Clarifying Attendance at Staff Meetings, Department Meetings

Teachers, your time is extremely valuable and so is the time that is required of you for monthly staff meetings. To clarify, CMS teachers should attend 2 meetings each month - the monthly staff meeting (usually the first Tuesday of each month) and the monthly department meeting (usually the 3rd Tuesday of each month). Both of these meetings take place after school for an hour, and meet the obligation. **Grade 6 teachers should select their CORE department meeting relative to their block schedule.

To support the work of each department, administrative responsibilities have been adjusted to support each department. Department Chairs will share with each administrator the agenda, attendance and minutes from each department meeting. The administrator responsible for supporting each department is:

• Jay Dowd: Art, Physical Education and Special Education
• Lisa Lewis: Social Studies and English Language Arts
• Alison Guernsey: Math and Science

This clarification means that grade level meetings do not meet this obligation, though they certainly are encouraged; and this year, staff attendance will be recorded only for monthly meetings and department meetings.

Learning Walks

The administrative team has created a tool to offer teachers immediate feedback following a visit to the classroom. The tool works off of a template that Alison made, so the feedback will come as an email from her account. However, the feedback is being provided by the admin who is actually making the observation and is listed on the form. The domains for feedback coincide with our site's goals for the year. The domains are:

• Classroom Management
• Is the Objective clearly posted and understood by students?
• Academic Discourse in the classroom
• Is ELD integrated in to the lesson?

The Helpful Handout will publish the statistics (without teachers' names) from these domains periodically so we can observe how we are doing with these goals. 

Student Use of the Internet 

Everyone should be aware of a condition with our Chromebooks. In case you were unaware, students (or anyone) can log in to their personal Gmail accounts with our Chromebooks, even from home. When a student does this with a different server other than FSUSD's, they can download plug-ins and extensions that will then provide them access to restricted sites while on campus indefinitely, and there are some machines on campus with this condition. As a result, please monitor for improper student use - accessing personal Gmail accounts, connecting to non-FSUSD servers (hotspotting) or using plug-ins and extensions. Always report suspicious online activity immediately as a behavior problem. Thank you!!

Upcoming Professional Development (Title 1 Funded)

Our school is contracting with Sara Veloz, an education specialist to provide to ELA teachers additional training and support for the implementation of Springboard, and provide to STIP and PIPP teachers a crash course called "Bell to Bell" instruction. Department Chair/Coaches will participate in order to make this work enduring and supported throughout the year. Heidi is working on the exact times for the dates we have reserved, so please look for this announcement. Dates for our first professional development round with Sara are:

Nov 1   PD 1 (8 teachers)

Nov 13 PD 1 (8 teachers)

Dec 4 Coaching 1a (release 1 teacher)

Dec 19 Coaching 1b (release 1 teacher)