocations, her three children have attended public, private, parochial and boarding schools across the country. For the past four years, she has conducted college planning workshops and worked one-on-one with juniors and seniors at SVHS as a Teacher Support Network volunteer. She is a graduate of Princeton University and she now oversees Princeton's admissions interviewing efforts in the San Francisco, Marin, Sacramento and North Bay areas. She has been a freelance writer on education issues since moving to Sonoma in 2006.

Sheridan will compile a weekly "Education Round-Up" column appearing on the Our Schools pages that will aggregate all the tidbits of school information that usually fall through the media cracks. She will also contribute her educational and journalistic expertise in ongoing news and feature articles appearing on those pages and welcomes any school and education information anyone thinks is important for the public to know. Submissions can be sent to ourschools@sonomanews.com.