December 2, 2013

By Allan  

Welcome Back Everyone,

I hope you all had a good Thanksgiving break and were able to find time to relax and rejuvenate. It seems hard to believe there’s only three weeks until winter break!

Fifteen items of note for this week:

School Design Workshop, Wed. 5:30-7:30 – A reminder that the Howard School Design Workshop will be this Wednesday, Dec. 4th from 5:30-7:30 in the cafeteria. Although staff will have future opportunities to work with the architects, this is really your only chance to have input on overall school layout as well as the class pod and classroom layouts, because those pieces are going to similar between Howard and River Road and will be set in stone very soon. Please let me know if you will be coming.

And a reminder for classified staff, downtown will pay extended contract to 2-3 classified staff willing to supervise open gym during the Design Workshop. I don’t expect it to be a huge turnout, so it won’t be anything crazy like Curriculum Night.

• Teacher: “Hive” design gives classroom an innovative buzz – Emily E. Smith, an educator in Austin, Texas, named her classroom “The Hive Society” and details in this blog post how she has transformed it into a “vessel for innovation to bloom.” Inspired by photos of technology start-ups, (similar the this article I shared earlier this year on how Pixar, Google and Apple workspaces should influence school design) Smith redesigned her room to inspire creativity — developing spaces where students could work together, spread out and collaborate. I think this is another good article to think about as we design our new school and think about our overall program.

• How the role of the teacher is changing in a high-tech world – Technology increasingly is changing the way students learn, and changing the role of the teacher “to give students what technology can’t — motivation, respect, empathy, and passion,” said author-educator Marc Prensky, who made a presentation at a recent conference on learning and the brain. Education-technology expert Will Richardson also said at the conference that educators must be “learners first, teachers second.” We are currently the last generation of educators who did not grow up with the internet.

• TalentEd is Fully Operational – TalentEd is now fully operational. Please log on and input SMART Goals. HR extended the timeline to enter the goals into TalentEd to December 31st. Attached (in Word and PDF) are the shared building SMART goals we discussed earlier in the year if teachers choose to use these as your goal areas. I’ll plan to set up goal meetings with people now that we can enter them, but please let me know if you have any questions.

• December 6th PD/Planning Day – I emailed this earlier, but there was a change of plan for the PD portion of this day. Instead of math and writing, we’ll be doing a work session focused on the Teacher Effectiveness and Growth System. Classified staff are not required to attend the December 6th meeting since it does not directly connect to your work, but you are certainly welcome to attend if you’d like.

See my previous email and agenda for details, but we’ll meet Friday, Dec. 6th in the library from 8:15-11:30. Teachers will need to bring 3 lessons in a unit of study—any stage of planning acceptable. See the attached “Preparing and Drafting a Dilemma” document if you want to know how we will using your lessons this day. These will be part of a consultancy protocol that we’ll do at the meeting. Let me know if you have any questions.

• 2014-2015 Enrollment Projections – Downtown shared with principals their preliminary enrollment projections for next year, which is what largely determines our staffing for next year. Howard is currently projected to be at 320.5 students (counting kindergarteners as half a student), which is 32 students more than our projection for this year, and 10 over our current enrollment of 310.5 students. This is a pretty good sign that our staffing for next year will stay the same, if not increase, and that we should be able to maintain straight grades. I did tell downtown that I think their kindergarten projection of 51 students is low when considering that our kindergarten classes have been growing the past two years and that I’m also expecting more people to come to Howard with the new building starting construction this summer (not to mention our great program that’s getting some good word-of-mouth!).

Related to enrollment projections, and something may be of interested or not to folks, is the school choice matrix principals receive each year. This matrix shows which schools we are pulling students from and which schools students in our attendance area are going to instead of here. We are pulling students from across 4J, mostly from River Road and Awbrey Park, and we are losing students in our attendance area primarily to Corridor and YG, though it’s fewer than in the past.

• PBIS Focus: Generosity – The December PBIS monthly focus is Generosity and don’t forget about the PBIS/CFK cheat sheet that matches our monthly themes with Caring for Kids class meeting lessons, which is a nice way to tie the two activities together.

• Feed Hope: River Road Serves – I’ve mentioned this before and it’s mostly an FYI, but I’ve been working with a Howard kindergarten parent, Quinton Williams, who’s a pastor at the Eugene Mission and who is also a community organizer, on setting up food boxes for families in need over winter and spring break. There are two goals with this project; one is the immediate need of addressing student hunger and the other is to begin connecting neighborhood community groups, businesses and organizations who can then form a network to address a variety of community needs and issues. The food boxes are intended so that students will be able to prepare on their own three meals a day over the break. Different from a food drive, we’ll be asking for specific food items. Volunteers canvased the River Road neighborhood to pass out 2,500 door hangers on November 30th and December 1st, which listed the food items we’re looking for as well as the drop off sites. Drop off sites will be at Howard, Trinity United Methodist, River Road Parks Center (Emerald Park), and Grocery Outlet. Food will be collected from December 1st to December 17th, and will picked up daily and stored at Howard. Packaging day will take place Wednesday, December 18th at 6:30 PM in the cafeteria. I think we’ll have enough volunteers between the Boy Scouts and Trinity, but if you’d like to help should can email riverroadserves@gmail.com

• No Lifetouch Spring Pictures? – I’m thinking about no longer doing Spring Pictures, given that it’s another interruption to instruction during an already shortened school year, that not many families order pictures, and that our school really does not get much back from Lifetouch for doing this (about $100). I’ll run this by the PTO at their next meeting too, but I wanted to know if there were any staff who would object to me ending Spring Pictures.

• TSS Hours and 4jdesktop@ Ticket Reminder – You can give James a big thank you for advocating with CIS that Howard needs more TSS hours to support the amount of tech in our building. To compensate, he’s been spending some time at Howard on M/W/F mornings, but it’s still important that staff continue to use 4jdesktop@4j.lane.edu to put in tickets.

• Title 1 Newsletter – If you’re curious what’s happening in Title 1 from the district perspective, here is the latest Title 1 Newsletter that went out to all Title 1 Coordinators and principals. This month’s issue has an interesting short article on ADHD from the Harvard Education Letter that’s worth reading.

• Blues in the Schools is now booking for 2013-14 – 3/4/5 classes did this last year, but the Rainy Day Blues Society’s Blues in the Schools program is now booking presentations for this year. They offer a fun, interactive look at blues music: how it started, why it’s such an important part of American history and culture, and how it became the foundation of rock ‘n’ roll, jazz, and hip-hop. See their website and flyer for more information. They have a limited number of slots available and they usually fill quickly, so schedule soon if you’re interested. schools@rainydayblues.org

• Track Athletes Reading to Classes – Coach Mark Rowland and the Oregon Track Club Elite are looking for opportunities to read to students over the next few months. While they cannot attend every classroom, they are hopeful to reach as many students as possible. They encourage you combine classrooms into one request (i.e. – all the 3rd grades at…) to facilitate a broader reach. If you are interested, email Kim McManus (tiggermcmanus@gmail.com) with the following information:

• School:
• Contact:
• Contact phone:
• Contact email:
• Date Requested:
• Time of Day Requested: (early afternoon works best for athletes)
• Age Group of kids:
• Number of kids:

• Symantec Volunteers – I’ve spoken with a Howard parent who works at Symantec and she shared that Symantec has a “Dollars for Doers Program” where they encourage their employees to volunteer in the community, such as at Howard, and Symantec actually pays $15 an hour to the organizations they volunteer at. If you are ever needing a tech, sales person or even an HR person for some sort of class presentation, career day or other related activity, please remember this resource. Just let me know and this parent said she would set it up for us.

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

December 1 (M)
PBIS Focus: Generosity
Reading Progress Monitoring 5
2:30-5:00, Allan to Elementary Principals Meeting (Ed Center)

December 2 (T)
1:10-1:40, Safety Patrol Training with Jennifer & Allan (Room 1)
2:30-3:00, PBIS Meeting (Room 22)

December 3 (W)
1:30-3:30, Allan Meeting with Sara Cramer (Howard)
2:30-3:00, Green Team Meeting (Room 13)
5:30-7:30, Howard Community Design Workshop (Cafeteria)

December 4 (H)
2:30-3:30, TLT Training (Room 6)

December 5 (F)
8:15-11:30, Howard Teacher Work Session (Library)

December 6 (S)
9:00-4:00, PTO Holiday Bazaar – All Day

Have a great week back everyone and keep watching those weather reports (as of posting this, a couple weather websites are predicting a chance of snow this week.)!

Allan


And here’s a fun way to teach fractions using LEGOs I saw on Reddit.