RSS

Undeniable Success

By Jay Treadway

August 6th, 2009

I have Google Alerts set-up for several topics that I’m interested tracking on a regular basis. One of topics I track is “School Resource Officer.” This past week an article that was published recently in the The Florida Times-Union came across my radar. It highlighted a program started in Duval County (Florida) this past school year that was deemed to be an “undeniable” success.  

I thought the program was simple, yet surprisingly effective. The program uses school resource officers that are already in place in the schools. So the program really doesn’t have any “out of pocket” costs per sea. The idea is to match-up SRO officers with troubled kids one-on-one.

The program is a first-year initiative called Project Safe Students in Schools that paired poor-behaving students with school resource officers. The results the first year have been dramatic. Students arrests during the 2008-09 school year were down 24 percent. Arrests for battery were down 28 percent and drug arrests were down a whopping 47 percent!

Not only were arrests down but all of the students in this program finished the school year! Pretty impressive.

A spokesman for the Sheriff’s Office in Duval County said “The results are undeniable. The objective is to work with these students when they’re making poor decisions early on, so they can improve their behavior and so that they can get a good education and graduate – and in doing so it keeps the schools safer.”     

Each resource officer met with his or her students a minimum of three times during the student’s first month in the program. I think that’s pretty doable for most SRO officers in the schools. Even if they just met with a few kids it would be better than nothing.

Sometimes we just need to do the little things like Project Safe Students in Schools to have a big effect in our communities. Think of the reduced financial cost to society during the lifetime of just one of these kids who turns themselves around. That financial number alone would be huge. But more importantly, it makes our schools safer and the affected kids’ lives much more productive. Good stuff.   

To read the whole article click here.

Comments (0)

RSS

Be Like Tiger? (Part II)

By Jay Treadway

August 4th, 2009

Tiger Woods has done it again. This past weekend he won his 69th tournament in just over 10 years on tour! He now only follows Sam Sneed and Jack Nicklaus on the all-time wins list. And, he’s done it much faster than the other two. Seven years faster than Nicklaus and eight years faster than Sneed. Remarkable stuff. 

tiger

So, as far as golf goes, there is Tiger up here and everyone else down there. No doubt about it. Since 2006 he has won 21 of 39 tournaments he has played. His skills are remarkable. He plays with essentially the same clubs and balls as everyone else, but he wins over 50% of the time!  I play golf so I know how hard it is to accomplish what he has done.

I think what Tiger has done has a parallel in business. We at Treadway Graphics/Geiger try every day to be the best at what we do. In our case, we sell essentially the same merchandise as a lot of other people.  Everybody knows that. However, we try real hard to make sure that this is the only similarity we have with our competitors.

 Isn’t that what we all want? To be like Tiger? The best of the best? I know I do. Whether you’re a police man, teacher, businessman or student you should try to be the best you can be. In business, if you’re not the best, you’re just one of the rest. That’s a big hill to climb and some days we fail and fall down that hill a short distance. But the next day we pick ourselves up and continue the climb. 

I hope my customers would say that Treadway Graphics/Geiger “is up here and the others are down there.” That would be very satisfying. We try to be the best of the best, just like Tiger. I’m sure you want to do the same. Good luck to you (and me)!

Comments (0)