"You want me to wear this tomorrow, right?" I asked the parent who was anxiously hovering around my office door this morning before school. "No, now!" he said. "We need the penguin outside this morning welcoming kids into school."

What we won't do for our schools. I'm sure our website will feature various shots of Mr. Downs in his penguin suit later this week. It's all part of our annual Book Festival and this year's "Under the Ice" theme. Polar explorer Ann Bancroft will speak Friday evening when I am in New York with 6,200 conference attendees. So the penguin suit is my peace offering for missing the big event.

Not sure yet how we'll measure the success of this NAIS blogging experiment. I've had one email in relation to a posting, but our tech guy says that perhaps NAIS Heads and others may be active readers, just not participants who comment or send emails. So if you're reading this and have a particular preference for what we "cover" at the conference, send me an email at mdowns@moundsparkacademy.org  

I'm thinking more along the person-on-the-street kind of reporting. Dane is doing such a splendid job covering the richness and diversity of the conference offerings and mixing it up with useful NYC information. I figure there's a Pulitzer in it for one of us....