TO DO:

• Principals, please sign up for a monthly visit from me to you at your site.  To do this, use the “MS Calendar” tab at the top if the TRIBE homepage.  You should be able to add directly on the calendar.  If you could sign up for the whole year now that would be great, but please plan on giving me dates/times through December. (NOTE: You only need to select one visitation time for the months of Nov/Dec and do not need one in June.)  * Chris, will you verify whether your dates are still going to work for you (since they were entered last year)?
• I’ve put a copy of our MS Horizontal meeting dates in our shared Google TRIBE folder (under the BLS Docs tab), with a link to it here.  We have a location for our first meeting (Roger, do you recall that you volunteered some months ago to host us on Sept. 18?).  Please take a look at this document and select a date that you would volunteer to host one of our meetings.  You can update it directly in this Google Drive document.

THIS AND THAT:

• First, I want to welcome all of you back to the start of another year!  And might I say again how fortunate and excited I am to be able to work with you and support the great things you have going on in your schools. I also want to introduce and welcome the new CMS team.  Well, Stephen isn’t new, but he will be taking on the role of principal and they have hired Eric Powell as the Assistant Principal to fill his position.  Many of you may already know that Eric has been the Dean/Counselor at CMS for a few years, but has had his admin license and filled in a leadership role in Hawaii prior to returning to Bend-La Pine (he is a former CMS student himself!).  Additionally, you heard the news recently that we lost Brian Crook to Madras HS (to work with his former colleagues Neff and HD) and Susan Heberlein has graciously come out of her short-lived retirement to be the interim principal so we can post this position in late winter/early spring.  I’m sure you will all love working with Susan and getting to know Eric better – learning the great things both will bring to their respective middle schools and our “tribe” of middle level leaders.
• As you are aware, certified staff are now on a two-year evaluation cycle – meaning that a Summative Evaluation is completed every other year, but the observation requirements look the same every year.  However, there will be some changes to our certified observation expectations beginning the 2017-18 school year. I believe these changes strike a nice balance between honoring your time and the professionalism of our teachers, with improving instructional practices and pedagogical conversations between teacher and supervisor.  Please let me know if you have any questions regarding these changes.