Child Care
As of Tuesday morning, most every elementary school site was directed to provide space for child care during the school day. (As of this morning, BP&R announced this to the community.) Similar to the after-school program, our district will be partnering with BP&R to provide limited child care. We will provide space for two groups of 20 students (max). The first space will be our cafeteria. The second will be the gym. There will be an entirely new set of guidelines and expectations provided for the BP&R staff to follow to ensure the program can run without interfering with our school day as well as stay within the state guidelines for operating. We were also directed to provide “academic support” staff during the CDL time frames for these groups. This support can come from teachers, EAs, whomever we can spare. Because of this need, I will be restarting the Secretary hiring process to bring another staff member on board to be available for some of this need. I am also hoping I might be able to convince you to use this as an opportunity to connect with some of our students in person on a semi-frequent rotational basis. We can talk more about how to accomplish this, but I had hoped and tried to make sure you heard this from me first, but the speed of information is outpacing me frequently these days. I am sorry for that. (If you are questioning why we can bring students in the building for an outside agency for childcare but cannot bring them in to provide our academics you are not alone….just smile and wave, smile and wave.)
Startup Week Plan
These startup weeks are taking a little more shape (this is still subject to change);
- Tuesday 9/1 (Day #185) – WebEx Hybrid in Building
- 8:00-12:00 – I have a more detailed agenda for the day in the works. I will try not to dominate all your time but I do believe this is important work to do on the first day.
- 8:00-12:00 – I have a more detailed agenda for the day in the works. I will try not to dominate all your time but I do believe this is important work to do on the first day.
| Room 1 | Library | Music Room |
| Alicia Vickery | Anna Park | Marina Reisinger |
| Amber Martinson | Deanna Chambers | Marieka Greene |
| Cami Green | Michelle Watt | Michele Cross |
| Ukiah Yeager-Woock | Becky Eriksson | Misha Therrian |
| Rob Pettis | Becky Hildebrand | JJ Howard |
| Barb Tennis | Jennifer Fetrow | Danielle Donnell |
| Heidi Evans | Jay Carlton | Scott Clements |
| Shawna Junker | Shelly Hill | Heidi Thomas |
| Megan Truelson* | Asha Dicharry* | Nicole Kalberg |
| Debbie Rychard |
- *Depending upon availability with other shared sites.
- 12:00-1:00 Lunch on your own – Sorry but providing food for these occasions is far more challenging and expensive right now. We will work on providing some individually wrapped snacks to be available in each room.
- 1:00-3:00 – Team follow up – this time is intended for more follow up with the SOP from the morning, however you can guide this work on your own.
Wednesday 9/2 (Day #186) – Grade Level Placement Revisit via WebEX
- 8:00-9:00 K to 1st
- 9:30-10:30 1st to 2nd
- 11:00-12:00 3rd to 4th
- 1:00-2:00 Kindergarten
- 2:00-2:45 Lexia Training – Heidi Evans and Me only
- Thursday 9/3 (Day #187) – Grade Level Team Meetings in Gym
- 8:00-9:00 4th/5th Grade
- 9:30-10:30 2nd/3rd Grade
- 11:00-12:00 1st Grade
- 12:30-1:30 Kindergarten
- 2:00-3:00 Support Staff
- Wednesday 9/9 (Day #191) – District Training Day
- Thursday 9/10 (Day #192) – Teacher Work Day
- Friday 9/11(Day #193) – Teacher Work Day
BLPO Enrollment
Over 373 respondents and we still have 92% of our families choosing to stick with CDL .
CDL Standards of Practice (SOP) & Schedules **additional views of schedules
Start with the most important Standard of Practice is the second one which is “Take Care of Yourself”. Start with this standard and revisit it often. Do not let these be overwhelming, you are already doing more of this than you already know.
The following doc is a good overview of K-5 CDL schedule.
Here you will find some more details specific to to your grade span. Student Sample Schedules and Teacher Sample Schedules are also provided. These are also linked within the Instructional Logistics SOP
If you did not get a chance to see one of the WebEx sessions by Skip and Julie here is the slide set.
Staffing Update
As mentioned above, I will start the secretary hiring process back up. I will figure out some interview dates soon, but please let me know if you would be interested in serving on this interview team.
Now for the big news! As of Tuesday morning I was directed to hire a new temporary teacher for the 2/3 level to mitigate our numbers and allow for us to fit in our square footage for All-In K-3 scenario. Fortunately I had already been given a heads up about this possibility earlier in the summer so I shared this with our interview team last week and asked them to interview with this additional lens so we would look at all our candidates as potentials for this team. We had a really strong pool and I am hoping to get HR approval tomorrow to make an offer to one of these candidates. Since this is a temporary position for a year, we will be creating a single 2nd grade class for this new person. This brings all our class sizes in K-3 down to 22ish and allows for us to fit in our building when the time comes, which brings me to another difficult topic (see building stuff below).
Building Stuff
For this next paragraph, I will simply start with “I am sorry.” Because we now need to have a plan for All In K-3, there is a strong chance that many of you will need to change rooms before students come back to the building. Before we get too anxious about this and before we start our musical chairs with room assignments, I will take another few days to solidify the enrollment numbers and then make determinations of which classes must move in order to make this work. For now, please know that it’s very possible you will need to move rooms and somebody will need to move into yours for the year. This will be a temporary move for the year and we can all expect to return to our original rooms for the 2021-2022 school year unless COVID metrics are dictating something else. While some of you will be anxious to make these moves sooner than later, it’s important to remember that we still have at least 6 weeks prior to students returning to the classroom in a hybrid model.
To complicate things a little more, summer maintenance and cleaning did not go as originally planned but please know there is a plan to complete our building (both Highland and Westside Village are behind schedule, so it’s not just us.) The grinding of the concrete floors has created quite a bit of dust in the building but the floor downstairs is just about finished. After the 8th, Walter Norris will be able to employ some of our bus drivers to do some major dusting and the painting in classrooms that was promised.
They will also be removing the tile downstairs outside room 18 because it’s believed this is causing the moisture to climb back up the walls and cause that plaster to constantly fall out. The hope is this will be a more permanent fix to that revolving problem but it’s going to cause some more messiness in the meantime.
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 |