TO DO:

Please complete your Self-Reflection soon if you haven’t already.

We are asking that you and your ICCL folks register for the Aug. 20 Leadership day (that will start with a Mary Ehrenworth keynote). Please click on the “Sections” tab and make sure you are registering for the Aug. 20 day (section # 10456), and not Aug. 21 (unless you will be attending both days).

And speaking of next fall, here are a couple of documents that will be very helpful in your planning. First is one for you and has to do with Admin August inservice offerings (both required and optional). The second is the certified August work calendar that we’ve provided the last couple of years. Please make sure you share this with your staff – and specifically point out the required subject-area inservice on Aug. 30 for math and social studies.

THIS and THAT:

Obviously, great news coming out of the Senate this week with the passage of HB 3427 and much-needed funding for K-12 education. This linked article does a nice job of providing some of the behind-the-scenes drama, as well as outline the areas where these additional dollars will be earmarked. As a reminder, these funds do not infuse any additional revenue into our district’s 2019-20 budget. (Also of note is that an increase in PERS rates – 4.75% – will equate to an additional 4.4 million per year payment increase for BLS beginning next fall.)

I’m sure you are all familiar with “National Signing Day” for high school seniors. What started out as a revelation of where a student-athlete would be attending college has increasingly become a celebration of continuing a young person’s educational (academic) journey. This fall, our traditional day for welcoming new certified staff to our district might become known as “Teacher Signing Day” – in recognition of welcoming and honoring new certified employees to BLS. I’ll be sharing more details about this at our Horizontal meeting on Monday – and am very excited (this is me being very excited!) about the possibilities this will have in “creating a moment” for this new group of employees.

You have heard that TSPC had some changes in store for Oregon administration licensure. These will be in effect August 1, 2022. If you do not currently hold your “continuing” license – and consider working in a position outside of a building someday, then you should begin by reviewing this TSPC informational page because these changes will likely affect you. Additionally, if you know of anyone working on or thinking about working on her/his Oregon admin license, you may want to pass this informational flyer on to them.

Starting this week, the Extra and Co-Curricular measure in DART will include students in grades 6-12 who are enrolled in coursework like the performing arts, stagecraft, ROTC, mock trial, etc.  We expect this change will identify about 10-15% more students as participating in Extra and Co-Curricular Activities.  This change will affect the measure back to the 2013-2014 school year. If you haven’t taken a look at DART lately, this change might be the reason to review some of your school data.

REMINDERS:

We’ll be discussing chapters 13 – 17 of The Culture Code at our last Horizontal meeting of the year on May 20 (at PCMS). Here are my notes.

Here is the agenda for our Horizontal meeting on Monday (3:15 @ PCMS). Please bring your laptop.

Don’t forget to be prepared to talk at our Horizontal about a decision you made through a set of Equity Lens questions. You’ll be discussing this in small groups.