October 30, 2025

Happy Halloween!!

From Tammy and Karen

As we wrap up a long week of parent-teacher conferences (and the loooong days that you put in), we want to take a moment to express deep gratitude for the time, energy, and heart you’ve poured into building strong partnerships with families. These conversations strengthen the bridge between home and school—and your commitment shines through in every one of them. As we head into the long weekend, we hope you’ll take time to rest, recharge, eat too much candy, and enjoy a well-deserved break!

Please take a moment to sign up for the next round of Site Visits! For November, we will be doing a “Gratitude Tour!” We want to hear about all of the things you are grateful for at your school!

Important Links

• October 22nd Elementary TLC Update
• SPECIAL EDGE LINK OCTOBER 2, 2025
• 1-Page Student Management guide
• Topics of Interest/Problem of Practice
• FAQs for Special Education Inclusion Topics—Keep checking in here! BEA and BLS supported
• Dates to recognize groups

Notes from our Team:

From Kinsey -Advocacy, Policy, and Equity

SNAP Benefits and our Community – FYI: 

As you may have seen, the anticipated federal shutdown is expected to disrupt SNAP benefits beginning in November. Many families in our community may experience reduced access to food for an unknown period of time. Local food banks are already reporting strain as they prepare to absorb the increased need.

We will share resources and reminders of local food services in the next Family Spotlight.  In the meantime, please feel free to 1) print, distribute, and share these bilingual food resource lists with all families and with your staff (Bend, South County, Redmond), 2) if you feel moved, consider donating time, funds, or other support to any of these local services (you can easily google any of their websites and find the Donation button 🙂), and 3) if your PTA or Booster Club wants to support food access, encourage them to support these local services.  

For those who visited the Giving Plate for our Community Engagement Bingo activity this week, thank you.  Your presence meant a lot to their over-stretched team, now more than ever.  (Missed it but want to visit and count that Bingo square?  Contact me!) 

MAC Survey – Action Needed: 

With the SNAP food assistance program being frozen and our students being impacted, this is a great time to remember just how critical our FAN Advocates are for our community.  Your participation in the MAC Survey process (completing your training ASAP, claiming time on the survey day in mid-November) brings in funds that pay for FAN Advocate positions, so that we have folks on staff who can help families navigate.  Thank you for prioritizing this!  Contact your FAN Advocate if you have questions.  

From Paul Dean in Operations

Work Order Submission Best Practices

When submitting a work order that requires greater visibility at your site, please include @[insert principal’s email], @[insert custodian’s email], and @[insert office manager’s email] in the comment section of the request. Doing so will:

• Ensure that key staff are aware of the request, helping to reduce duplicate work orders.
• Allow all recipients to receive automatic updates as the work order progresses.

To help our maintenance staff be better prepared and efficient:

• Provide as much detail as possible in the Description/Summary section. This information helps staff bring the right tools and materials and may prevent multiple trips.
• When possible, attach photos showing the repair issue. Photos help clarify the request and document the condition of the area needing repair.

From Jennifer in Student Well Being

College and Career Day: 

It’s that time of year again. November 20th is College and Career Day in Bend-La Pine Schools. As with last year, we are looking to draw attention to the multitude of pathways available to students after they graduate high school. This is a K-12 day! We want all students to be dreaming about what options they have after they leave our schools.  
 
Here are a few things you could do at your site to make the day a success.  It would be great if classrooms or advisories could look to do something for just 10-15 minutes this day.
Dress as a professional
Encourage students and staff to dress up as someone from a career they are interested in.  Remember there are a lot of great careers out there!
Wear college colors
Encourage students to wear the colors of a favorite college.  Remember, college can mean community college, trade school, 4-year university, etc.  Be careful with wording here as college brand clothing can be expensive and prevent students from feeling like they can participate.  Colors are more inclusionary.  
Consider incorporating videos or lessons bringing awareness to careers and colleges. 
Our 6-12 sites could lean into some of the activities in SchooLinks.  All secondary students have required activities to complete through BLS School Counseling curriculum and to complete their Educational Plan and Profile, so this would be a perfect opportunity to complete one of these required activities.  Consider onboarding 6th and 9th grade students on this day if you haven’t already done so.  Students are required to take a “Find your Path” assessment when first logging in that will jumpstart the college and career exploration process.
Comprehensive School Counseling Program and Lessons could be completed this week: High School and Middle School 
Wayfinder also has some great resources, especially their integration with Roadtrip Nation and their Future Ready Collection K-12. For middle school, these have been added for the week of November 17th as potential advisory lessons in our scope and sequence.
Here is a great website from the State of Oregon called Career Journeys.  There are amazing short videos, lesson plans and other activities any teacher could do.
Also available is the Career Connected Learning Central Oregon website which allows exploration of career paths close to home.
Consider inviting parents from the community in to talk about their careers.  
This could be done in a variety of ways from advisory to lunch opportunities.  You could also ask parents to submit a short video of them talking about their jobs and stitch them together for students.  Remember our visitor and volunteer requirements if you decide to invite parents into schools.
 
We hope you’ll join in the celebration.  Please send pictures of your participation to Becca Burda.  

Wayfinder data Available:
Wayfinder Waypoints data from the summative assessment is now available for your MTSS meetings. I will work with elementary admin on Tuesday, November 4th to go over how to use it. High and middle school admin leads, I will meet with you all in our smaller teams in the next two weeks. Reach out with any questions. Elementary and Middle school Counselors will be trained on Wednesday, November 5th during shared SIW. We are still working to schedule time with high school counselors.

From Lindsley – Elementary Literacy Coach

I am putting the following in the TLC blog- it is specific to 2^nd grade but if you see cursive taking instructional priority in other grade levels at your school, you could use the same questions to get alignment through your building.

2nd grade RGR Handwriting – recommend sticking with print through the end of the program

• At about unit 13, it will shift to cursive. I recommend continuing to do the lessons for all the rich sentence-level grammar, but continue with print (could use this paper)
  • Why no cursive? Ask yourself and your teams these questions.
    • What standard supports cursive instruction? 
    • Are your students all fluent with print yet?
    • Unless your class is at 100% reading at benchmark, how could the additional time it takes to learn cursive be spent teaching them to read?
      • If they are at 100%, which technology would better serve students today- typing fluency or cursive fluency?

Action Items

• Consider printing and distributing information about food resources to your community!
• Review Paul Dean’s tips for submitting work orders
• Start thinking about celebrating College and Career Day on November 20th.
• Bring computers to November 4th Horizontal meetings so we can look at Wayfinder Data together.
• Don’t forget Daylight Savings Time ends on November 2, 2025!

Important Dates

• October 31: No School and School Improvement Plans are due today.
• November 4: Horizontal Meeting 3:00 – 4:30 at the Board Room
• November 11: Veteran’s Day–Enjoy!
• November 12: All Admin PD from 3:00 – 4:30 at Perseverance Hall
• November 14: Ruby Bridges Walk to School Day
• November 18: PLC 1 and PLC 2 Meeting Day 3:00 – 4:30 p.m.
• November 20: College and Career Day
• November 24-28: Fall Break and Thanksgiving

And finally… Congratulations to our Next Duck Drawing winner Stephanie Jensen!

Stephanie is the Assistant Principal at Buckingham Elementary! She has been a leader with BLS for 10 years. Prior to that she worked at Sisters School District as a Reading Teacher and ELD teacher, which means she has a vast knowledge of instructional strategies and she is passionate about ensuring kids have everything they need to feel a sense of belonging. She believes in the Power of Moments, and likes to create experiences for teachers, kids, and families that are meaningful and memorable. She is always on the go, literally– she even has a treadmill under her desk so she can keep up the steps after the kids are gone! Congrats to a great leader, teacher, and mom! Stephanie, let us know your drink of choice!