Allan's Announcements

By Allan 　http://blogs.4j.lane.edu/chinn/?p=4810

Hello Roadrunners,

It was great to see so many students doing coding last week! Next year, more teachers should tell me ahead of time what you’re doing so we can try to get more media out here, because there were some pretty cool activities and presentations happening last week. One of activity landed Howard on the front of the Register Guard, which if you went to the website had a pretty nice video to go with the story.

Seventeen items of note this week:

• January 5th Workshop Sign-Up – Licensed staff, if you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for two workshops for the January 5th PD day when we return from winter break. See Susan Penrod’s email for details. And for classified staff, there is a training that sounds good being held this same day at Chavez 10:30-12:00 titled “Preventing and Managing Behavior Problems in Small Groups,” which is specialty designed for EAs who provide small group instruction. For both classified and licensed, to register for workshops, go to the 4J Workshops webpage.

• Fire Drill, Tuesday at 9:15 – The weather forecast looks good for holding our December Fire Drill this Tuesday at 9:15. If we’re rained out, we’ll try later in the day at a dry moment or the same time on Wednesday.

• 2nd Grade Job-Share Interviews Monday – It’s short notice, but if anyone is interested in helping with interviews for Erin’s job-share parter, Erin and I will be conducting interviews this Monday after school in the office at 2:15. Let me know if you’d like to join the interview committee.

• PTO Meeting, Tuesday at 6:00 – The December PTO meeting will be this Tuesday, 6:00-7:00 PM in the library if any staff are able to attend. There was a small turnout of regulars at the last meeting, but it’s always great if any staff besides myself can attend.

• PTO Papa’s Pizza Coupon Fundraiser – If you didn’t see it on the Howard PTO’s Facebook Page, they were selling Papa’s Pizza Coupons at the Holiday Bazaar for $15. They have 90 left and are going to allocate $5 of each sale to any teacher, support staff or fund that the purchaser would like. That is $450 of potential extra money directly to the staff this year. Feel free to promote this with your students and to tell them direct the $5 towards your class or program.

• Child Abuse/Neglect Reporting Form – We’ve sadly had to make a fair amount of reports to DHS lately, which made me think I should remind staff to make a record of your report and to share a copy with me either by email or paper. Attached is a copy of the Abuse/Neglect Reporting Form that can be found in the Mail Room filing cabinet. You can use that form or you can also write up a summary with this same information in an email or text file.

• BRING Recycling Presentations, Field Trips & Art Contest – BRING Recycling shared several things with us last week. One, they are available to do classroom presentations on a variety of sustainability and recycling topics, including food waste, composting, paper making and “Where Stuff Comes From.” Two, they are offering field trips to the Lane County Waste Management Facility (colloquially known as “The Dump”). BRING will actually pay for transportation for this field trip. Lastly, they are again holding their annual art contest for the best student made posters capturing the message REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE, RETHINK and/or COMPOST. Winners are published in their calendar and Howard actually had three students make it into the 2016 Calendar!

• Safety Reminders – 4J’s Risk Manager, Randi Bowers-Payne, sent an email reminder to principals about the annual Building Safety inspections, saying there are consistently several areas needing improvement across buildings. These areas include maintaining a clear path to electrical panels, shelves needing to store the heaviest objects lowest to the ground, and remembering to lock COWs to help prevent theft. See the above email for Randi’s complete list.

• 2016-2017 EEF Grant Application Changes – This is quite a ways off, but principals and secretaries received and email from EEF saying they are chaining their application process for next school year. Instead of having staff write grants at the start of the year, when staff are especially busy, EEF is going to begin accepting applications in the spring for the following school year. On a related note, the email also stated they will be announcing this year’s grants recipients this week.

• New Building Updates – Attached are the minutes from the last Owner/Architect/General Contractor (OAC) Meeting and below are a few items of note:

• Classroom White Boards – Our TLT Leaders, Angela and Erin, were invited by Kim Ketterer last week to look a short throw projector that was installed in a mock-up classroom in the new building. They immediately noticed the white board was mounted too high (about neck height for your average kindergartner), which meant most students and quite a few staff member wouldn’t be able to reach the top of the board. A second issue with the board was the size. We thought we were getting boards that were 5 feet in height, compared to the smaller boards that were ordered. However, good news! The district is stepping up to pay for the larger boards, which will allow us to have a larger space to project onto from the short throw projector.

On a related note, we were originally planning to order a SMART brand of short throw projector, but SMART discontinued the model, so we’re instead ordering an EPSON brand of short throw projector, which will still work with all SMART Notebook files. The EPSON projector will actually project a 100 inch diagonal image, though our boards will be nowhere that big.

• File Craft Packing – It was asked last week how teachers should pack their file crates and here’s the answer. Teachers housed label on the long side, put some sort of paper/cardboard over the top (which helps keep what is inside contained), and tape it around the top and bottom (tape completely around a couple of times).

• Staff Tour, Tuesday – To end our Staff Meeting on a fun note, I can take people out to the new building this Tuesday following our meeting. There are cabinets installed in classrooms (even if they’re smaller than we wanted), walls and glass are mostly installed, the tiles we made are now up, and the yellow/blue/green wing colors are going up too, so it’s definitely starting to look like a school. If anyone would like to tour the building at 3:15ish on Tuesday following the staff meeting, please feel free to join!

• News from the Emerald Empire Reading Council – Here’s the November Newsletter from the Emerald Empire Reading Council. This month’s newsletter includes a number of workshops and information on a $100 grant for reading and writing activities (small grants are usually easier to win). If you’d like more information, visit their rad-looking website.

• Parenting Group at the Child and Family Center – A therapist at the Child and Family Center (CFC) is offering a reasonably priced, mindfulness-based parenting group for parents of children ages 2-8 years old who are experiencing behavior concerns. They will start the group in Mid-January and offer free childcare and a light dinner at each group. See the email we received and the flyer for details and contact information if there are any families you’d like to share this with.

• District Admin Updates – Linda O’Shea is the new half-time principal at Family School Elementary. Linda served and continues at half-time as the assistant principal at ATA. This mid-year modification is due to Kathy Owen’s shift in responsibilities, leaving an opening at Family School. Kathy was split between Family School and Twin Oaks, but is now full-time at Twin Oaks, though taking on additional responsibilities. The last Twin Oaks principal was the district 504 Coordinator.

• Why computer science education is “gateway to the future” – President Barack Obama has called for increased support for computer science education in US schools. In this blog post, Melissa Moritz, deputy director of STEM at the US Department of Education, shares three key reasons why computer science education is critical.

• Smarter Balanced Classroom Activity Requirement Removed for 2015-2016 – I’m on an ODE Communications email list and got an email saying that for this school year the multi-state Smarter Balanced Consortium has voted to remove the Classroom Activity as a required precursor of the Smarter Balanced performance tasks for math and ELA. I’m sure there will be further details on this coming from 4J, but if you’d like more details, see the above linked email from ODE.

• Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) – With the passage of ESSA, replacing No Child Left Behind, the work in many ways is just beginning, because the new law does away with so many federal mandates and shifts control to states regarding assessment, accountability and evaluation, state legislatures will be playing a decisive role in determining how ESSA is implemented. If you want all the nitty gritty details, see this EdWeek article which offers a pretty comprehensive summary of the new legislation. And here’s an OregonLive article that includes reactions from Oregon lawmakers, which gives hints at the changes we might see in our state.

• Schedule of Events for the Week – See the Google Calendar for future events, but here are the events of note for the next two weeks:

December 14 (M)
9:30-12:10, 4th Grade Symphonic Safari Field Trip

December 15 (T)
9:15, Fire Drill
2:30-3:30, Staff Meeting (Library)
6:00-7:00, PTO Meeting (Library)

December 16 (W)
9:00-11:00, Allan to OAC Meeting (Construction Trailer)

December 17 (H)
No BEST
2:30-3:30, Allan to IEP Meeting (Room 9)
3:45-5:00, Allan to Kindergarten Teacher & Principals’ Monthly Meeting (Chavez)

December 18 (F)
Tail Feather Reward – PJ Day
No BEST
10:45-12:30, Birthday Lunches with the Principal (Library)

December 21 – January 1
Winter Break

January 4 (M)
No School – Furlough Day
In District School Choice Requests Open

January 5 (T)
No School – Professional Development Day
8:00-12:00, District Professional Development Day for Elementary Teachers (Holt)

January 6 (W)
Classes Resume
Winter Benchmarking Window Opens
9:00-11:00, Allan to OAC Meeting (Construction Trailer)
1:30-2:30, PBIS Meeting (Room 21)
4:00-5:00, Allan to North Region Principals’ Meeting (Spring Creek)

January 7 (H)
Bianca Out 1/7-1/15

January 8 (F)
Regular Day

One week until winter break when staff can turn off all those alarms on your phone reminding you to send students to groups, to start supervision or any number of things. :)

Have a great last week of 2015, everyone!

Allan