Welcome!
I am extremely pleased to introduce and welcome Jay Carlton to our team as our new Elementary Resource Teacher. Jay has extensive experience working with students with disabilities from elementary and secondary settings. He relocated to Bend with his wife and two children a couple years ago. I look forward to introducing him to everyone next week.
Off Site Events Planning
If you are planning a culmination off site (i.e. Summit Auditorium) please let Shawna know asap. We want to reserve spaces as soon as possible to ensure we have the needed spaces. Please also be sure to ask for it to be added to the staff calendar.
Correction
Please note a mistake on the Friday bullet point in the Welcome Letter. The day is a flex day however it is day 189 and the dates for Friday, Tuesday are from last year. It is correct now, but sorry for any confusion.
School Design
I would really appreciate it if you could take a few minutes to read the attached reading selection. The reading selection provides addition context to our school design learning process. I found it extremely helpful for my understanding and my hope is you will too. Please click on the link below;
Assessments
We have some changes to our assessments this year. We will no longer be administering the ACT to our 3rd, 4th and 5th grade students. CBM is evidently just as predictive when it comes to Smarter Balance testing and it cost less so the district will no longer be using the test. We will get more details of the Assessment Calendar soon, but I wanted to share that bit of information now. Since we still have some work to do in order to get our math assessments established and ready to use for EBISS purposes we will continue to use CBM for all our students. It is a relatively easy test to administer and it adds a data point for reference, so until we have our own assessment system established it will serve as our data for comparison.
Here is a link to the district assessment calendar. I will also add the pertinent dates to our google calendar a little later this week.
2017-2018 Observations/Evaluation Requirements
For those of you who will be completing the evaluation this year, the process remains the same as before. For those of you who are not completing the evaluation this year, you will only have three minis for the year. Everyone is still required to complete Student Learning Growth Goals. For more info please see the following document here.
Minis will be focussed on the school design work with one or more of our three goals. In addition to looking for evidence to support our design work I will often be observing lessons with some of the following questions in mind;
- What moves do we make to establish and maintain equal social status for all students?
- What are students learning? Who is doing the thinking and the work? How do we know they are learning? What is next?
Congratulations!!
Brad Waler and his wife became new parents a several weeks ago when Maverick Lee Waler entered the world! 
Please use the link below to take a quick look at upcoming events on the calendar.
Looking forward to a great start-up to the year!
Brian