This and That:

• Hot off of the presses!  This afternoon you received an email from Lora stating that our first district MS SIW date will be moved from Sept. 14 to Sept. 28.  We didn’t realize until today that the original date was your first opportunity to meet with all of your staff after school started – and we don’t want to take that time away from you.  (There is a possibility of also changing the Oct. 5 date as many schools have their staff meetings on the first SIW of the month.  Stay tuned for more on this potential change.)
• Speaking of new information, I heard yesterday afternoon that the annual Illegal Acts training (attendance from one admin from each building required) will be held on Aug. 23 from 8:00 – 12:00, but location was still undecided.  More to come from Sal regarding this.
• Linked here is our best thinking/communication regarding certified work calendar/fall in-service days.  Feel free to share all or parts of this with your staff.  If you have any questions or need additional clarification please let me know.
• Another piece of information that you may want to share with staff this fall (or at least know you have access too so you can refer back to it during the year if needed, is regulations around various types of employee leave.  This is a nice, concise document created in HR that you might want to also share with your office manager.
• Following are this year’s district calendars for your reference.  Bend-area middle and Three Rivers School  have one calendar – while La Pine Middle has a slightly different calendar due to having different grading terms.
• Here are two calendars related to classified employees that may be useful for you – and likely your office manager.  The Classified Employee Work Year Calendar provides a guide to work days for various classified positions.  The EA Work Year Calendar is specific to that employee position.
• And one last calendar to share.  This one is yours.  Please print out this year’s Administrator Calendar and mark off the days that you won’t be working.  Principals, please turn in a copy of yours to me by the end of September.  Assistant Principals, please work with your principal for deciding a turn-in time, to whom you’ll submit yours.  Remember that most of your non-work days should coincide with non-student and staff days.  That is not to say that you can’t take a day when students are present, but it shouldn’t be the common occurrence.
• Please share this information with your counselors and anyone else who might be involved in the registration of new students:  We are changing our practice this year regarding students who live in our attendance boundary, are enrolled in another institution, but want to take some classes at his/her home (BLS) school as well.  In the past we have allowed this.  Simply put, if we cannot collect ADM on a new enrolling student (e.g. because they already attend an online school) then we should not enroll him/her – unless they would want to pay tuition for the classes they want to take from us, which is unlikely.  This decision was made mainly for financial (we were not collecting any ADM on these students) and class size (often these students were enrolling in popular elective/specialty courses) reasons.  If you would like to make an exception for a student affected by this change in practice please let me know.

Reminders:

• This year’s MS Extra Duty should be sent out to each school soon – if you haven’t already received it.  Don’t forget that you need to have all of your extra duty employees hired prior to the start of the (fall, winter, spring) season in order for them to receive the entire stipend.  With this in mind, all fall employees need to be hired prior to September 6.j
• Chris Huff retired this past spring.  Chris had her hands in a number of pieces of activities that occur often in your schools.  Jody McBride, most recently in the SVMS main office, is transferring into Chris’ spot and will be charged with the difficult job of trying to corral Gary and I.  Jody’s first day will be this Monday and Chris will spend some time here early next week training her.  With that said, many things that Chris was responsible for has been parceled out to other people, while Jody will be picking up a few things that Chris didn’t do.  I will share more details about who is doing what in my next blog post (on Sept. 2).