Meal times- Please see this letter from Garra regarding lunch times for next year. The ‘no earlier than 10’ is a must do, while the ‘not before 11:15’ is a suggestion. We know that you will need to create a schedule that works for your building. Feel free to give me a call if you have any questions.
PE Minutes- Back around the year 2000 NCLB was implemented and schools were told that 100% of their students would need to meet grade level benchmarks by the year 2014. I confess to spending exactly 0 seconds worrying about that because it seemed so unreasonable. Fast forward to 2007 when HB 3141 was passed requiring 150 minutes a week of PE for grades K-5. A little NCLB grade school math tells us that a school with 24 classes would need about 60 hours of school a week to make this happen. Last I checked, we are only in school for a little bit more than half that. Given the difficulty of fitting 60 hours into 32.5 hours, I must admit to worrying/thinking about HB 3141 the same amount as I worried about NCLB. Turns out, my instincts on NCLB were correct, and my instincts on HB 3141 were not. Simply put, HB 3141 is still in play. While we have a phase in period, it is time to act. In school year ’19-’20, schools will be required to provide 120 minutes of PE per week. Of that 120 minutes, 45 can be delivered by a classroom teacher if planned by a teacher with a PE certification. Students will still need to have 75 minutes of PE class taught by a PE teacher next year. Skip and I have met a couple of times with a PE teacher leader to come up with a plan that will help us meet the letter of the law while protecting the integrity of quality PE and limiting the burden on classroom teachers. We hope to have that plan ready for roll out before the start of next school year. In the meantime, we ask that you do everything you can to plan for 75 minutes of PE per week taught by the PE teacher when developing a schedule for next year. I am also looking for a couple of primary teachers and a couple of intermediate teachers who might help with some of the planning. If you have names of classroom teachers you think might be interested, let me know. At this time, you don’t need to talk to the teacher, just share names with me and I will contact. I will have more information at our May 20 horizontal meeting. Let me know if you have questions ahead of our meeting.
George Fox Teacher Candidates- George Fox has two teacher candidates that they would like to place in our schools. They need one primary and one intermediate placement. Please let me know by next Friday if you have an interest in placing one or both of these candidates.
ACR Kinders- Kindergarten ACR’s are due on May 1. We will not meet to sign and trade. Please contact other principals if you have ACR’s with their schools so that you can both be in agreement on approval. We have traditionally approved all ACR’s submitted before the deadline, but there may be a few schools out there not able to take and/or give, so please communicate at least by phone before signing. If you have a concern, please give me a call.
Self-Evals/ Eval Meetings- Hard to believe this is the last edition of notes before May and that means self-eval time! Please complete your self-evaluation by May 17 and schedule a time for me to meet with you.
B a ttle of the B oo ks– The book list for next year is out and looks to be less divisive than this year’s list. That being said, the process we used this year will remain the same moving forward. It is not a school sponsored event, permission slips can be made available for students wanting to take one, only students returning the permission slips should participate in any related activity and activities should not be during class time. Let me know if you have any questions.