2023 SUPERINTENDENT’S CONFERENCE DAY

Board President, Dr. Andrea Macari’s, Superintendent’s Conference Day Speech
“We are all on a collective journey together…”   

Chris, thank you for sharing your journey with us.  We are so beyond fortunate to have you as our superintendent.  You are so smart, so hardworking, and so proud of the work that happens here.  But most importantly, you care…. you care about our colleagues, you care about out community, and you care about our students.

The Board of Education is excited about the new North Shore Journey framework, and we look forward to seeing it in action with the district’s children. 

But journeys are not just for children. The North Shore Journey is also about you too. 

This year, our district is 672 employees strong: 
bus drivers
nurses
custodians
security guards
social workers
psychologists
cleaners
maintenance workers
administrators
teachers
food service workers
monitors
aides
teaching assistants
clerical workers

Each one of us is united in our commitment to providing our students with this very special, very unique North Shore experience. 

But as we work together as colleagues, we also are individually trying to make sense of where we fit in the world. 

Maybe this is your first superintendent’s conference day, the day before your first official day of work at your first job, wondering whether these strangers seated around you will become your new friends (they will). 

Or maybe you are sitting here today, contemplating whether this will be your last superintendent’s conference day…. questioning whether you will miss your work friends just too much to ever retire.

Or perhaps, you are somewhere in between.  

As a community of colleagues, we have stood beside each other during great adversity (divorce, illness, death) and during times of great celebration (tenure, marriages, births, recovery from sickness).  By doing so, we have walked together on each other’s path.

As a psychologist, I do worry about the journeys we don’t know about. Those silent journeys that we all have but don’t share with anyone.  Maybe it is a struggle with infertility, challenges with substance use, caring for an aging parent, or supporting a special needs child who needs you, but you just ran out of ideas on how to help her.        

Life is not easy.  But as I often tell my patients, it is not supposed to be. It is these milestones, these hardships, that make us who we are…. that push us toward personal growth and a greater sense of understanding of ourselves and the world around us. 

And for each one of us, North Shore is part of that. You could say we are all on a collective journey together.    

So, while Superintendent’s Conference Day is billed as a day of professional development, I hope it is also a day of self-reflection on your own personal journey. 

Where have you been?
Where do you want to go?
And who were the people who helped you along the way? 

My guess is that many of them are in this room right now.

On behalf of the Board of Education, we wish you a year full of purpose and meaning.  Good luck tomorrow. We know you will do good work.