To Do:
From our Public Health Specialists: Please complete this document for your school: BLS UpShift roles document.
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From Misty Groom: Please complete this doc indicating your team members for STAS/SIRC.
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A reminder: Concussion Study notification to families: All high schools, please mail home these letters to your families by today, Friday, August 18: Information about the Ready for School Project, Letter to Families in English; Letter to Families in Spanish. Feel free to contact Jody Slocumb: [email protected]., if you have questions about the project and encourage families to do the same. This is the last year of the project. Thank you!
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From Colleen and Josh: Crisis Prevention Intervention Training Opportunities. This training is our non-violent crisis intervention training. This is a requirement for each school to have a team trained in their building. HERE is the link to currently trained employees. Registration for these trainings in UKG.
We have 3 CPI trainings this month.
Aug 24 – CPI for Administrators ONLY
Aug 31 – CPI Refresher Course
Sept. 1 – CPI Initial Course
If you have specific questions, please contact Magadalyn Hasse in the Student Services office at ext. 1060.
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From Ryan: Be ready to introduce your new staff at the New Certified Staff Orientation will take place Monday, August 28th at North Star Elementary. Breakfast service will begin at 7:30 and it would be great to have as many admin there as possible before 7:30 to welcome our new hires and create a positive and supportive atmosphere.
The program will begin at 8:00 with a welcome address from Steve Cook, to be followed by each site introducing their new staff members (name and position) to the whole group. Following the introductions, our new hires will go into breakout groups for the duration of the morning, and admin can clear out.
It is a full day for our new hires; following the breakout sessions, they have a BEA-sponsored lunch and then finish their day in trainings specific to their roles.
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Honors Diploma Update: We are continuing to work on the proposal to the Honors Diploma. Those changes have not yet been approved, so the current Honors Diploma is still in effect. Please share this with your staff.
Information:
From Dean: Instructional Tools Update
- Of the requests received in the Spring, about 60% are processed
- 15% of the requests will be purchased at the school level. School Accounting Techs and Office Mangers were informed of the account codes by Austin James.
- About 20% of the requests are held up until school schedules are published in Synergy. We need this information to know quantities for purchase. These are largely digital tools and can be turned around quickly.
- The remaining 5% are one off requests and are being processed.
- During the week of August 21st, we plan to send status updates to every teacher who made a request in the Spring via email.
- The Instructional Technology staff is working hard to deploy all of these instructional tools.
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Wayfinder Administrative Training:
Thank you for all for attending the training on August 11th with Diana from Wayfinder. I know a few of you missed it so I wanted to send out the recording. Please don’t hesitate to reach out with questions. Also, the Wayfinder booklets have been delivered and many of the schools were short booklets. Stephanie Bent has been working to order more workbooks based on the most recent enrollment numbers and those should be delivered soon. Austin James is working on the Clever integration for teachers and access to the digital curriculum.
Bend-La Pine Admin Training Recording. Passcode: ^aOe9v#D
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From Scott in IT:
The Help Desk:
Your excellent IT Help Desk is for district staff only!
Please do not forward or give our IT help desk number to students or families for any reason.
Nope! Not even for the reason you are thinking about right now!
Student Connectivity Solutions:
For the previous three years, our district has provided hotspots to students who did not have internet access at home. The demand for these hotspots has decreased significantly from over 600 in 2020-21 to 132 in 2022-23. Additionally, the federal funding for student hotspots has moved toward a family-centered solution called the Affordable Connectivity Program.
The Affordable Connectivity Program allows qualifying families to receive internet from almost all providers at a significant discount. I encourage you to promote this program to your families in any way possible. Families from any of our CEP campuses automatically qualify. If you are a principal from a CEP school, you can use the attached letter (in both English and Spanish) as a starter template. Be sure to modify all of the highlighted areas before distributing the letter to your families.
Finally, we in IT know that connectivity is a significant barrier (ranked 5th) to student learning. Other solutions (including hotspots) for those with insecure housing are being considered. We will communicate additional possibilities as they become available.
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From Paul in HR:
UKG and My Team members
Building leaders may notice that there are employees on their My Team area of UKG who were temporary teachers last year and are still appearing as if they are on your 2023-24 roster. This is due to a deliberate decision that we made in June to not terminate temporary certified staff (a) because so many of them are rehired, it would create double work if we had terminated them on June 30th, and (b) if we terminate them, then they would not have BLS email access nor UKG access to track job openings and communicate with hiring managers
On August 18th, we will begin the process of terminating temporary certified staff from the 2022-23 school year who have not been rehired. As we process those, you’ll notice them drop off of your My Team rosters.
Before building leaders departed for the summer, office managers emailed an updated certified FTE list for the 2023-24 school year to [email protected]. We are still processing the changes from those FTE lists and assisting new hires so your My Teams information will become gradually more up-to-date each day.
July was devoted to BLAST new hires and movements (we had an unusually large volume of these this past year) and assisting moving new certified staff through the onboarding/licensure process.
Onboarding New Employees
Please note that once an external candidate accepts an offer of employment, it can take 7+ days for them to be cleared to work. Drug testing takes as long as 5 days once the person goes into the lab and background checks can take an average of 3 days after they submit the necessary information. In addition, the new hires have to complete all of their onboarding paperwork before they are legally allowed to show up at your site. DO NOT HAVE THEM WORKING PRIOR TO NOTICE FROM HR.
If you post a job today, begin interviews after 5 days, do your necessary reference checks, submit a request to hire, wait for HR approval, get a verbal offer of acceptance THEN the 7+ day onboarding process begins. Please take this timeline into consideration as you may need to have a substitute to begin the school year for people who have not been cleared to work in time for the start of school.
Supervisors will receive an email from one of our Specialists when employees clear the hiring process and are permitted to begin working, but if you want to check the status of a new hire, please wait until at least 7 days after the verbal acceptance to email [email protected]. REPEAT: DO NOT HAVE THEM WORKING PRIOR TO NOTICE FROM HR.
HDESD Sub System: Red Rover Replacing Frontline Absence Management
We are hearing from staff that they have received a login notice from Red Rover. Please help us communicate to staff that HDESD passed last year’s data from Frontline to Red Rover therefore it is NOT up to date with 2023/24 data, Office managers will need to work with HDESD to align current staffing assignments with Red Rover accounts as this is outside the scope of BLS HR’s work.
We have not received a request from HDESD to give them updated data from the 2023-24 school year yet so it will be a few weeks before you can expect to see anything different in Red Rover.
Update: We received this email from HDESD on Thursday morning
Good morning HR partners,
I wanted to share the email below that was sent to your office managers yesterday with the news that invitations had been sent out to staff to login to Red Rover and set up their profiles. We go live on Monday and at that point, staff will be able to add absences and select their preferred substitutes. Also, on Monday, our substitutes will be able to begin accepting jobs.
Please know that we will be working alongside office managers, staff and substitutes during this transition and while we know there may be anxiety with a major software change like this, we stand ready to assist in any way we can.
Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or concerns.
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From Tami: Illness Symptoms and When to Stay Home
Bend-La Pine Schools follows the Oregon Health Authority/Oregon Department of Education’s Communicable Disease Guidance for Schools. This guidance includes when an individual should be excluded from attending school on site (including any school-related activities such as clubs and sports).
For information on symptom-based exclusion guidelines, see page 8 of the Communicable Disease Guidance for Schools.
- Fever – An individual must be fever free for 24 hours without the use of fever reducing medications.
- Diarrhea/vomiting – Must be 48 hours since last episode.
COVID-19 is no longer an excludable disease (unless symptoms of fever, vomiting, and/or diarrhea are present). Parents/guardians/staff are no longer required to report positive cases of COVID-19 to the schools. COVID-19 test kits and medical grade face masks are available to students and staff upon request. Check with your school nurse about how to obtain a supply for your school.
You may also refer staff to the Health and Wellness section on our Bend-La Pine Schools website for more information about when to stay home.
For any additional questions/information, please contact the Bend-La Pine Schools Human Resources Department directly.
Calendar:
- August 21: 8:00-10:00 HS Check in @ Caldera HS
- August 22 and 23: 8:00-4:00 Taking it Up training for those who have not attended previously
- Inservice Week Schedule
- August 28: 7:30-9:00: New Teacher Orientation Day at Northstar Elementary
- August 29: 8:30-9:30+ District Virtual Welcome Back Event; be sure that ALL STAFF are in one location for this event. Be ready to send pics! (see Scott’s note above).
- August 30: Building Led Professional Development
- August 30th am focus: Assessment and Feedback Practices (formerly known as Equitable Grading)
- August 30th pm focus: Tier 1 MTSS framework: Teaching and supporting the development of prosocial behaviors.
- September 6: Ninth grade only day; regular daily schedule (8:00-4:00).
- September 19: 8:00-9:30 HS Work Session