December 10, 2012

By Allan 　

Howdy Roadrunners,

Just two more weeks until winter break!

Nine items of note for this week:

• Hazardous Weather and School Closures Memo – Please read over the Hazardous Weather Information for this school year. The short version for building staff is, if there is a snow day, no staff members need to come to school except for lead custodians. And to find out if school is cancelled, besides making announcements via local media and email, downtown is now also announcing school closures over their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

• Librarian Vacancy & Interviews – Howard’s librarian, Allen, will sadly be retiring at the end of the month and a posting for the position will be going up this week. I’m tentatively planning to conduct interviews on Wednesday, December 19th from 1:15-4:00. Let me know by the end of the week if you are interested in being on the interview committee. Allen will leave some big shoes to fill, but we’ll likely still get to see Allen around school as he has kindly offered to continue to run Oregon Battle of the Books for Howard. Best of luck on your new adventures, Allen!

• Social Committee Survey Results – The survey results are in and with 23 response we had a tie vote between holding a party here at school and going out to a restaurant on an early release Wednesday. There was also a fair amount of interest in holding a Friday at 4:00 after the break, so we’ll plan one for sometime in January. Look for an email this week from the Social Committee about our party plans!

• Fire Drill, Tuesday at 1:00 – Our December fire drill will be this Tuesday at 1:00, weather permitting. If it’s raining, we’ll try for a dry day next week. In light of the recent incident at YG, I was originally thinking we might do a Code Blue/Code Red Lockdown Drill this week too, but then I also just heard about a student at another elementary school who made a false report to police about an attempted kidnapping last week (he ended up confessing he’d made up the story because he didn’t want to go to the after school program), so I think I’ll save this drill for after the break. .

• District Recapturing Fleet Funds – The district made the decision to use building and department fleet funds to pay for the 17 new positions they added back this Fall. Using their weighted formula, we are having 42.12% cut from our fleet fund, which translates into $5,357 less than we had. If you’re interested, you can read the rationale sent to principals by Simone Sangster, 4J’s CFO.

• Youth Tobacco Prevention Poster Contest – The American Lung Association in Oregon sent me information about their “Be Tobacco Free” Youth Poster Contest. If this is something you’d like to do, see the attached cover letter, poster, guidelines and registration form for more details.

• Education without representation – Although Hispanic students represent a quarter of the nation’s public school enrollment and are the fastest-growing segment of the school population, non-white Latino children seldom see themselves in books for young readers, reports The New York Times. Education experts and teachers who work with Latino populations say the lack of familiar images could be an obstacle as young readers work to build stamina and deepen their understanding of story elements like character motivation. The Cooperative Children’s Book Center, which compiles statistics about the race of authors and characters in children’s books published each year, found that in 2011, only 3 percent of the 3,400 books reviewed were written by or about Latinos, a proportion unchanged in a decade. As schools across the country implement the Common Core State Standards, many are questioning whether nonwhite students are seeing themselves reflected in the required reading.

• Books to Match Diverse Young Readers – Related to the above item, here’s a nice resource Carmen shared recently that I wanted to pass along. On this site, you can click on quality titles that feature main characters who are black, Latino, Asian, American Indian or Alaska Native and read the beginning of each book. In response to concerns by the Southern Poverty Law Center and others, the architects of the Common Core are now developing a more diverse supplemental list.

• Schedule of Events for the Week – See the Google Calendar for future events, but here are the events of note for this week:

Dec. 10 (M)
2:30-5:00, Allan to Elementary Principals Meeting

Dec. 11 (T)
9:00-10:00, Allan, Angela and Carla meet with Kim Ketterer (Howard Office)
1:00, Fire Drill
2:30-3:30, Collaborative Meeting (or use this time to finish your SafeSchools required trainings).

Dec. 12 (W)
10:00-2:00, Sara Cramer visit to Howard

Dec. 13 (H)
12:00-4:00, Allan to Superintendent’s Cabinet Meeting
2:30-3:30, IPBS Meeting (Room 10)

Dec. 14 (F)
8:00-4:00, Allan to required OIS (Oregon Intervention Systems) certification training (Ed Center)
12:00-2:00, 3rd Grade to Salmon Release Field Trip at Alton Baker Park

Have an excellent week, everyone!

Allan

This entry was written by Allan, posted on December 8, 2012 at 5:06 pm, filed under Announcements, Articles, Equity. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.