TO DO:

Please help spread the word with your staff: BRYT will be offering an encouraging and voluntary workshop to any district employee on Wednesday, Sept. 9 from 11:00 – 12:00. This is the Webex link for those who would like to participate. Here is a description of this workshop:

Self and Collective Care as a Foundation for Working with Students and Families in 2020-21

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to have an impact on school and district staff members at all levels.  The stress associated with seemingly unending changes, uninvited endings, and evolving expectations about new ways of doing things can feel overwhelming. Factor in the concerns about the well-being of students, their families, our own families, and each other, and levels of stress become an even more serious concern. With this understanding, and grounded in the knowledge that we can’t help others if we’re not okay, this session puts forth a shared responsibility framework for systemic approaches to taking care of ourselves/each other and a set of practical considerations and strategies for self and collective care as we work our way through the school year ahead. __________________________________________________________

Here is a copy of our COVID 19 Administrator/Supervisor Guidelines. Think of this as your “owner’s manual” for all things COVID-related. I’d suggest you keep a copy of this handy (electronic or paper) as you will likely need to refer to it more than once in the coming weeks/months. ___________________________________________________________

As you know, both Park and Rec. and Boys and Girls Club are currently making plans for providing child care in both our and their facilities. In addition to their employees, we are looking for some BLS classified staff to help provide support and supervision at these many sites. If you have a classified employee that could help with this work (and you do not have consistent tasks for her/him to complete), please email me their name. ___________________________________________________________

THIS and THAT:

As a reminder, each school in our district will need to establish four teams (Curriculum/Instruction, Culture of Care/SEL, Family Connections, and Safety). The most urgency is around the work of the safety team due to the fact that you may have students entering your school buildings as soon as Sept. 28 under the “limited in-person” guidelines. Your safety team has some work to do prior to that. Paul will attend our next Horizontal meeting in order for us to spend some time digging into what this means for you/your safety team. The only thing I ask you to do before our horizontal meeting next Tuesday is review this document related to school safety teams. ___________________________________________________________

I was recently asked what the process will be when a student needs his/her iPad repaired this fall. Please share this with folks in your building who will be involved in this process. Here are the steps that I received from Roy:

Swapping out iPads for repair should look similar, if not even better to what was being done in the spring. They’d contact the school or their Tier 1 and get a time set up for a replacement to be prepared for a quick drive to the school and swap for the new while leaving the old to be picked up and brought downtown to be sent in.

Downtown was mainly used over the summer as there wasn’t bodies in the schools. Since all the school’s Tier 1’s should be onsite it’ll be make it easier to have them help with the swaps for as quick a turnaround as possible. ________________________________________________________

Our Canvas Toolkit for Schools is ready!  It is linked here.  This is a compilation of resources that you can deploy to your teachers, families, and staff as you see fit, with other communications.  Note that this also contains recommendations about and directions on accessing and inserting the “Canvas Ready” module into classes!  This module will help students learn the basics of Canvas at the start of the year.  Please don’t send the entire toolkit to your students and families, but instead, familiarize yourself with the resources linked here (it won’t take long!) and deploy the appropriate ones for each audience when needed.  (Thanks to Amy T. and her entire Canvas team who quickly pulled this together!) ________________________________________________________

So, each of the past few weeks I’ve shared the “Guidelines for distribution of materials between school and home” document (with updates each week). Well, here is your latest update. This one includes what to do in the scenario of distributing material to a student’s home (directly). You’ll want to read through these updates, as you need to know the process that is being required when materials are being distributed. This update will live in Google docs, and I have removed the previous versions. _________________________________________________________

HDMS has created a teacher schedule that clearly communicates what a day will look like, as well as a link to activities that can be completed during the 2:30 – 4:00 time slot. You do not have to create a similar schedule – but please make sure you have communicated these same aspects of this schedule to your teachers. __________________________________________________________

A MS Teacher Standards of Practice FAQ document is continually being updated. Feel free to not only read it yourself, but also share this with your staff. __________________________________________________________

Here are a couple of items regarding student attendance: In CDL schedule, teachers will be able to override the PV code with a NPV code .  At 11:00 am the auto dialer will place calls to parents for the previous day’s NPV absences for all schools., therefore a day’s attendance must be completed by 10:00 the following morning. A student is considered present if any of the following occur:

○  Participating in a video class; 
○  Communication from the student to the teacher via chat, text message or email 
○  A phone call with the student, or, for younger students, with the parent;
○  Posting completed coursework to a learning management system or web-based platform or via email; or
○  Turning in completed coursework on a given day. ___________________________________________________________

We’ve been trying to reconcile the different masking requirements offered by OHA (in their August 13 update)  and ODE In their Ready Schools, Safe Learners (RSSL) document with regard to staff who share work spaces with others.  We asked a committee led by Sean Reinhart and Tami Pike with members from Deschutes County Health and local health care providers to make a recommendation to the district.  

Based upon their recommendation, our standard of practice across all BLS sites is ODE’s RSSL requirement of:

Face coverings or face shields for all staff, contractors, other service providers, or visitors or volunteers following CDC guidelines for Face Coverings. Individuals may remove their face coverings while working alone in private offices. 

We are interpreting ‘private offices’ to include any enclosed space with an entry door and where only one employee has been assigned to it (i.e. a classroom).  Therefore, all staff in open-air shared offices, even when 6 ft of distancing can be maintained, must wear a mask.

When choosing between face mask or face shields, please be aware of:

RSSL guidance:

In general, face coverings are preferred over face shields, as they may provide better containment of small aerosols that can be produced while talking. Clear plastic face shields remain an acceptable alternative in some instances because they enable students to see whole faces. This avoids potential barriers to phonological instruction and reinforces social emotional cues.

CDC guidance: 

Clear face coverings are not face shields. CDC does not recommend use of face shields for normal everyday activities or as a substitute for cloth face coverings because of a lack of evidence of their effectiveness for source control. ________________________________________________________

REMINDERS:

Here is a link for administering the math by-pass assessment. As a reminder, students will take both the easyCBM and paper/pencil (this year via GoFormative) assessments. __________________________________________________________

As you know, the telework agreement for Classified Staff has been sent out/shared.  Please read the form so you fully understand what you are agreeing to with your employees.  The idea is the staff member does their work at home and abides by their regular work hours, breaks, etc.  It is not meant to give flexibility to just be available if needed while being at home.  Some staff are confused by our expectation of them performing work this fall versus what they may or may not have been required to do last spring.  It is the understanding that staff work their regular work hours and be available by phone and email during normal work hours.  __________________________________________________________

As I mentioned to you in our Horizontal meeting on Wednesday, student schedules are now visible to students in Canvas (due to a synch with Synergy on Tuesday). If you haven’t already, please let your counseling office know you are aware of this and there is not a “do not show” button to turn on to make the schedules disappear. ________________________________________________________

In case you missed it, this is great news: The summer meals program is going to be extended through December 31, 2020. This will allow us to serve breakfast and lunch at no cost to all children 18 years old and younger. __________________________________________________________

Don’t forget that our weekly MS Horizontal meeting will move back to Tuesday at 2:00. The focus of our meeting this next week will be on “school safety teams.”