TO DO:
New Teacher Day is August 26th: We are always looking for new ways to welcome and honor new certified employees to our district. Our traditional day for welcoming new certified staff to our district might become known as “Teacher Signing Day!” In order to help with this day, we are asking you to do two things:
Please have new teachers complete this form and return it to you. The form is a template you will need to customize before you send. At the August 26 new teacher welcome, choose the answer to ONE of the questions to share in your introduction of that teacher.
Also, provide one piece of school ‘swag’ (t-shirt, water bottle, coffee mug, lanyard, etc.) to your new staff member during introductions.
We are hoping for this to be an exciting way for us to welcome our new teachers this fall!
Please add this important task to your END OF THE YEAR CHECK OUT PROCESS with your sped teachers: SPO needs your help again this year to ensure all SPED case managers (SPED teachers and SLPs) have completed and finalized their IEP processes and documents prior to checking out for the summer. Last year we asked that sites add a box on your check-out form that says, “All IEP documents finalized.”
Once all paperwork has been finalized, the SPO office will send each case manager and email indicating that they are “all clear” with their paperwork. It will be the case manager’s responsibility to provide you a copy (or forwarding) the email from our office. Please don’t let them check-out until this has been documented. Please note, we will be sending frequent reminders to case managers on the days leading up to June 14th, so there should not be any surprises.
Information:
Skip prepared this August-September calendar to help us stay organized: Here is a link to a document that is an overview of summer dates, events and trainings. Hopefully it will help you keep your heads together and on top of what’s happening this summer. Pay special attention to the events on Aug 30th that are mandatory Day 189 trainings and communicate those trainings to the appropriate staff. Principals, be sure to REGISTER your administrative team AND your ICCL members for the August 20 training!
Mental Health Provider List: At the HS Counselor meeting this week, we talked about resources for counselors to share with families. Here is a helpful list of community mental health providers compiled by Deschutes County that you can provide to parents/students asking for community mental health resources. Please replace any documents or other resources that you’ve used in the past, with this list. A couple of notes about this resource:
- Needed resources can be easily filtered using the left side of the page
- Although it provides a logo for the Suicide Prevention Alliance, this group is simply providing the space for providers to register their services, it is not an indicator that this page only provides suicide resources.
- These providers are not vetted at all – the district does not endorse or otherwise promote any of these providers over another.
- With that said, if you have some you have heard to be successful in working with youth, please encourage them to register on this site.
Here is a message from Lora regarding Taking It Up training! “This week I sent out publicity to all staff regarding this summer’s Taking It Up training. While most of the work over the two days is focused on individual exploration and reflection, time is given Tuesday afternoon for school teams to talk and plan. I encourage you all to attend, if you haven’t before…AND to encourage both certified and classified staff to attend. Of course, certified staff could count their attendance as their Days 189 and 190. You might consider paying classified staff who are not on contract to show how much you value their attendance. If you have classified staff who don’t have access to a computer, you can send their names to Stephanie Bent and she will register them. Contact Chris Boyd or me if you have questions or need more information.”
Several of you have had questions about who gets called when a tip comes in on Safe Oregon. Here is some helpful information from Scott Bojanowski: “The tips are triaged into three categories that determine if 911 or a school administrator gets called first.
- “Standard” which need to be addressed or acknowledged in the system within 24 hours.
- “Urgent” tips could mean potential harm to a student but that incident may have taken place in the past. Those tips will trigger the tip center to start calling the phone tree for each school until someone answers the phone. If they don’t get in touch with one of us they may call 911 depending on the severity of the information in the tip. We then have to use our best judgement to decide if the incident requires action now, or we need to notify 911 for a welfare check, or if it can wait until the next day to deal with. The tip line will keep calling until they get in touch with one of us to at a minimum acknowledge we have received the “urgent” tip. They will call 24/7 on those tips.
- The final category is “critical” which means someone is currently in a potential situation that may cause them harm. For these tips, which as a district we have only had a couple over the last year and a half, the tip line is supposed to immediately call 911 and then start calling the school phone tree to assure we have received the report.”
ACT Test Date for 2020: Just a reminder that ACT testing is scheduled for Feb 7, 2020, next year which, oddly, is a Friday.
Interesting Reading:
Recently, Jessica Jacks, Prevention Programs Supervisor, Deschutes County Health Services shared a compelling article with our Health Advisory Committee titled Why Scare Tactics in Drug Prevention Messaging Don’t Work.
The article summarizes that “…over 60 years of studies show that relying on fear to prevent alcohol and drug use simply does not work. Even worse, scare tactics can actually increase problem behavior. ” The research supports positive messaging, opportunities for behavioral change, presenting positive alternatives and the development of decision making, coping and resistance skills. Our challenge is to implement these effective practices into our schools as a way of proactively addressing the drug use we are seeing in our community.
Here are a couple of interesting articles that may be of interest to you related to the SAT: College Board’s Plan to Assign Students a “Disadvantage” Score on the SAT and New SAT Score: Adversity.
Calendar:
May 31 – HS Principals Mtg, 7:15 at Jackson’s Corner – be ready to share out your Equity Lens leadership activity
June – Graduation Extravaganza!
June 17 – Last Leadership Team!