As I mentioned to principals earlier this week, I am very open to your feedback and suggestions of how I might better communicate with you or support the work you do every day in the building. Feel free to send me an email, give me a call or ask that I stop by and see you if you’d like to talk about any of these things.
Reminders:
- Nov. 5, 3:15 – 4:30 : ACT Aspire training held at HDMS. Plan on bringing a team from your school that may include: admin, ICCL, core teachers, data queens/kings, others. Those trained will then train others in your building. Elementary principals will also be invited, so it will likely be a very full library. Please plan accordingly if you want to sit with your school team.
- I will be out of the office from Monday afternoon through the rest of the week. I will be checking my email, but if you need to get a hold of me quickly then please call my cell. If you can’t reach me, but need immediate assistance, please call either Gary Timms or Jay Mathisen.
New Information:
- At times there is a need for someone in your building to have access to historical discipline data (either from a different BLS middle school, or from an elementary) regarding a student of yours. There is one immediate way to gain this information, and one pending way. Following is a quick synopsis of both of these:
- Immediate – Log into ParentVue as the parent. Here are instructions from Becky on how to accomplish this:
- Open the student in question (Synergy SIS > Student > Student)
- Select the Parent/Guardian tab, and click a parent/guardian name (who has Contact Allowed checked)
- In the Parent screen, select the ParentVUE tab
- Scroll down until you see a button labeled ‘Open ParentVUE as Parent’, click that button
- In the resulting ParentVUE window, click Discipline in the left hand navigation
- Pending – In the coming week(s) principals will be receiving an email providing a secure login and instructions for gaining access to a Synergy back door. This access will provide the school with historical discipline access to every middle school student, both those currently enrolled and those not enrolled at your school. Additionally, this access will allow you to see all discipline history from any elementary they attended in our district. Having this access may be needed at times and is great to provide, but also comes with greater responsibility to keep a lid on the number of folks who have this access. Therefore, this access will only be sent to building principals. It will be up to her/him to determine whom else in their building they would like to share this information with. Lastly, this secure login information will change every academic year – the password you receive will only be good for 2015-16.
- Clarification re: interior windows being covered. I spoke with Julianne regarding whether current practice/recommendation is for interior classroom windows to be covered during a lockdown situation. She indicated the recommendation has changed to a practice of windows should not be covered. What is important is that those in the classroom are out of sight, quiet, and the door is locked. There will more coming regarding safety recommendations at our November Leadership meeting.
- Would you be interested in me inviting a police officer to our next Horizontal to talk to us regarding “signs” or “what to look for” or “current trends” related to drug/alcohol use amongst our students? This was brought up at our District Safety Team meeting as a possibility, but I didn’t want to assume, without asking you, that this would be a good use of our time. Please let me know your thoughts.
Have a great weekend… and Go Beavs!
Jim