As I make my way around to see you all, it is so encouraging to hear the stories of what a great start this week has been. You and your staffs are a huge reason why! Creating welcoming and inclusive spaces for everyone, clearly communicating expectations and information, and sharing the joy of learning with the students and families contribute to the success. Thank you for a job well done!!
From Tammy
Reminder: As you are planning out your events for the year, please remember, for the 2 evening events that you are requiring staff to attend (Open House does not count if you adjusted your hours that day to include OH in the work day), please remember that you need to notify them at least 60 days in advance. Without the notification, the event becomes optional. So plan them now if you haven’t already and communicate it out to your staff. It can sneak up on you if you don’t!
Fall Conferences: There have been some questions about fall conferences and the conference/work schedule. Below is the work/conference days if you have not already shared those dates out with staff. Per the contract, this does not include the full work day prior to conferencing, however BEA was part of designing this calendar and knows we may need a Memorandum of Understanding for fall conferences.
- SIW the week prior to conferences is teacher prep time
- Tuesday, Oct 29. Kids attend school. Conferences 3:15-7:15
- Wednesday, Oct 30, Teacher work day 7:15-3:15, Conferences 3:15-7:15
- Thursday, Oct 31, Conferences 7:15-3:15–everyone home in time for trick-or-treating!
Rearranging things: Just a heads up, that I am moving the “Action Items” section to after the information from our teams. It seems that I can put more there to simplify things for you if I call out actions in the team notes, but you need those for context first. Please let me know if this does not work for you. Ultimately, it is what is easiest for you!
Important Links
- Tier 1 Expectations
- Personal Electronic Device Expectations in English, en Español
- School Issued iPad Expectations
- Assurances for Learning
- Sample Main Schedule with Assurances
- Priority Standards (Critical Areas of Focus)
- Investigations Powerpoint is now in the slide decks above.
- August 28th Elementary TLC Update!
Notes from our Team:
From Scott and Kayla in Safety : AQI:Please review our district’s Air Quality Index (AQI) protocols and decision-making resources on the Safety site of our staff portal. We have added an AQI FAQ document that you can review and share with your staff regarding air quality and our protocols.
As a reminder, it should be the school administrator(s) making the decision on whether students should be participating in recess, PE, and outdoor activities during the school day, based off this guidance, and not individual staff members. Please reach out to Scott or Kayla if you have any questions, or need support in your air quality decision making process.
SROs. We are excited to have our School Resource Officers and Deputies back working back in your schools with you this week. Please review the district’s SRO/SRD point of contact information and phone roster located in the Safety Resource share drive and reach out to us with any questions regarding the SRO program.
From Andrea Wilson, HR Director, Benefits and Risk Management:
New Incident Report Form now available in the Staff Portal. As a follow up to the investigations trainings in August, the revised Incident Report Form is now available in the Staff Portal. The form now has a second page for the post-incident/accident investigation.
BLS Incident Report Form – staff 9.2024.pdf
As a reminder, a site administrator or supervisor must complete a post-incident/accident investigation after every incident that results in employee injury. The investigation must be completed within 5-10 business days following the injury. Please reach out to Andrea Wilson if you have any questions, need assistance with an investigation, or have form feedback. Thank you again for your partnership and help as we navigate this new process!
From Jessica Houser, BO Operations Manager, Accounts Payable and Payroll
We know this is a busy and exciting time with many staffing changes happening across your sites. Please be aware that the cutoff for processing Personnel Actions (PAs) to ensure accurate payment and proper system setup for employees is Tuesday, September 10th. Any PA actions for September should be initiated in UKG by Monday, September 9th, using the appropriate HR action under the ‘team’ tab.
After this date, payroll processing begins, and any delays in submitting PA actions may affect employee pay or cause system issues. We appreciate your continued support when employees have questions, such as “Why hasn’t my location been updated in UKG yet?” Once a request leaves your hands, please understand that it can take some time for the system to reflect the changes. Your patience during this process is greatly appreciated.
Reminders:
- Classified Staff: PA actions should be completed for location changes (Nutrition, Custodial, and Transportation only), budget code changes, and FTE adjustments.
- Certified Staff: PA actions should be completed for budget code changes, FTE adjustments, and position changes within your school.
For questions, please reach out to:
- Classified Specialists: Cara Gienger and Kelly Marty at [email protected]
- Licensed Specialists: Trish Uhart and Candy Gelatt at [email protected]
- Payroll Specialists: Jenny Ostrom, Kate Pardo, Lisa Brinlee, and Jenny Helvie at [email protected]
Thank you and we hope it’s been an incredible week with students!
From Eric Powell, Ted Helton, and Jason Westmoreland, re: Disciplinary Action in Synergy
We have identified an unexpected change to typical discipline data entry which has occurred because there is no mechanism to separate those piloting Teacher Referrals from those who are not when it comes to “Accepting” (or “Denying”) discipline incidents.
Previously, there was no concept of an “Incident Approval Queue”, you simply entered a discipline incident using either Student Incident or the Incidents screen in Synergy and the data was immediately ‘live’ in the system.
However, this year some schools are piloting Teacher Referrals, which introduces the concept of (and a Synergy screen called) “Incident Approval Queue”, allowing administrators to determine what discipline data should be accepted (or declined) from entering the system.
The side effect of adding this has been that ALL schools are affected by the change and will need to use the approval queue to finalize data entry by accepting ALL incidents regardless of how they are generated. This is required for the data to be state/federal reported, as well as being displayed in ParentVUE.
What you need to do: As a principal or VP/Dean, using the Synergy quick launch, type “Incident Approval Queue” and wait for the search to complete, then click on the resulting link to enter the Incident Approval Queue screen.
Once you have entered the screen, you can review any incident in question. You can click the Student ID to review the Student Incident screen, and the ID (Incident ID) to go directly to the incident in question if you want to review beyond the description displayed in the grid.
NOTE: For those participating in the Teacher Referral pilot, you may want to edit the Incident description to include your initials at the end of the description if you are working on an incident to indicate to the rest of your team you are handling that incident. Therefore, any incidents entered by a teacher via the Teacher Referral process without a set of initials has NOT yet been reviewed by anyone. This may be a quick way to identify who is working on what until we can get a better solution in place for you to manage who is handling which incidents / students.
To accept the incident, look to the far-right Action button, and select “Accept” if the incident has had all the data entry done for the incident and is ready for parents to view, etc.
NOTE: Most users will only have Accept / Deny – don’t worry about the other options if you don’t have them.
This will remove the incident from the Queue and make if available to view in ParentVUE and to be included in State/Federal reporting. THIS IS REQUIRED FOR ALL INCIDENTS.
If you have any questions or concerns, please contact Eric, Jason, or Ted by email. l
Walt Norris, Director of Custodial and Sustainability, re: Sustainability. Moving into the new school year the sustainability position is changing. Jackie Mueller-Wilson has taken a job with Deschutes County Solid Waste as a Community Outreach Coordinator. She will have some connection with the schools because of her position, mainly for support of the Green Team.
The sustainability position has been refined, going forward we will be concentrating on three main objectives:
- Waste reduction across the district.
- A lunch waste/composting/recycling system for elementary schools
- A recycling program for secondary schools
The main focus this year is put our efforts into what we do as a district for sustainability. If we are thriving in the way we are sustainable, it will support our students thriving as learners too. The sustainability position will also support the Green Team initiative and also the SEM (Strategic Energy Management) program. Please continue with the Green Leadership Coalition through your schools and once the position is hired, we will work on the best way to support the Coalition. Best guess will be October to see the position filled.
Please reach out with any questions, I will do my best to answer or find someone that can. Thanks!
From Jennifer Hauth in Social Emotional and Mental Well Being:
Student Success: We have a new coaching model this year and many of the coaching assignments have changed as we onboard 10 new SSCs. Going forward, schools with the Student Success Intervention will have a Student Success team that will have two coaches – one team member will have a mental health/clinical/care coordination focus (Darlene and Megan) and one will have a system, SPED, PBSP/Data focus (Jen and Amanda) but they will work very closely together and will take the lead based on the situation or students need. We will be moving forward with building out a Medicaid billing model for our clinicians over this school year to launch for next school year. This information has not been shared with SSCs yet but more information to come as we learn more about what is possible in Oregon with Medicaid and schools. This became a possible opportunity for us going forward as of September 1st. The team has already been working closely with teams onboarding new SSCs so please reach out to your coaches if you have any questions. More to come as we navigate this new transition….
Wayfinder: We continue to have integration issues with Clever and Wayfinder for some staff. If you have a staff member that does not have the correct access or correct school listed, please use the instructional tool process to request what is needed. All elementary and middle schools that ordered workbooks should be receiving them this week if they have not already.
Waypoints, the intial summative assessment for students will be live in Wayfinder from September 15th through October 18th and the final summative assessment for students will be open May 12th through June 13th for students. Summative Waypoints allow educators to measure student growth of Wayfinder’s six Core Skills across the school year. By administering this optional summative Waypoints assessments, educators can understand areas of strength and growth for individual students and the class to make informed, data-driven decisions about SEL instruction. Here is the info on Waypoints, including the new Waypoints Implementation Guides to help teachers set up the reason we are assessing students as well as instructions.
From Scott McDonald, IT Director, re: device management tools
There are two applications available to assist with classroom device management, Apple Classroom and JAMF Teacher.
Apple Classroom. Apple Classroom is familiar to Bend-La Pine teachers, as it has been available for some time. The guide linked here provides all the information you need to get started with Apple Classroom. Common uses include:
- Monitoring all student devices at once, displayed on a single screen
- Locking iPads to a blank screen while giving instructions
- Locking an entire class or individual students into a specific app
- Managing small (ad hoc) groups of student devices
Apple Classroom is ideal for elementary classrooms or any classroom that doesn’t frequently require internet access.
JAMF Teacher. JAMF Teacher is a newer application for Bend-La Pine teachers and offers more restrictive controls than Apple Classroom. With JAMF Teacher, you can create a pre-determined digital lesson that allows access to specific websites and applications while blocking all others.
Use the instructions linked here to create your first JAMF Teacher lesson plan. JAMF Teacher is particularly well-suited for secondary classrooms that use online curricula.
For best results, we encourage both applications to be accessed from your iPad, rather than your computer.
From Sean Reinhart, Student Services
As a reminder, each inclusion EA in your building is issued a device (iPad or laptop) and needs to have read only access to Synergy SE, so they can review student IEPs. Please check with your inclusion EAs and have them confirm that their Synergy SE access is working. If not, please submit a help desk ticket to ensure they have access. Thank you!
Special Education Staffing Update: Each year, learning specialists provide our administrative team needs assessment, which help us staff your buildings. We believe we have a good staffing plan given the available resources. At this point, we have used all our staffing allocation to hire learning specialists, inclusion EAs, and other specialists. This includes already using 50% of the discretionary budget to hire inclusion EAs for the year. Before we look at any other staffing, we will need to wait until after we can verify all student enrollments, which should be within the first 5-10 days of school. After that, we will create a plan to support the sites with unexpected needs. Please remember that you can utilize your 70 hours (the “high needs” line item in your school budget) worth of funds to get a substitute. If you do end up using this option, it would be important to communicate with our team.
From Josh Marks, Student Services, re: 504 Coordinators
Welcome back to a new school year! I hope you all had a restful summer and are ready for another successful year ahead. I’m pleased to inform you that we have updated all of our 504 forms to better support our students’ needs. In addition, we will be introducing a new process for annual 504s that I believe will be a significant time saver for you.
To ensure everyone is familiar with these updates, we will be holding a mandatory training session. You can choose from one of three times on September 11, 2024: 8:15 AM, 10:30 AM, or 2:00 PM in the Board Room at the Education Center. NO SIGN UP NECESSARY.
Thank you for your continued dedication to our students. I look forward to seeing you at the training and to another year of great work together.
Action Items
- Choose a mandatory 504 training and put it on your calendar
- Make sure all inclusion EAs have access to Synergy and IEPs on their district issued device
- Share Apple Classroom and JAMF with teachers
- Meet with a team (ICCLs, teachers, etc.) to determine if you are using Waypoints this year in Wayfinder
- Refresh yourself with AQI limits for inside/outside play–smoke has started to roll back in!
- Make sure your office managers have initiated any outstanding PAs in UKG by 9/9
- Share conference/work dates and times with staff if you have not done so already
- Notify staff of evening events at least 60 days out
Important Dates
- September 6: In bed by 7, thoroughly exhausted!
- September 15: Payroll Cutoff—timesheets and approvals for this last period (August 13-Sept 15) are due today!
- September 15: Cutoff date for enrollment for benefits!
- September 24: Horizontal Meeting at High Lakes Elementary, 3:00-5:00 (High Lakes and Amity host)
And finally… if interested, don’t delay, registration closes 9/12!
