Thank you very much for your participation and enthusiasm this morning. I loved hearing your energy working with Amy and I am a little envious that I could not generate the same energy with the school design process, but I will keep trying. In order to access her handout, Learning Through Our Senses, click here. I look forward to seeing our students benefit from this work, and to be completely honest, I look forward to benefitting form this work as well!
I am sorry to bug you with this now, but I really want to get your feedback to help improve the quality of our school design process as well as inform our work with Amy Nary. Please take a few minutes to complete this survey.
Assessments
Just in case you wanted to know a little more information about the districts shift from ACT to CBM please read the following points.
1. Research: We now have compelling data from multiple sources showing that easyCBM CCSS Math is an outstanding predictor of Smarter Balanced Math.
2. Cost: ACT Aspire has doubled in price since our first year with it. Aspire is a bundled suite of reading, math, and science assessments and we would be paying for assessments that were not utilized at the elementary level. easyCBM CCSS Math assessments fill the same needs as ACT Aspire benchmark assessments for about half the cost.
3. RTI: easyCBM assessments have clear advantages for supporting RTI systems. For example, all benchmark and progress monitoring assessments are the same level of difficulty, which makes calculating rates of improvement simple.
Camp Highland
The tentative plan is to follow a very similar format to the previous years. We should have a schedule for the Camp Highland ready to share on Wednesday 8/30 after the Thriving Citizen team meets.
Bell Schedule
We “played” with some different bells this afternoon as you may have heard. We were trying to come up with a few alternative sounds to signal some of the transitions from lunch to recess and vice versa. We will likely need to use whistles again, but my hope is we have another bell that will help with the signal while we are outside. The following link is the tentative bell schedule, but I would suggest you wait to print a copy as there might be some tweaking needed. Although this looks good on paper, we need to run through the process with kids for a few days before we can consider it final.
Cafeteria News
I want you to be aware of some changes to cafeteria lunches and money collection. The basic rule is this; Students cannot be a part of the communication between the school and the parents regarding negative balances. No student will be turned away from the lunch-line regardless of what their balance. Nutrition services will be working with schools in attempt to be more vigilant with parents about collecting outstanding fees, but we will no longer be using hand-stamps or any similar method of communication involving the student. If you are interested in seeing the actual policy, please let me know and I can share it.
Schedules
I provided a variety of schedules in the 2017-2018 Master Schedule Google Doc. I noticed that many of you like to display the information in different ways so I tried to provide a lot of options for you depending upon your preference. If you would like some help printing your schedules to be more specific to your own classes please let me know. There are a few tricks that can make the printed version of a schedule be more clear and show only what you need.
One final thought; this smoke and heat is really dragging me down and I am sure it is impacting all of you too. Please, please, please do not push yourself beyond your limits this week. Take breaks, drink water and pace yourself. I asked if we had any fans or AC units at the district warehouse available and there are not any. If you have parents offer to let you borrow or even donate a fan or AC unit, feel free to accept it but please let me know if and when you do. We are currently forecasted to be in the high 90’s for the first few days and although I know this heat will soon be in the past, I really don’t want our first days with students to be characterized by severer weather and smoke.
I also want to add that if anyone has family and/or friends in the Houston area, please know that we (Amy and I) are keeping those communities close to our hearts and in our thoughts as they endure the storm. We have some family (Amy’s uncle and cousin) there and they have been fortunate so far, but that entire area is in for a long recovery effort. I went through two hurricanes as a kid and the force and flooding they show in the media is nothing compared to the real thing so they really need all our positive thoughts and energy.