Joel's Journal- A Weekly Bulletin Paulo Freire — Education transforms people. People transform the world.

Hello Awbrey Park Staff,

I hope you all had a rejuvenating Spring Break and are ready for the last long haul leading up to summer! My family and I went to Port Orford for some coastal downtime.  It was beautiful and we had some great walks on the beach in between the intense winds and squalls. Most importantly, we enjoyed each others’ company immensely which is what Spring Break is all about. I hope you all enjoyed your time off as well. I know I sure did!

Some items of note this week:

• Staffing Timeline  – Principals will get next year’s staffing allocations this Friday. We haven’t gotten an official staffing timeline, but I expect a final plan will be due within a three week period. We will hold a second staff meeting Tuesday, April 8th at 3:00 in Room 13, to share my initial staffing scenarios and for staff to discuss and give input. If we need to have further discussion, I will add other meetings. I will share with staff my submission of staffing in a stand up meeting close to their due date ( My guess is that this will be April 18th or 21st.)

Lastly, I’ve shared this earlier about the staffing we’ll receive, but to reiterate, these allocations will assume  CBA contract status quo, which will mean a teacher to student ratio increase of 1 to 30, compared to this year’s 1 to 27. We’re projected for about 378 students vs. this years’ projection of 425 (415 actual). This will negatively effect our staffing as you already know. Please let me know if you have any questions or ideas you’d like to discuss regarding any of this.

• “Taking it Up” Opportunity – Final call for any staff members wanting to attend “Taking it Up” on April 17th and 18th, 8:00-4:00 at the Ed Center (breakfast and lunch provided). Many certified staff members from Awbrey Park have gone through this training, so if you’re not familiar with this seminar, you can ask quite a few staff members about their experience with it. It is a two-day training focused on issues of race and equity for students in our schools. One credit is available from the UO for this seminar (the cost is TBA). The objectives of the seminar are to:

1. Develop a deeper personal awareness about how who you are impacts your work in schools and with students.
2. Deepen your understanding of Oregon’s history and context around race, racism and racial achievement disparities.
3. Become more aware of your own attitudes, values and beliefs about race.
4. Develop a stronger awareness of racism and its impact on yourself and others.
5. Learn skills for talking to other staff, parents and students about race and addressing issues you encounter.

Please let me know by the end of the week if you’d like to attend this high quality seminar.

• Title 1 Newsletter – If you’d like to know 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 information regarding Summer School (timeline, student selection criteria and teaching opportunities), a couple of nice math articles and lots of compliance work for coordinators.

• Title 1 Summer School Classified/Certified Positions – Mentioned above, there will be opportunities to work at the Title 1 Summer School for staff. If you are interested, you should apply through NeoGov (once it’s posted) and also email the new Summer School principal, Karen Ramirez-Gutierrez, who currently teaches at River Road/El Camino del Rio Elementary, so she can get sense of who and how many folks are interested. Also, because of the program focus on reading support, teachers must hold a reading endorsement, but in the event they are unable to locate enough interested teachers who hold an endorsement, they may shift the primary focus of summer school to mathematics interventions.

• Kindness

Here is a short article on kindness from Huffington Post last year.   In these trying times, I urge us to all consider how far kindness and community goes. Be good to each other and always be sensitive to how each of us feel.

Keep you fingers crossed that we don’t have too many indoor recesses this week!

Joel