Transcript
AI TRANSCRIPT
This transcript was generated automatically from audio using AI and hasn't been reviewed by a person — it can contain mistakes, including plausible-sounding sentences that were never actually said. Treat it as a starting point, not a verbatim record.
[0:00]
Yes, my name is Greg McLean, I'm the supervisor of athletics and physical education for the Jackson Township School District, primarily I am in Jackson Liberty High School. My primary function is to function for this school and McCullough, but I also oversee athletics for the district in general too, so if you ever have any questions, you can reach out to me, whether it's educational or athletic based, that'd be there to help you guys out. And I just like to say I have a plan, we actually have an audience. Tonight for all you at home, we have a great presentation and story for you.
[0:28]
We are on the question, as we said, to look at some opportunities for families and students with disabilities
[0:34]
looking for athletic opportunities and recreational opportunities that are either in the school district itself
[0:40]
or throughout the state in New Jersey to help you out for all age groups.
[0:45]
So that's what we have in store for you for tonight.
[0:48]
So these are the major topics that we're going to discuss, you know, the Challenger League,
[0:53]
Special Olympics, and some recreational department things that we offer in town for students with special needs, and look at our school-based athletics, whether the elementary school, middle school or high school.
[1:08]
So, and then at the end we'll have a question and answer session where you guys can talk today and ask anything from what you've seen in the presentation or other concerns that things you might want to discuss.
[1:21]
So the Challenger League, this is popular amongst a wide range of students in Jackson and across the state, just to let you all know.
[1:29]
So this is something that your students and kids can get involved in.
[1:34]
This is the contact you would want to look at.
[1:38]
It's a little bit more now. Challenger League is mainly for a little bit of kids that are older in elementary school, but they do get some middle school kids involved in this program.
[1:47]
So it's something to think about if you have a younger child, something to think about in the future.
[1:54]
So the way it works, mom and the notion county kind of work together to form these ladies with the kids in the areas in a different surrounding town.
[2:04]
So that's what that said telling you up here.
[2:07]
and of course students are eligible to participate until they're about 21 years old and normally students
[2:15]
with disabilities without more their early participation may be in a school athletic team can take
[2:20]
advantage of these programs within the school district itself and outside the school district.
[2:26]
So it's something to think about for your children. It's a great program and it's been around a long time.
[2:32]
If you have any questions about the Challenger League in district or out of district, I can
[2:38]
help you with that.
[2:39]
In the context, my email is in the presentation and we're going to post a presentation
[2:44]
itself to the website, too, not just the video.
[2:48]
And within the presentation, I'm going to show you there's some hyperlinks.
[2:51]
You can also use some of them today.
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You can scroll around to write linked up web pages to help you out with additional information.
[3:00]
So, this is a little sampling of what most of the challenger leagues will do, especially
[3:05]
in Jackson, our school district.
[3:08]
So if you love them, they offer a couple of sports in each season, and these are co-ed
[3:15]
type activities for your child, and normally what they'll do, they'll play, they'll have
[3:20]
these type of games and activities at Jackson Memorial High School, essentially located in
[3:25]
in town, you know, Liberty Grunga Grunga, opposite side.
[3:29]
Jack's world was built more in the center of town.
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So it's within 10 minutes give or take for anyone
[3:33]
in the community to get to.
[3:35]
You know, Liberty is 20 minutes away from people
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that live out of their great adventure,
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or so depending on traffic.
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So we try to house it in Memorial.
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Lots of elementary programs sometimes are hosted
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at Switzerland for the same theory
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of a central location for the parents that drive to.
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So if you look, the games usually played on Sundays,
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transportation's provided, uniforms and things like that.
[4:01]
Even weight games are played at participating schools
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usually on a Sunday in the morning.
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So that's going on here in spring.
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And this could grow.
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These programs wouldn't have all been at the time,
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but of course, they could change that based on the interest
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and demand.
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So this could grow over time with popularity.
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If
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you look what I put up here is what they try to do for the kids is at the end of the
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spices, at the end of a flat, local, or cyber season, they might have some kind of celebration
[4:36]
or banquet or something for the kids when it's over, that's what I put up here.
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Usually they do that in the fall on the spring, not in the winter.
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The winter's tougher because of gym space and eligibility and what's going on with weather
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and different cancellations that happen.
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So, for example, it's free to usually have some kind of celebration when it's over.
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There's some examples that they've been doing over time.
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Anytime you're looking at the presentation, if you're at home, when this is uploaded,
[5:03]
you can just take the pointer, and if you scroll over images, you'll see a change from
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the arrow into the pointer figure, and when that happens, you can click on it, and it
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takes you to different, this one will take you to, you know, quality services, lots of children
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that do the challenge relief statistically, they have all sorts of disabilities, of course,
[5:26]
but statistically, autism is the most popular, you know, for better or worse, on a special
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need that these children are dealing with in the challenge relief. It is a good lead for
[5:37]
children with those type of special needs. So I linked it up to that side. I'll show you
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some more as we go.
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This is another thing you can get involved in, almost at age, it's
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There are criteria to make the special Olympics, I'll show you some of that, but it's definitely
[6:00]
something to think about it.
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This is actually a picture in town hall from Jackson, a people who participated in the
[6:07]
special Olympics in the past, I just want to throw that out there.
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That's a local contact that's on the slide.
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What I tried to special Olympics is run throughout the country.
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This is going to focus more on New Jersey and specifically ocean and mom of county because
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it's so big to special Olympics.
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That is what this slide is telling me.
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I did put on here some of the requirements could be eligible for special Olympics.
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You look at the slide down here.
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You're going to delay determined by standardized measures.
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You know IQ tests and different types of assessments that a private physician or therapist may do.
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or even a school-based type of cognitive or intellectual development test to see where
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you stand for those type of things. So this is what this is some of the criteria that
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goes into the special limits.
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What I did is there's numerous activities with this, and
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once again, I'm not going to go through all of this, but I've linked every sport that
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they're offering at this time. So for instance, if you they have a wide range, like it's the
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full right now, you know, soccer is a popular one, so you can just click on that and as long
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as your internet connection is working, you know, I linked it up, so each sport is linked
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to give you additional information and to give you upcoming events, so you can see what's
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going on for any individual sport up there,
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so you know, they will offer a wide range of
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activities for winter sports, skiing, snowboarding,
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tennis,
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swimming golf, whatever you could think of.
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Now I broke it down to Mama Denosian County's
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a little further, this is where we're all on.
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And then Mama Denosian County's, we make up an area,
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they break the state up into different sations or areas,
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where area is set, all right?
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So area six is the Mama Bosian County area,
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and this is some of the activities and spurts,
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and that's a lot more than once again,
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And same as before, when you're at home and you want to look at the presentation, you
[8:23]
could go back and you could scroll around, look, snow-shooting.
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It's actually an activity.
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Yes.
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I know.
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I know.
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And if they really do this, you know, it's, it's, and they have races.
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So there you go.
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Yes, it is real.
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And it is there.
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All linked up for you.
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Now again, can this list change? Of course it can, so this is accurate based on, let's say, yesterday, what I was reviewing, I'd say I'm kidding, but the point is, everything is based on demand and interest level, so of course the list can be modified at any time, but this is the general idea of what's been going on.
[9:08]
And
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also, what I did is I just linked it up to the actual website itself if you want to go
[9:18]
right to the beginning of it, and I linked it on with the notion counties to show you
[9:23]
exactly where you could look for some areas of exports.
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See, this is still, I took it off there.
[9:29]
They update this, and you could look to this for, you know, up-to-date, or the most up-to-date
[9:35]
information on our area for the Special Olympics.
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contact information, local events, and there she is.
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The person I put on our slide is also there.
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The same information with a phone number for you guys.
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The recreation department,
[9:59]
we can do a whole segment on the recreation department itself
[10:03]
because they offer lots of things in the town from youth sports,
[10:07]
all the way to summer recreational programs for kids to get involved in.
[10:11]
And this is going to focus more on, of course, the people that are disabled with special needs.
[10:16]
They actually have a department that deals with this in town, so if you haven't been
[10:21]
involved in it, you might want to add more lean, actually, you know, she's great, she's
[10:25]
been doing this a long time.
[10:27]
Many of you, if you haven't gotten involved in this out there with the audience, you should.
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There's the contact information.
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And I just put down some general information of what the department tries to accomplish
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you. They serve the disabled and handicapped students in town. They do different activities
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which I'm going to show you. They change these a lot depending on the surveys and interests
[10:51]
of the town itself.
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Now, it fails, they do sports, and they're going to do activities. So
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we'll focus on some athletic things first. Now, again, they have one for each season right
[11:09]
right now. Sorry, our fans are both softball and bowling. Those are those are ones. And this
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is this is mostly accurate. Again, could this change short? Because this is what historically
[11:21]
they've been doing. Again, location could change. They let you know times what it is. But I
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what I try to do is give the audience you guys out there a general idea of what's been happening
[11:32]
in the past is to give you, you know, if you're thinking about doing this, you can kind of get
[11:35]
a gauge for what a commitment level you're into. There it is. It's usually a six-week
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type thing. Usually they use local fields in town of course it's Jackson Bay so you're
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not going to be driving out of town. They try to use a local, a local school gym like
[11:51]
a SWITLINK or something. Usually it's a bit slower than a centralized location. But sometimes
[11:55]
you can't always get a SWITLINK. So you could be out of Crawford, could be out in LGN. One
[12:00]
of the places that has a nicer, newer gym. Then I use elementary schools, truthfully,
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And it's not just because they want to, it's because the middle schools and high schools have a lot of school-based sports going on.
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So you can't always get the gym time.
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The elementary schools gyms aren't being used this much, so they're more open to the public.
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And they're more younger student-friendly.
[12:24]
Sometimes for a basketball, you know, a swindler can lower the baskets down to 8 feet.
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It's not always the best idea for them to be shooting on a 10 foot basket.
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So these are some of the things we think about, the talented things about when they're setting up these programs for the kids.
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But these are some of the most recent activities that the talent ship has done under this department.
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And again, let's just take a look.
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These, these I didn't need to hyperlink because what I couldn't do was I have a hyperlink to the actual department, I'll show you in a minute.
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So, this is accurate until today.
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Now, again, I wrote here, it's subject to change based on demand,
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because the town may add or delete a program they've done.
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Even last year, when I was up here, I wasn't actually up here last year.
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It's so nice to see a real live audience.
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I'm so glad that some people came out to see me tonight,
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because last year I was sitting behind my computer screen doing that virtually.
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And nothing, when they told me to do this presentation again,
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I was really happy that I was going to be in person.
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I'm a big believer in connecting with people face-to-face.
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This screen just doesn't work.
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Yeah, I have some stuff.
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So I'm a little more excited this year
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to stand up and try to even talk about this
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up to a live audience.
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So here you go.
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There it is. It's subject to change.
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These are some of the things they have going on right now.
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Some of the activities for, there's an age restriction on it
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or whatever you want to call it, age limits,
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minimum age requirement type deal.
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Like a prom night, they try to do it maybe for like a middle school age group
[13:56]
up, you know what I mean. But most of them are for any age, you know, younger kids,
[14:00]
most of them are for younger kids too. This is something that definitely get
[14:04]
bobbed out there. You should definitely contact the town. No matter what level
[14:08]
special age your child has, look into it. You might as well take advantage
[14:12]
of all the town and the school district has to offer.
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And that's what I did here. Instead of linking each individual
[14:20]
activity which they didn't really do a good job as far as
[14:24]
That's the special Olympics and the challenge reliefs they have like individual links to it.
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The town has a nice webpage that you can just research about it.
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So that's why I just did this and I said go there, you know, go here and you can navigate
[14:38]
around.
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You know, you come over here, programs and activities,
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there's the old jacks and jungle gym right
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there, my justice complex.
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Truth is, that's the video that they do, they do nice jobs taking care of that, it's been
[14:54]
around a long time.
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I mean I took my kids, my kids are almost 20 years old and it took them there.
[15:02]
It's good for sensory integration. It's good for physical activity, motor coordination. And you don't get charged to go there. You've got to look for those types of activities. You can utilize township facilities with no cost or a low cost as a parent. So yeah, if you can scroll around this and see what they have to offer. And look, you see these are some of the things I took off their website. Some of the activities they're worth.
[15:30]
working on it. So they updated this regularly. That's why I linked it to you. Get up to
[15:36]
data information and the presentation itself.
[15:48]
Yeah, what I was showing. That's okay. This slide right here, the question from the
[15:53]
audience was, was there a time frame for the sports and stuff there is? I tried to give you guys
[15:59]
what they historically did. They'll put that on their website. They'll give a
[16:03]
you have a flyer out with details on when it's going to start.
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This is kind of what they've done.
[16:07]
These activities you have to look online for.
[16:14]
Now, leading into the finale is some school-based athletics.
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Now, if some of you out there, your children
[16:20]
are still in elementary school, so you know,
[16:23]
but eventually stay with us and we hope you do,
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and grow through the Jackson community
[16:28]
in the Jackson School District, you'll
[16:30]
eventually be able to take advantage
[16:31]
of many of these programs, even with children
[16:34]
or what special needs can still get involved in school-based athletics.
[16:38]
You, the parents, have to decide. You know your children are best, you know.
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They don't know what they can do. You know, you make those decisions at home.
[16:45]
But the opportunities are still there. They really are.
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So, what I did here to make it, just because you've got to remember,
[16:54]
we take middle school and high school sports as a lot, so it's a lot there.
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So, I tried to make it simple for you.
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and when you're home and you're bored and you're scrolling around, I click the school
[17:04]
mascots on here and hyperlink them to the actual school webpage, right? So,
[17:12]
Swidlake, I took you to the air page to look around with their offering.
[17:19]
This one,
[17:19]
that's Rosenhower, the roadrunners, Coleman, you know, and the rest of the
[17:24]
elementary schools down here, Johnson, Robert Elms, and as a little historical
[17:29]
I put the logos here, going from left to right, and the board of the schools were built.
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This was like, of course, the Jackson's first elementary school.
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That goes an hour.
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And coming down here in a moment, you know, Johnson probably wouldn't end now.
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To that order, that's how the schools were built in Jackson.
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And at the end, over here, you got our against middle school, which came first, then become, around 1994.
[18:00]
So, the middle schools are offering those sports at this time, and they're always adding stuff to look at baby day at volleyball.
[18:08]
That's out there. We don't know if that will happen or not, but, you know, you never know.
[18:13]
Interest levels there, that's something things are offering.
[18:16]
Now, the elementary schools for the people, the other day, they started a program,
[18:20]
and it's a mural sports program for all students in the school, whether it be special needs or not,
[18:25]
to get kids involved. So they're starting at this year, and it's successful. It's running right now. They're doing basketball in the pool. They might do flag football and just get off the ground.
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Activities for kids to get involved in.
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So they offer that at all?
[18:44]
All the elementary schools are starting, like right now they're doing basketball.
[18:50]
Yeah, they're starting them off with that, so that's why you could, you could even call
[18:54]
the school, you could look at their website, and if you missed the fall one, maybe you could
[18:57]
think about doing something, having a child or something in the spring.
[19:01]
This for football, especially flag, flag works for a wide variety of different kids with
[19:08]
different needs.
[19:09]
It does, we should run, you know, you're for the flag, you're playing with the kids, you're
[19:15]
together as a team, you're allowed to run around and stuff like that, it's okay.
[19:20]
So, this one is probably easier a little bit than basketball.
[19:26]
Basketball, you can do it, but I've coached it.
[19:29]
I've worked with little kids in town with this at ball levels.
[19:33]
If we require a little bit more skill, you know, trying to get the ball in the hoop is not
[19:36]
as easy, but playing, running around, playing flat, football, you get the ball, if you get
[19:40]
to run and have fun, it's a little, definitely a little easier than the basketball went
[19:45]
Honestly,
[19:47]
now taking the shifting gears and going into high school, there's a lot of sports
[19:54]
in high school.
[19:56]
And again, today I said, I don't know how many more we can keep adding, but what I did
[20:00]
here too for you is I linked up to Jackson Jaguars.
[20:04]
Jackson Memorial High School, that was the first school in the course of Jackson, then came
[20:07]
Jackson Liberty 2006.
[20:10]
Jackson Memorial, you took him probably back in 1964, you go back without him.
[20:15]
That's the original, right?
[20:16]
there. That's where I came from. Jackson, Jack, or land. But I am proud to be
[20:23]
aligned. So we're all on Jackson. So let's take a look at what Jackson has to
[20:27]
offer you, right? So what I did, I linked up not to the school's web page. I
[20:31]
linked it up to the athletic web page. This is a good place to look. Someday if
[20:36]
you're kids at high school, you look at your kids going to high school. I linked it
[20:39]
up so you can just see what the high schools have to offer. From scheduling to
[20:44]
physicals that might be necessary to any of the programs you want, right here.
[20:56]
We've got the same way to the same page. So again, these sports are all offered,
[21:01]
many of them are, many of them are for poised and gross levels of the sports,
[21:06]
they go by season.
[21:15]
I'm sure the audience has some questions that we can get into a
[21:18]
nice little, I love this part where we can get to a dialogue. But for
[21:21]
common anxiety, we're going to, we're going to stop recording at this time, all
[21:26]
you at home. I hope you look at the video again. Take a look at the presentation.
[21:30]
That is hyperlinked. It will all be uploaded soon. Thanks for joining us.