A morning with the Crusaders — robotics club first thing, math and reading, Spanish immersion, and one very large candy monster.
I spent Thursday morning as Principal for a Day at Croninger Elementary, and I want to be honest about why that matters to me more than it probably sounds like it should. Board members read about schools constantly — enrollment numbers, test data, budget lines, facilities reports. All of it is real. None of it is the same as standing in a hallway at eight in the morning watching what the building actually does.
Croninger does a lot, and all of it was already going by the time I walked in.
Students on the floor around a practice mat with tablets, a motor, and a half-built machine — running their program, watching it fail, changing one thing, running it again. This was the first stop of the morning, and it was already fully under way.
The core of the day, and the part no visitor should skip past. Small groups, a teacher moving between them, and the ordinary unglamorous work that every other thing on this page is built on top of.
A classroom where the lesson is not Spanish — the lesson is in Spanish. Elementary students doing their schoolwork in a second language, as a matter of routine.
A cart, a lot of cardboard, and a set of teeth, destined for Croninger's Trunk or Treat. Exactly the kind of thing that makes a school feel like somewhere children want to be.
“You cannot govern a district from a board table alone. The robotics club was going at eight in the morning because a teacher decided it should be and students decided to show up for it — and that is not a line item you will find in any report I read this year. Thank you to the staff, the families and the Crusaders at Croninger for letting me spend the morning with you.”
— Noah Smith, FWCS Board President and At-Large candidateThis is a campaign website published by Friends of Noah Smith. It is not a publication of Fort Wayne Community Schools and does not speak for the district or for Croninger Elementary.
The work on safety, teacher pay and career pathways exists so that a Thursday morning at Croninger looks like this one. Help us keep it going.