OCR Text |
Show Grant succeeds in completing task of census taking for school district i Leo Durocher said it "Nice guys finish last" This time, Durocher was wrong.' Tuesday the Board of Education honored everybody's favorite nice guy; Grant Steed, who after a year of painstaking labor is finally seeing some light at the end of the tunnel: the District's census taking project is bearing fruit - Charged with directing what was surely one of the most tremendous tasks in the history of Davis District, Grant has succeeded where others might have failed because he is a nice guy. i When the job got underway just over a year ago, nobody , knew it - would be like assigning Hercules to clean the Aegean stables. Purpose - of the census: to gain the necessary J r information to make better long range plans, use scarce resources ' . more efficiently and improve the. : quality of services to the District's ' growing student population. The ! . ' Board and the , s administration I . agreed that a census was the key to effectively accommodate growth: The census taking project involved in-volved the principal of every elementary school as well as its PTA. Block plans for each school were laid out including the address of every household These are now being made into sectional maps by the county. . - - . Volunteer coordinator Cherie Cawley and In-service director- D. Betty Ashbaker held training sessions ses-sions for PTA volunteers in how to ask the census questions as diplomatically diplo-matically as possible. ; ! By last July, just at the time when ' it had been hoped the job would be completed, work - came to an impasse. Says Grant in explanation: "About half the schools reported ; they had done all they could to collect col-lect xlata, and we would have to move in and help finish the job." : : A number of PTA volunteers had suffered burnout as had many of the principals. "We had some schools : who did the job on their own, some . who hired help with it or called on us, and some who just plain left us! in the lurch." But with remarkable forbearance and the patience of Job, Grant kept at it, working with prin ipalSrnvincmg-rahy-lbsr census was a high priority project ' Some schools had more problems than others becausesof the popula- tion they served. Obtaining census data from trailer courts and apart-' apart-' ment buildings proved extremely difficult and frustrating. Then there was the trouble with the computer or bubble sheets on which the data had been written. Half had to be redone because the wrong number pencil was used and the markings didn't show up. "We've run into problems we -never dreamed existed," says Grant Enter to the rescue the team of Kay Sanders and Phyllis Allen. They and Grant have put in a tremendous amount of legwork ' checking back weekly, sometimes X daily, with schools that needed help. "I've put 10,000 miles on my 5 car doing this project" says Grant, r V "and it is always so loaded with ; census materials there's never room v even for a bag of groceries." ' : But now with the end in sight, . (though to quote another baseball great, Yogi Berra, who wisely commented: "It ain't over "til it's overl"), still the team can breathe a ,, little easier, Only about half a dozen ' schools remain on the critical unfinished un-finished list 7 . '.- - . ' - .. 'I'" , . .. .! ' "- ' ' . . ' , : V ' " .'. . . " - . a -.! For those schools who have completed the first all important phase, census data for each school 4 can be added with births, move-ins and other changes in family status so information can be updated on a regular basis. Before Grant took on the census job as part of his duties as executive assistant to the superintendent he had served for nine years as Curriculum Cur-riculum director. He came to that post from Clearfield High, where he was principal of three years, and assistant principal for seven. Grant began his career in education as a science teacher, eight years earlier when that high school opened. He became an educator by a " quirk of fate. "I started out in agriculture, earned a master's degree in dairy administration and fully intended to go into the dairy - business." But during his army ser-; ser-; vice in the veterinary corps he was called upon to do some teaching. "I decided almost immediately that was what I really wanted to do.". A loss to the dairy business, no - doubt, but a great plus for the Davis School District |