New!! Get updates about JaneThursday’s Publications

New!! Get updates about JaneThursday’s Publications

Coming Soon: God’s Most Difficult Children: Urgent Lessons for families, church leaders, and educators!

Adults are often baffled by children.  Families, church leaders, and educators are constantly looking for answers to their questions about the difficult children in their lives. Teaching them about God’s love and helping them grow into responsible Godly citizens becomes a distant dream when you can’t even get them to sit down and listen! Modern thought on children’s behavior teaches us names for the behaviors that make some children more difficult to spend time with than others:  high activity level, impulsivity, low sensory threshold, negative mood, distractibility, high intensity level, irregularity, negative persistence, and poor adaptability.  God’s Most Difficult Children takes a fresh look at the children of the Old Testament: their struggles, their triumphs, and the subtle yet persistent clues about their personalities.   Amazingly, God’s Holy Word already taught the world valuable lessons about these behaviors in ancient times.  How was it that Solomon used his high activity level to enjoy so many successes while Sampson suffered for his differences? What specifically can you do to create a supportive environment that will enable a child with a high activity level to succeed in your learning or home environment? How is Adam and Eve’s fall from grace expedited by impulsivity?  How could David’s actions be explained by his high activity level and his extroverted personality? How can your approach to parenting or teaching a high activity level child influence whether or not the child lives up to his full potential? Anyone who has children of their own or supervises children in any capacity would be well served to revisit these urgent life lessons and then put strategies into place.  If you want your children to respect you, obey your rules, make and keep friends, develop strong study strategies and work ethic, then use God’s Most Difficult Children to help you put Godly strategies into place.  The book is designed for flexibility, and is excellent for group Bible studies, daily devotions, and personal reading!  Each of the ten chapters discusses multiple Old Testament stories.   Each story is complete with a scriptural text, an essential question, and a reflection questions.

Free Comprehensive School Safety Plan Template

Free Comprehensive School Safety Plan Template

Featuring detailed school plans for a variety if school emergencies. Teachers, substitute teachers, bus drivers, parents, and district supervisors can use this plan! Explicit instructions for lock down, tornado, weapons of mass destruction, fire, code yellow. The template is available in Word and PDF for easy personalization.

My first reaction to news of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School

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My first reaction to news of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut was not immediately one of grief. I immediately thought about the elementary school where I serve as principal. Will we need to revisit the school safety plan my team spent much of last summer working on? How will this tragedy change the procedures already in place? What new expectations will parents have of me and my faculty?  How will I work to reassure my young students that they are safe in my school?  As the days following the shooting passed, I began to internalize the incident as I read about it on FaceBook and the online news.  My pastor addressed the incident in our Sunday sermon.  Gradually the sadness of the incident got to me, and I joined many others around the world in grieving and mourning this horrific tragedy.

Though the issue of school safety will likely re-emerge as a hot topic in the coming months, it has always been a priority in the public school system. A team of teachers and I attended a multi-agency training last summer.  In the training we learned how to make plans for a variety of emergencies including an active shooter on campus, a chemical spill, the deployment of a weapon of mass destruction, and so on.  We revamped all of our plans and collated them into a single manual, and we spent time at the beginning of the school year presenting those plans to the faculty and staff.  Of course, we still do monthly fire drills and a yearly tornado drill. Last year, the county sheriff’s department surprised our campus with a lockdown drill, and we received high marks for the procedures we had in place.  This year after presenting the new manual, we held our own practice lock down drill so that our new faculty and staff members would be prepared.

As I alluded in my opening paragraph, national school-related tragedies bring the issue of school safety to the forefront.  I can all but guarantee that new policies will come down to us from the national, state, and local governments, and I will gladly accept any new upgrades to policies and any additional resources that come our way.  But what will I do at my school?  Most certainly, I renew my commitment to my profession.  I live each day knowing that there may come a time when—just as the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary School—I stand between harm’s way and my students.  I do not take this responsibility lightly.  I pledge to learn as much as I can about school safety.  I pledge to work to strengthen the partnership between the students’ parents and the school, so that the best interests of students can be served in any situation.

I am also renewing my commitment to a project I began before the holidays, Parent University.  The idea of Parent University is to offer a series of seminars to parents of students at my school.  The topics will include researched-based information that parents can put into place immediately to improve their relationships with their children as well as their children’s academic and social performance.  I am excited about the work I will be doing over the holidays to produce quality information and handouts that will be useful for families.

I am a person of strong faith, and I believe that we can draw upon the strength of our Heavenly Father, even in times of tragedies that we can never understand and to which we can never find closure and resolution. I believe that public schools are perfectly poised to offer top-notch, high-quality education in a safe and nurturing environment. When families and schools work together, wonderful things are possible!