To Do:
Our Canvas Toolkit for Schools is ready! It is linked HERE. We hope it will come in handy over the next few weeks. 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.
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More Canvas support for teachers: Quinn Daily will also be offering some canvas help sessions at the following times. Interested teachers can just join him in his personal WebEx room: https://bls.webex.com/meet/quinn.daily. Here is the schedule:
Intro Canvas training / Question & Answer Webex meetings: Tuesday, September 8th from 10:00 – 11:00 am; Thursday, September 10th from 10:00 – 11:00 am. In addition, Quinn will also be teaching a WebEx course from 11:00-12:30 during the optional PD day on Wednesday, September 9th.
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🚩School Safety Team & In-Person Education Requirements🚩
Scott Bojanowski has created a document that outlines the OSHA requirements for school safety teams and it includes requirements that you should already be familiar with on page 1.
Scott, Tami and Paul (with input from Deschutes County Health) collaborated on the second part of the document which is a COVID-19 checklist that is required to be completed before schools welcome students back into their building either under limited in-person instruction or hybrid (no later than September 23rd). The checklist is intended to remind schools about ODE blueprint requirements, their applicability to BLS and elicit detailed information about how your school will comply with these requirements to ensure the health and safety of our school communities.
This document, along with the documents links within it, will be updated as new guidance is released and is intended to be your “COVID bible” during the 2020-21 school year. We ask that your safety team to revisit it regularly throughout the year.
Please feel free to reach out to Paul and Scott with any safety-related questions or concerns. They are also available to meet with individual schools or host a WebEx to clarify any of these requirements.
Scaling up to provide Limited In-Person Instruction (LIPI) in your building
The district’s Return To School Core Team (Lora, Katie, Brad, board member Caroline Skidmore, Paul) made some decisions on an entry into LIPI.
- We will start LIPI on September 28th
- We will use a “phased” approach to determine when to scale up or scale back LIPI. The phases will be based on highest priority and highest needs and will be tied to local metrics.
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| Activities | When start | Metrics | |
| Phase 1 | Evaluations (SPED/ELL) and students with zero connectivity | Sept. 28 | Building level – No confirmed cases of COVID within 14 days |
| Phase 2 | Above, plus add instructional supports for students based on need (primary historically under-served) | Oct. 5 | Building level – No confirmed cases of COVID within 14 days AND county metrics are below 30 cases per 100,000 |
In order to be ready for evaluations under LIPI beginning September 28th, Sean is asking your school’s evaluation team (nurse, school psych, Speech-Language pathologist, and ELL/Title 3) to develop procedures for in-person evaluation. The evaluation team will use guidance aligned with ensuring section 1-3 of your school’s operational blueprint are met and will share the final proposal with your school safety team by September 23. As your school evaluation team is forming, please feel free to consult and/or participate as you deem necessary.
Check-In Acknowledgement: The school check-in form includes an option for a staff member to decline acknowledgment of non-COVID symptoms and contacts and directs the staff member to “inform the secretary of your declination’. Secretaries should inform supervisors of any staff member who chooses ‘decline’ in their check-in form so that you can follow up with them before they enter the building.
Update Face Covering Requirements: We’ve been trying to reconcile the different masking requirements offered by OHA (in their August 13 update) and the ODE Blueprint (section 1h) with regard to staff who share workspaces 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 Blueprint 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, need to 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 the 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.
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Here is an important note from HR related to classified staff requesting to work remotely: We have distributed the telework agreement you may choose to enter into with your classified staff. Please read the telework 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.
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Information:
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.
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Please be sure to READ the Supervisors Guidelines to guide your work with staff in your schools.
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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.
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Meal Service will start September 14th it will be grab and go from 11:30a-12:45p breakfast and lunch, all kids 18 and under qualify for meals at no cost and meals can be picked up from any of the following SITES regardless of attendance area.
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Metrics: Skip created this little graphic to help us read and track the metrics. Thanks, Skip! We are getting close to k-3 going hybrid. If the metrics get to 10/100,000 we will be talking about 4-12 hybrid.
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Hot Spot info from Ben: You will be receiving a set of hotspots that can be supplied to your families that are in need of some help with connectivity. The number you receive is based on the feedback from families in the district-wide survey this summer. We will work to continue to get you more hotspots as family/student needs are identified. John Aubry and Amy Stafford will be helping to coordinate this effort. Here are a few things to keep in mind:
- We have a limited supply of these hotspots. Please try to ensure we are only providing one per household. A device can support up to 14 simultaneous connections. Asking if a family has received a hotspot from another school would be helpful.
- There will be some paperwork to fill out for usage, agreements and helping us with inventory.
- This is a connection to the internet. If a student uses a Bend-La Pine device on the hotspot, it will be filtered just like at school. If a non-Bend La Pine device is connected, it will have full internet (unfiltered) access.
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From Ben Hansen: Breakouts, and other new features, are live in our WebEx TEST site! Please invite anyone you like to try out the new features.
Keep in mind this is still test/pre-release, so Cisco may continue to update and change things. I noticed a few functionality changes that may change how things work by default, but that is why we play with this stuff in the test. I noticed that by default when I used my personal room it put attendees in a lobby and I needed to admit then to the room. I assume this is a setting somewhere and could be useful in some scenarios.
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ZOOM App for juniors and seniors: In communicating with our school to career team members, we are learning that most colleges, trade schools, businesses, and community organizations use Zoom to set up virtual admission meetings, workshops, internships, and other opportunities for our soon to be graduates. To ensure our juniors and seniors can take advantage of these experiences, our IT team pushed out Zoom to their iPads this week. These students are now able to download the Zoom app onto their iPads.
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Bend-La Pine’s LEAD Cohort is finalizing a clearinghouse of resources to support all teachers in guiding classroom conversations about anti-racism and equity. In accordance with the school board and leadership guidance, we want teachers to be brave, proactive, thoughtful and supported in engaging in these conversations–it is not a question of if we should address the current events of our community and country, but how we approach that dialogue, that we are seeking to support.
The clearinghouse of resources for teachers will be published soon. At that point, LEAD Cohort members will begin piloting and demonstrating the use of the materials, for collective reflection and learning. A meeting with you as building administrators will take place before implementation begins.
Can you please give your LEAD Cohort representative 10 minutes at a staff meeting to give context for the resources and to invite others to join in trying them out collaboratively? The list of cohort members is HERE (pretty great group!). If you don’t have a staff member from your building on this team, one of the current members is happy to join your staff meeting as a guest and share the information. Please reach out to Kinsey if you have any questions at this point!
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We are excited to launch our third year of Spanish for employees! Bend-La Pine Schools is pleased to offer weekly Spanish classes for employees once again this school year. These classes are designed to provide skills that can be used to carry out educational and administrative tasks and aid in practical communication with our Spanish speaking students, parents, friends, and neighbors. Here is more information about the classes and how to register.
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OSAA Athletics Update: Additionally, we are including athletics under the Season 1 proposal in that Phase I group. So teams are good to begin on the 28th. Thank you to Dave Williams, our District Athletic Director, and all the middle and high school Athletic Director’s for their thoughtful advocacy and detailed proposals.
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iPad Repair note from IT: Swapping out iPads for repair should look similar, if not even better to what was being done in the spring. Parents and/or students should contact the school or their Tier 1 and schedule for a replacement to be picked up at the school and the damaged iPad to be left with the school. The damaged iPad should be sent to IT.
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Canvas Parent Information Night! Our Instructional Tech Team will host a “How to Navigate Canvas” parent information night September 23. We have scheduled back to back WebEx demos/Q and A’s for Spanish and English speaking parents to learn about Canvas and how they can support their students!
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Instructional Support: We had such a successful class this summer that we have decided to offer our differentiated instruction course again this coming fall. We have added this course offering to Performance Matters? The class will be presented online through Canvas and WebEx. The class will require approximately 3.5 hours of work per week, for 3 weeks (all digital). Here is the information:
Look for: Meeting the Needs of All Students: Differentiation is the Key
Description: This course will support you in providing differentiated instruction both in virtual and face-to-face classroom settings. As a result of this class, you will come away with a better understanding of what differentiated instruction is and you will have created a differentiated instruction lesson you will be able to implement directly into your classroom this year. This course is run completely through Canvas, with a group share on the last day of the course (Friday, December 4th).
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A note from our Instructional Coach Team: Synergy started syncing to Canvas this week. Overall, this is a good thing because teachers can start building their courses directly into their shells that will eventually have students and be used for instruction. This is HUGE for our users and gives them some peace of mind in that they are finally able to start building their “real” courses. That said, our team discovered a complication. This sync allows students who are somewhat Canvas literate to see their current schedules for the year. In some cases, these schedules might change a lot, so the fact that students are seeing them has caused some angst this week. We apologize for this. Fixing the issue at this point might come at the cost of teachers being prepared for the first day or even losing content they have been building What’s the lesser bad? Please know that our team will continue to try to resolve this problem.
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Self Care – A big thanks to Jim for organizing the presentation from BRYT. Take care of yourself and model taking care of yourself. Think about what you are going to do with your staff to demonstrate your concern for them and how are you going to communicate to them the importance taking care of yourself?
Calendar:
HS Admininstrator WebEx: Thursday, Sept 17 at 8:00am