This and That:

MAC Survey: The winter MAC Survey will be on Monday, January 24th. Please know that your time and effort is appreciated more now than ever. Covid has stretched our school staff beyond limits and FAN services are in high demand. Your participation raises over 60% of the budget to keep our FAN program running. Thank you!  

State Testing: It is sounding like we WILL have state testing this year, although I haven’t heard if there will be similar to last year or more like pre-COVID.

Kids Inc. Staffing: Thank you to our classified staff that expressed an interest in supporting our Kids Inc. for a few weeks while they hire more staff. I have passed your names along to Skip Offenhauser.

Safe Touch: Currently, Jennifer Hauth is working with a team to revamp the Safe Touch program (current books are out of date and out of print. For this year, you are welcome to follow the current version of lessons or, if the new lessons are ready when you plan to do SafeTouch, your team can choose to use the updated lessons. Either way, next year, we will have updated lessons that all BLS staff will be using.

Deschutes Children’s Forest: There are several community organizations that have NOT been able to be in our schools for the past couple of years as very few organizations had the correct clearance. As of this week, the Deschutes Children’s Forest has permission to be in BL schools and provide their services! If interested, I recommend scheduling them more sooner than later as many schools are going to want to access their programs.

K-1 Foundational Skills Educator Network Session: K-1 Foundational Skills Educator Network Session will still be happening on February 9th and April 20th- 1:30-3:00 in each elementary building. The information covered during this session is essential information on teaching phonics. Decodable texts have been purchased for teachers and these materials will be given out at each of these Educator Network sessions. The sessions are optional and teachers will be paid (timesheet) to attend. Please sign-up here.

SIW Agenda: SIW this week is a teacher prep day.

ICCL Meeting: Canceled this week.

Focus on Excellence and Equity:

TLC Update: Here is a link to this week’s TLC Update. There are a BUNCH of report card supports – make sure you take a look.

Black History Month and Women’s History Month (From Kinsey): Just a reminder about some upcoming months and some resources for each.    Look for more resources from Christie Boen.

1. Black History Month: February. Resources here.

2. Women’s History Month: March. Resources here.

Reading Article- “Teaching Reading IS Rocket Science“: 2020 version: I will highlight small chunks of this lengthy report over the next few weeks to try to nudge everyone to read it in small pieces. Pages 14-22 are titled: “Toward a Curriculum for Teacher Preparation and In-Service Professional Development”. Although there are many great quotes from this section, I am only including one. Additionally, I STRONGLY recommend that all staff that supports reading pages 20-21 regarding best practices in reading.

Children—particularly those who are not strong readers—are routinely subjected to teaching practices that have not been shown to be effective for children like themselves. These include teaching students to rely on context, pictures, and guesswork to decipher new words, instead of decoding the sound-symbol relationships. In far too many classrooms, a great deal of time is allocated to practices— like drilling children on hundreds of “sight” words on flash cards and drawing outlines around words as if a word’s silhouette would help identify it—that are less effective than practices based on the latest research.

COVID/ Safety Related Information:

Staff COVID-19 Response & Recovery: As you all know, the COVID 19 rules and landscape have been changing quickly over the past couple of months. BLS created a newsletter called “COVID-19 Response & Recovery” to keep staff up to date with the latest changes. The most recent edition came out last week on January 18th (and another one was sent on January 13th). If you haven’t been reading these, I recommend you search your email to read these important updates).

EME COVID Anonymous Safety Concern Form: Link here.

To Do:

Staffing: Believe it or not, it’s just about time to start thinking about staffing for next year. Please follow this link to complete a short survey about your wishes for next year by Thursday, February 4th. ALL POSITIONS SHOULD TAKE THE SURVEY.

YouthTruth Survey:  The survey closes this Friday, January 28th at the end of the day. Currently, we are up to 80% of our staff completing the survey (great job!!) I’d love to have 100%. Please follow this link and take the survey if you haven’t already. Every voice is important.

DIBELS: Winter DIBELS benchmark testing will be the following Friday, January 28th. Grades 3-5, please have your DAZE completed BEFORE January 28th so that we can use the DIBELS data quickly after the 28th. Thank you!

Master Schedule Updates: Classroom teachers – please ensure the master schedule is up to date with your current schedule (including what the rest of the class is doing during reading intervention time. Please be sure to use the tab that says “Master Regular – To Edit.” **Note** – please ensure that the “pink” reading intervention block is not during template time for the rest of the class. Our students who are receiving intervention should definitely NOT be missing template time. Please see Kelle if you have any questions about this.

Important Dates: