In addition to the individual school accomplishments throughout NPSD, great things also took place district-wide and in various departments.
The core mission of the North Penn School District is to educate children. To that end, NPSD made every effort on the operational side to reduce costs so that more funds could be directed to instructional needs. Administration made significant progress in many areas including copying and printing, contract renegotiations, expansion of bidding, living with vacancies, health care costs and transportation services.
School Nutrition Services
Providing healthy lunches to our students is another im- portant goal of NPSD. Modifications and improvements made to the School Nutrition Services (SNS) Department and its offerings and services helped to increase the number of meals sold and the school district’s bottom line. The significant results include increasing breakfast participation by 300 meals a day, increasing à la carte sales by $40,000 per year, and increasing internal and external catering by $6,000 per year. Also important, federal and state reimbursements increased for both breakfast and lunch due to better communication of the guidelines to families.
Last school year, SNS also worked extremely hard to develop exciting, appetizing menus that not only met federal and state guidelines, but were wholesome and appealing to students. Taste-test panels of students were key in creating these new menus.
Technology
A priority of the 2010-2011 school year, increased use of interactive technology to help differentiate student instruction, made an impact at both elementary and sec- ondary levels. At Bridle Path, Inglewood and Oak Park elementary schools, NPSD implemented iPad projects and, at Knapp elementary school, NPSD introduced iPods for a pilot reading program.
Also in the spring of 2011, NPSD entered into a contract with the Montgomery County Consortium and the Brandywine Virtual Academy to form the North Penn Virtual Academy. This option for students already enrolled in cyber schools became available in the fall of 2011 to NPSD students.
Communications
The district’s website, www.npenn.org, received a complete overhaul last year to improve its usefulness, flexibility and look. The results are that more people than ever are logging onto the site for information. In 2010-2011, more than 2.5 million people from 138 countries visited our site. Once at www. npenn.org, they frequented an average of 3.4 pages for a total of nearly 9 million pages viewed. And many of these visitors, more than 27%, were first-time visitors, meaning the changes that were made are driving traffic to the site.
The Office of School and Community Engagement also started its newest publication, North Penn E-Matters. This monthly newsletter is emailed to more than 10,000 addresses at the beginning of each month. Also new during last year is “North Penn Answers,” a North Penn Television (NPTV) program in which school board