Appreciation
Chase: I appreciate your calm gentleness and how with a look or expression you just let me know you get it when some ridiculousness is happening in the hallway outside your room.
Chris: I appreciate how you are always coming up with new plans and schemes to help our students. You always have ideas to support them beyond the school day in the forefront of your mind.
Lividini: I appreciate that it took me almost a full year to call you that! Seriously, I appreciate your "I've got this" and "Can do"attitude and how it is mixed with an irreverent sense of humor that just makes me laugh all the time!
Ms. G: I appreciate how calm and serene you always are even when following friends around the building. The first day I met you the first words you said were "Can I help?". I will always remember how welcome that made me feel.
Building Open Thursday
The building will again be open on Thursday. Please sign up here if you need to come in to get things for the remainder of the year. I am not sure when or if the building will be open again.
Please sign up here for a time if you intend to come in.
I enjoyed seeing everyone today even if it was just behind your mask. It was nice knowing that people really do still have legs.
Weeding the Garden
Given how much each of you is doing I am trying to take a few things off of your plate that may now be redundant as we have grown in our remote teaching and learning tracker.
Communication Tracker
Thank you for how faithfully you filled out the tracker. The purpose of the tracker was to know which families we had been in contact with, if the student had access to technology, and to troubleshoot any issues that the student or family may be having.
Our technology dashboards now let us know who has technology and the internet and there is a hotline for families to call with technical issues.
You are taking attendance so we know which families and students we have been in contact with. We have multiple contacts and a strong internal communication system within teams so we can intervene quickly when we have concerns. We will be able to document these interventions via our student success plans (More on these next week).
Therefore you are no longer required to complete the communication tracker! Thank you again for your hard work on this.
Website
Almost all of our families are now connecting directly through Google Classroom, Clever, or Seesaw. Most specialists are connecting directly with teachers to post content. Therefore the website has become redundant and will no longer be updated.
Zooming Fun
Jen is heading up an effort to plan a fun night for our students on Zoom. This will be something like a dance party, yoga night, trivia party, etc. If you would like to help her plan this for our kids please let me know.
Parent Support Night
We will be hosting a family support meeting Thursday, May 14th at 4:00 PM. We will invite families to come and share their thoughts questions and concerns about this challenging time for our students and families. For this first attempt, we will have Sam to answer health and community resource concerns, Jen to answer any social-emotional and mental health concerns, Paula (and 1 or 2 more volunteers) to discuss the challenges of parenting, working and homeschooling, and hopefully a representative from the technology department to help troubleshoot. Please let me know if you would like to volunteer for the panel as a fellow struggling parent.
I will also be asking you to push out to your parents an invitation to this meeting and a document collecting questions ahead of the meeting if families choose to send them in. Thank you for your help! I will have this to you tomorrow.
Time Off Requests
Today Zoraida went into the system and cancelled all requests for time off that was supposed to happen between March 16th and June 19th. If you do need time off from now until the end of the year please use ESS to request the time. I am sorry if today's unilateral actions resulted in you having to enter time again.