Civil Municipal Magazine Aug 2023

270 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 4, ISSUE 8 “Getting students to think, to interact in positive ways with each other, to build ideas, to fail and to recognize the value of failure. For example, the pencils at the Imagination Lab don’t have erasers, and the reason is we don’t believe you make mistakes. You just cross it out and keep going. We believe in mistakes as positive experiences.” Olinger spoke of the school district’s future goals. “I think right now that the goal would be for us to continue to find ways to meet the needs of what the kids are going to need for the future,” he said. “If the pandemic showed us anything, it showed us that things can change very quickly, and you have to adjust. And we did that through the pandemic. We read all the time that kids are going to be switching jobs a lot in the future. We just need to prepare them for what’s going to be coming at them in the future. We are not afraid to fail. We will take the chances that we can in order to help our kids. We work in a community and have leaders in the community that support that. We’ve been really fortunate to do things we’ve done because of the collaboration with our stakeholders.” Ballinger also cited the school district’s relationship with the Town of Plainfield. “I did want to talk about an experience the kids had back in November at the Imagination Lab,” she said. “We did a focus on first-responders, and we worked with the Town of Plainfield to ensure that someone from the fire or police department was present at each of the odysseys so students had a chance to sit down in a small group with those first-responders to get to know them as people first, to get to know what inspired them to have the jobs they have and to begin to think about those as career possibilities. In that time, we also looked at hands-only CPR for the students. We talked about how to get help, such as calling 911 or what happens when you call 911 and how can you be prepared for that.” More about Plainfield and its schools Plainfield’s proximity to Indianapolis