Look what’s waiting for you in the staff room!!! Enjoy! Thanks Shawna!
Shout Out Link
Staff Meeting – Notes and Agenda are linked below.
1/14/21 Agenda and Q&A
District CDL – For families who are choosing to enroll in the District CDL Program, there will be a gap from when students stop attending their current school to when they begin their new program. The district will be providing activities and lessons to engage students during this time. Click here for a document you can share with staff and can share with families. Right now there about 211 elementary students signed up for the district CDL.
Masks and Gaiters – heads up, the information shared today, specifically regarding gaiters, by Paul may change again…sigh. Paul let us know this afternoon that soon after he sent out the message there was a change that came out. Don’t communicate anything about it if you have not already done so as gaiters may not be allowed.
Breakfast update – breakfasts contain a little more than I initially thought. There are few items including milk and juice. I think you are still fine to encourage eating some or all of it prior to going inside, but I wanted to let you know it’s more than what I originally shared. We should be able to refer parents to the Nutrition Services webpage on the district website to address allergen questions. Here’s a photo of an example of what to expect;
Lunch delivery – it appears we can deliver all the lunches in one delivery right around 10:45 – I made the adjustment on the master schedule document.
Master Schedule Tweaks – There have been some brilliant revisions to address some sticky points of the master schedule – so thank you to everyone who contributed. Be sure to spend some time examining the different tabs in this document. You can find your schedule, bells, recess zones, recess equipment, and much more.
Quick Note on Recess – I know in the past we’ve spent time reviewing pages of rules for every corner of the playground. This will not be a priority to start our year. There is a quick reference document added to the Return to School Information page. It’s a much shorter list of items to remember and it allows for an appropriate amount of unstructured time during recess. Similar to the need for children to learn how to be bored, they also need to learn how to navigate less structured environments to be most successful in life. Because so much of the school day has an incredible amount of structure it is imperative that recess balance some unstructured time into their learning. Time to Play
Recycling Solution – please plan on leaving your recycling containers outside your door every Wednesday afternoon. Zack will take it from there.
Vaccines – One thing we were asked to relay to all staff is that vaccine information (like all medical information) is confidential and we should not be asking others about whether or not they will be vaccinated.
Ventilation – just some key points regarding ventilation:
Due to the upgrades in all our district buildings we can now count on a complete air change in any given room 1 to 2 times per hour. Additionally air is filtered 6 to 7 times per hour. Why not air purifiers? Air purifiers simply filter recirculated air as opposed to our building systems which pull in outside air.
Return to School Information Please bookmark this document so you can refer back to it as needed. Remember it’s a working document so we will add to it and change when necessary. Please take a look at it and write down any unanswered questions so we can address them during our team meetings on Tuesday. We will highlight or call your attention to any major changes.
Safety Team; Thanks to our Safety team for meeting on Friday afternoon to talk through some great items. Please see link; Safety Team Notes
Risk Mitigation in Implementing Instructional Best Practices This document was shared earlier in the year, but there are some updates. Great guidance on how to do different activities. This will likely be revised again.
SEL Menus There are now nine weeks worth of SEL menus! Number nine has some great Brain Gym Videos. Easy (for some people, not me!) brain warm-up ideas that students can do at their desks.
Borrowed! So well put!
“This letter was put out by a retired superintendent in upstate New York .
Dear Friends and Colleagues:
I am writing today about the children of this pandemic. After a lifetime of working among the young, I feel compelled to address the concerns that are being expressed by so many of my peers about the deficits the children will demonstrate when they finally return to school. My goodness, what a disconcerting thing to be concerned about in the face of a pandemic that is affecting millions of people around the country and the world. It speaks to one of my biggest fears for the children when they return. In our determination to “catch them up,” I fear that we will lose who they are and what they have learned during this unprecedented era. What on earth are we trying to catch them up on? The models no longer apply, the benchmarks are no longer valid, the trend analyses have been interrupted. We must not forget that those arbitrary measures were established by people, not ordained by God. We can make those invalid measures as obsolete as a crank up telephone! They simply do not apply.
When the children return to school, they will have returned with a new history that we will need to help them identify and make sense of. When children return to school, we will need to listen to them. Let their stories be told. They have endured a year that has no parallel in modern times. There is no assessment that applies to who they are or what they have learned. Remember, their brains did not go into hibernation during this year. Their brains may not have been focused on traditional school material, but they did not stop either. Their brains may have been focused on where their next meal is coming from, or how to care for a younger sibling, or how to deal with a missing grandma, or how it feels to have to surrender a beloved pet, or how to deal with death. Our job is to welcome them back and help them write that history.
I sincerely plead with my colleagues, to surrender the artificial constructs that measure achievement and greet the children where they are, not where we think they “should be.” Greet them with art supplies and writing materials, and music and dance and so many other avenues to help them express what has happened to them in their lives during this horrific year. Greet them with stories and books that will help them make sense of an upside-down world. They missed you. They did not miss the test prep. They did not miss the worksheets. They did not miss the reading groups. They did not miss the homework. They missed you.
Resist the pressure from whatever ‘powers that be’ who are in a hurry to “fix” kids and make up for the “lost” time. The time was not lost, it was invested in surviving a historic period of time in their lives—in our lives. The children do not need to be fixed. They are not broken. They need to be heard. They need to be given as many tools as we can provide to nurture resilience and help them adjust to a post-pandemic world.
Being a teacher is an essential connection between what is and what can be. Please, let what can be demonstrated that our children have so much to share about the world they live in and in helping them make sense of what, for all of us has been unimaginable. This will help them– and us– achieve a lot more than can be measured by any assessment tool ever devised. Peace to all who work with the children!”