A quick tribute to this little princess….Some of you may have met this little princess, Leia, at some point at our home (way back when we used to be able to gather). Leia and her brother Luke have been a part of our family for the past 9 years. I’ve always been a dog person, however since Amy is a cat-person, that naturally caused me to be a cat-person by relationship however Leia fully converted me. She was my trusty companion while working from home during this COVID closure and in fact, she attended a few of our WebEx Staff meetings each week. Since our move to Oregon, Leia has increasingly turned into a night time huntress. We were never fully comfortable letting her out because of the coyotes and owls in our neighborhood, but she was always relentless whining and crying about getting out so of course, we caved and let her run wild. She always came back each morning, so we started to question it less and less, but unfortunately, she has not returned for the past several days. As much as I would like to believe she ran off to join the kitty-circus, I think I have to accept that she finally met her match in terms of the predator-prey relationship – may she rest in peace. We love you and we’’ll miss you, Leia!
First Building Administrator Training Video
 | Dr. Lee presents Can’t Touch This Covid ParodyDr. Quentin J. Lee, Alabama principal, sings a rap song about Covid to MC Hammer’s classic hit of “Can’t Touch This.” As we are all getting ready to go back …youtu.be |
If you would like to get more information faster, then please see this link below, otherwise, I will continue to pick and choose items as I feel they are needed for our purposes.
New Laptops – we have 7 new laptops for staff. I will email a group of you separately depending upon the age of your machine so we can rotate these new machines into the inventory. Please work with Hannah to complete this asap, because we will rotate your machines into the hands of EAs which will give them much improved speed and connection.
Working in the Building – our building is still not quite ready for you to come and work in your rooms. With Brad out after his roof-diving escapade we are without a lead at our site and the district does not typically replace a lead during the summer. Tim is primarily working on the cafeteria floor and Walt has some different people finishing up the rooms – I will keep you posted on when the rooms are ready for you. Looking forward:
- For CDL in the fall you are permitted to work from home however you are welcome to work from the building. You are still permitted to bring your kids, but please be sure they stay within a relatively confined area of the building.
- Even if you are working from home, if for some reason you are needed in the building you will be required to report so long as you’ve been given 24 hours notice. I can think of two main reasons this might happen;
- meetings (see bullet points below)
- Parent concerns regarding CDL and need for support.
- Office staff and administration are expected to work from the building, however once we are up and running I plan to provide some flexibility for Shawna to work from home and eventually a newly hired secretary.
- Our office will be open to the public soon, however nobody other than staff will be permitted to go past the welcome area.
- We still do not have any clearance for any students to come into our buildings (meeting kinders, assessments, etc.) and the BEA and district leadership is making it clear that we cannot do this “off-line” at a park.
- We will be able to provide K-1 packets and we will need to provide some drive-by pick up times in the future for these.
- I am planning weekly grade-level in person meetings beginning on our start-up week. This will keep group sizes small and allow for in person contact. We will meet in the gym so there will be more than adequate ventilation. We can establish our standing times later, but I just wanted to share.
- For All Staff Meetings, I will do these via WebEx. I will work out a schedule for these in the near future.
- Lora will be sending a more formal survey soon regarding your intentions for work in the fall, but for my planning purposes only please let me know whether you are working in building or at home; Fall CDL 2020
Communication to families
- The plan now is for Lora to provide a parent survey to principals this Friday. I will be providing a brief welcome message with some key information at the time and then asking parents to commit to BLPO or CDL in Lora’s survey. After a week Shawna will be calling in our EAs to help with follow up phone calls for anyone who has not responded.
- BLPO registration opened up this week so we will already have some idea of how our numbers are changing.
Some other items to know;
- We are not posting class assignments early and in fact I will delay by a week due to starting late.
- While we may need to adjust some class placements due to some shifting numbers, we are not going to adjust placements due to pods, or other similar day-care arrangements. Disrupting our placement progress with all these requests will likely concentrate our underserved students into one class.
- As I mentioned in earlier posts, the district messaging will be promoting and promising consistency across grade levels for CDL. We are scheduled to receive some Standards of Practice and sample schedules this Friday and I believe these will also be shared with the public next week.
Technology Update
- I forgot to mention that we will be using the premium version of SeeSaw.
- Also the district is working on providing iPads K-2 district-wide (K-1 for us). They are working on “stripped-down” version with only the essentials for primary grades.
- More Parent “How-to videos” are in the works to help with the set up of these devices, but once these are out this should alleviate quite a bit of discrepancy in terms of access.
- This decision and process is still in the early stages, so please wait for the official announcement from the district before sharing too widely.
Staffing Update
- I am happy to announce that Becky Hildebrand will be joining the 1st-grade team!
- The primary teacher position closes Tuesday. I’ll do my best to screen these by Thursday or Friday this week. I am targeting Thursday, August 20th for interviews and possibly Friday 21st. So far, my understanding is Anna, Deanna and Alicia are interested in being on the interview committee – let me know if I missed anyone.
- Student Services – FYI – I will most likely be posting for a 0.5 Student Services after we get the teacher position squared away.
- Secretary – still holding off on this one for another week or so.