School Supplies/Classroom Funds/PTO budget
PTO is not going to conduct a Giving Campaign this year or at least not while we are in CDL, however they are considering a sort of “passive ask” along with a way to give toward supporting families in need (FAN) during CDL and Hybrid Models. Families can still donate the suggested $30 for school supplies via the PTO website*, however without the Giving Campaign nor our Ice Cream Social, we should not expect much for this particular fund. As I shared with you in the spring, there is a balance of about $19,000 left in the budget. As we start the year we are not going to ask the PTO to release anything from their current balance of $19,000 to the school/teachers.
*As a school, we will not be asking money from parents for any supplies or any other purposes. The PTO website will have this link and information, but we will not be communicating this with parents via any school communication. This is a district-wide directive.
We will start by using the school funds (and your remaining class room fund balances from last year) to purchase school supplies for students. We got some great news that the district will be infusing some funds into our school accounts to address the need for individual school supply kits. This increase is $10 per student. Using this increase we will start with a $20 per student amount that each teacher will receive.
Work with your teams to establish school supply kits that will need to go home and also be thinking about the school supplies that need to be here at school for when we move to hybrid. I believe there is already some work being done on this with our district teams, but you will probably want to take some time to figure out what will best serve our needs.
As we move into the school year and learn more about our needs we can generate requests to the PTO to utilize the 19,000. Ideally we would identify some different and unique experiences, events, resources for the PTO to fund since these are the items that tend to generate more enthusiasm for the school and the PTO, however if we are in a place where we simply need their support to fund more classroom supplies or replenish, then it serves as safety net. Also, we will likely see the classroom fund line item grow over time, so I would hope there will some more funds available in that pot as well.
The bottom line(s);
- You can still plan on ordering supplies.
- You and your team need to establish what goes home and what will be needed when we return. We may also get some details from the district on these kits or lists.
- You will receive funding, however this funding is initially coming from our school budget rather than the PTO budget.
- Without considering your carry-over balance you can count on spending approximately $20 per student in your classrooms.
- You might want to talk with your team about pooling your carry-over from last year to share the costs across the grade level.
- All orders will go through Shawna so we can work on bulk ordering. Do not go buy on your own.
- In the near future our PTO Board is ready to fund special requests, needs and/or items that might come up with that $19,000, however we all recognize that we may not know what those things might be right now.
BrainPop
BrainPOP will not be continued by the District as it is a 55,000 cost to the district and they have some redundant apps already purchased (Newsela, Discovery, etc.). If we want to continue it, then cost falls on us. It’s a little under $2000 for the entire school. We saw quite a bit of use during the spring distance learning and with K-1 receiving iPads, I could see this resource getting used more and more use of this program in the coming year. I am curious to hear(read) your thoughts on using it and whether we should buy the subscription for another year and here are the options;
- Ask PTO to fund it as a request from the whole school.
- Ask PTO to share the cost with the school budget.
- Cover the cost from the school budget (This is doable, however it’s not a typical for me to spend this kind of chuck of money so early in the year so there is a risk it could impact us later in the year.)
- Don’t buy it, we can use the district’s alternative apps in it’s place.
Startup Week Plan
- As I mentioned earlier, I do not plan on taking too much of your time during our startup week (Sept. 1st). You all have a lot to do but I do want to balance some time to connect and see each other. Sorry, no Art with Alma this year. )=
- You should plan on one all-staff meeting that week via webex (20-30 minutes) and one in-person team-meeting (30-45 minutes) with me that week or the next week. I am almost ready to calendar these times, but my own calendar is still changing frequently as we get closer to the start.
- Plan on limiting your interacting or mixing with the different grade levels. Think “staff cohorts”. More on this later.
Communication to families
- I will start up my weekly communication with families this week with our Newsletter. This is a little earlier than usual, but…well, you know, nothing really qualifies as “usual” right now does it?!?
BLPO Enrollment
We will be tracking these numbers shortly but as of today we only have 5 students signed up. Some things to know about BLPO.
- This is being stated as a year-long commitment. (However, at the elementary level it’s not as crucial for them to remain enrolled for an entire semester or year, so technically we can take them back at any time into our CDL/Hybrid program.) The semester or year long commitment is really most relevant at the secondary level.
- Some students may double-dip – completing CDL in addition to a BLPO course on line (for example, math). This is OK. There might be some tricky conversations to navigate, but this is a way for some families to find extra challenge for their students.
Instruction
- Message from Skip on Standards of Practice and Schedules: This year, our district is working on developing a common elementary school schedule and teaching standards of practice in order to support a more uniform roll-out of Comprehensive Distance Learning. Although we don’t have final materials to share at this point, they will be coming within the next two weeks and we felt that it would be important for teachers to know what they might expect. This work is being informed by community and staff feedback, as well as input from BEA, the school board, and teacher leadership teams. This schedule outlines teaching times as well as teaching expectations and teaching tools that allow our district to align with state guidelines/requirements. Opportunities to learn more about these standards of practice and ask questions about them will be provided shortly after they are released.
- To facilitate sharing lessons and consistency for your teams, please designate somebody to create and maintain a google folder with your content for the year. Once it’s created please share it with me.
- It’s important to make everyone on the team an “editor” so everyone can add or modify material in the folders, but it’s a good practice to designate one person to keep it organized.
- Within that folder you should create separate folders for Writing, Math, Storyline, etc.
- If you are uncertain where to start or how to start and/or this feels even just a little overwhelming then just let me know and I will get you started.
Technology
WebEx things to know…
- Once we signed a contract with WebEx we then moved off their free version and onto a paid, supported version. For some reason this meant our WebEx address changed so settings need to be adjusted by everyone. Here is a quick video you can send to your staff in an upcoming note on how to change their settings.
- WebEx has some fabulous changes coming our way that we are hoping will be in effect Sept 1st. The biggest is the addition of breakout rooms. The instructional tech team will be putting together a list of the changes along with tutorials for them.
- If we get to a point when we have combined in-person and WebEx meetings this year the following protocols from Dean Richards will be helpful. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HaVtzz3Mstz-UsHPZ6zEbeGeK6MASA3T/view?usp=sharing
Libraries
Our wonderful district librarian Christie Boen has created a document to help you plan for how to best use your libraries and your librarians during distance learning. It’s just a guideline. We realize each school might do things a bit differently. You can access her document here: Libraries During Remote Learning
Heads up…
As we head into the school year we will need to form the following teams/committees at each school site (part of the Blueprint requirement):
- CDL Team – School Curriculum/Instruction Team
- Culture of Care/SEL District – School
- Family Connections District – School
- Return to School Buildings Hybrid (Safety) – School
You do not need to do anything just yet, but I wanted to provide a heads up and let you know that we will need to reorganize some of our existing committees (Design teams) to meet this requirement. More on this later.
Staffing Update
- Primary Teacher Interviews are this Thursday.
- Student Services/Student Success Coordinator – after several discussions with Skip, I will not be replacing the Student Services position this year. I will be increasing Heidi Thomas’ Student Success Coordinator position to .8 and she has agreed to take on a few of the typical Student Services responsibilities. Since this is a new position, I am sure there are quite a few questions about how this position will function and serve our students. We’ll do our best to provide some clear direction for both Heidi and the rest of you, but please know and expect the position to evolve over time, especially when we move from CDL to Hybrid at some point in the future.
- Heidi’s role will be to facilitate and support Social and Emotional Teaching across the entire building.
- Her role is to facilitate SEL across content areas so that it becomes part of everything we do and not separate additional content area.
- She will work with us to refine our instructional practices and environments to be congruent with Trauma-Informed Instruction. If you are interested to learn more about what this might look like, Classroom 180 by Heather T. Forbes is a great resource.
- Heidi will also assume the role of PBIS team leader (Formerly Thriving Citizen, likely to become a new team title in the future…)
- Heidi will assume the role of 504 Coordinator and she will also help lead the IPS process when appropriate.
- She is not “The SEL teacher” who delivers stand-alone SEL lessons to kids similar to our PE/Music model. That title carries some preconceived and inaccurate notions for the role.
- Let’s also avoid titles such as, “The Behavior Teacher”. One of her roles will be working together with you to support lagging skills and it might look like: check in check out, scheduled breaks (purposeful and structured), goal setting, someday social groups. This will support all students but especially those with lagging skills in social and emotional development.
- During this CDL period, Heidi would like you to know she can be available to connect with students needing a little more frequent adult support and one on one connection.
- Heidi Evans will be increased to 0.8. Reading intervention is being reinvented beneath our feet, so this increase is the best I can do to accommodate such a drastic change to this important need for our students.
- I am also increasing Rob’s time to 0.8. The music curriculum Rob will be using has a high degree of SEL messaging tied to it and I am hopeful it can help to lighten and brighten days for our students during this CDL and eventually Hybrid times. Rob can also support any of you with your instructional technology struggles as he has proven to be very tech savvy and creative. He provided a lot of support to many of you in the spring, so I feel this increase will support his efforts to support you (and me!!).
Schedule for Decisions on Returning to School Steps (comprehensive distance learning, balanced/hybrid, “all in”)
Although we must always leave room for flexibility and changes due to the rapidly changing nature of our understanding of this virus and its impact on schools, below is the chart we’ve created for district decisions:
| Dates of 6-week terms | Dates to Monitor Metrics | Announcement Dates |
| Sept 14-Oct 23 | Friday, Oct 9 | Monday, Oct 12 |
| Oct 26-Dec 11(Thanksgiving break Nov 23-27) | Friday, Nov 20 | Monday, Nov 23 |
| Dec 14-Feb 5 | Friday, Jan 22 | Monday, Jan 25 |
| Feb 8-March 19 (spring break March 22-26) | Friday, March 5 | Monday, March 8 |
| March 29-May 7 | Friday, April 23 | Monday, April 26 |
| May 10-June 17 |