To Do:
I’m not sure if you have read today’s Daily Digest that Paul has been sending out, well, daily. The information that he has included in today’s “digest” is pretty informative and is the first two pages of the document linked here. It is a heavy dose of information, so you may want to take it in bite-sized chunks.
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Here is a link to some important dates to get on your calendar. (If you would prefer to wait for it, I’m guessing that someone will create and share calendar invites for some/all of these.) The first column is our traditional Leadership dates/times. You’ll notice that these have been moved from Monday to Wednesday afternoons. The middle column is meeting dates/times when we plan to gather (via Webex and/or small groups) around the topic of Equity and Excellence (likely similar to what you experienced on Aug. 19). Again, these meetings will be held on Wednesday afternoons. The last column is the nine teacher-driven SIW times as guaranteed in our BEA contract. Currently, I’ve asked you to make sure you have time every Wednesday for teacher-directed activities.
Information:
This year our juniors (as well as 6th and 8th graders) will be participating in the statewide Student Health Survey. If you recall, this is the merge of two former state surveys (Oregon Health Teens and Student Wellness Survey). The window for this 30 minute, online, anonymous survey is Oct. 5 – 16. There is a passive parent permission letter (all students are opted-in unless a parent returns an opt-out form to the school) that needs to be sent out two weeks prior to your administration date. (You select the date you administer within this window of time.) You will receive an email from me in the first part of next week that explains this (and more) and provides you the parent letter in multiple languages.
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Canvas Update: All Synergy-using districts in the state of Oregon who have Canvas are experiencing an issue with dropped classes. In short, classes dropped in the first 10 days of the term hit the Canvas system in a way that it does not recognize. Because of that these dropped courses still show up for students in Canvas, and teachers still see these dropped students in their Canvas courses. Canvas and Synergy staff are both working with us to figure out this issue and we will let you know when it has been resolved. In the meantime it would be awesome if you could let your staff know we are aware of the challenge and don’t have a fix…yet.
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Bend-La Pine Online Update: Earlier this week our Online Staff started receiving notifications that PEAK classes were full, and because of this they were unable to enroll students in many requested sections. This is because of higher-than-normal enrollment in online programs across the state and a shortage of Oregon-certified teachers who were trained to teach online. Fuel Education is working on both short and long term solutions and as of this afternoon we once again had sections available for enrollment. If you hear of this happening again, please just encourage staff and families to be patient as more sections will be opened as quickly as possible.
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Here is some guidance from HR regarding substitutes. I hope this is not new information, but more of a clarification of what you’ve already heard from me…
Substitute Guidance for CDL
- If a teacher is sick for one or two days there are a couple of options. One, the teacher can do his/her best to get information and work out to students. If a teacher attempts to teach, then the teacher doesn’t need to take a sick day. If the teacher is sick and can’t do any work, then that teacher needs to take a sick day.
- If a teacher is sick for more than two-three days, then the teacher and administrator need to try and get information out to students the best way possible. This will probably mean having someone that works close to that teacher help get information out to students. If this happens, please have the teacher that helps complete a timesheet for the work.
- Long-term substitutes. We will continue to use long-term substitutes for teachers that are out long-term, on FMLA, etc.
Substitute Guidance for Balanced-Hybrid
We have been working with the HDESD to get substitute training on our systems. The substitutes that take our training will be identified in the HDESD system (AESOP) as being trained and will have preference over substitutes that are not trained. Once we go to hybrid, obviously we’ll need substitutes in the building.
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This message from Scott “Bojack” was sent to office managers yesterday, and asked that we share with you all too!
The district has placed an order for each school to receive 20 distancing floor decals (keep 6 feet apart). We want to make sure all the decals are standardized across the district.
As soon as they come in, we will get the decals out to all schools.
Answers to questions we still owe you:
Will we have a standardized location at each school for the floor decals?
Will we have more decals available through our supply chain at the distribution center if schools need more?
As soon as we have an answer to those questions, we will push that information out.
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Calendar:
BRYT WebEx training for high school teams: Thursday, Sept 24 10-11:30