Weekly News and Notes

Greetings!

Thanks again to everyone for such rich and positive conversations today. Our PD was focused, productive on many fronts, and suitable to a number of needs; we will be looking through all the feedback forms and working to provide opportunities to support our needs, and to provide the opportunities people need to continue these collaborations!

SENIOR PRIVILEGES

Senior privileges were approved at the School Committee meeting on Thursday, January 17. We will hold a senior assembly on the first Friday of second semester (February 1), at which point we will outline the procedures to the students. Please let us know if you have any other concerns or ideas in terms of implementation, which will be in place, hopefully, by the first day 1 of second semester, the following Wednesday.

Thanks to Christine Ryan and Spencer Christie for their patience and advising of the students, as well as Diana Rodgers, who provided support throughout the process to the seniors as they honed and refined their presentations and ideas.

ELA Interviews

We are in the process of finalizing the ELA position, and hope to have someone recommended to Dr. Evans at the end of next week. That person will hopefully be in place by the following week in order to hit the ground running on Friday, February 1, after Linda Matondi's retirement!

SECOND SEMESTER DUTIES

My apologies for sending out duties in a couple of different formats; I was under the impression that you could see the same schedules that I could on MMS. Hopefully the files on the high school conference make sense; if you need any clarification on when and where your duties are for second semester, please see me. I have made every possible attempt to ensure that everyone gets at least one long block free, and to ensure that everyone has a first or last period duty when the seniors could come and go.

With the additional "time," which is really only 1-2 periods every week or so, we are hoping to provide some pointed ideas for filling that time: working toward SMART goals, time for Atlas and curriculum collaboration, coverage for others who need time to collaborate during school time, etc. I am open to ideas - I would love to make that time as productive as possible for folks and support your goals as best we can!

SCHEDULING CONVERSATIONS!

Doug and I will be attending an MMS seminar in early March regarding the scheduling of the building. As we start to look at the schedule, we have shared with the department heads our desire to schedule the building around the courses that students elect to take, not simply rolling the schedule forward from year to year with a couple of tweaks.

Already, we are having some conversations with the arts and PE about revising the schedule to allow for greater curricular opportunities, as well as to reduce the number of students forced into study as a result of the scheduling of PE classes without anything opposite them. Furthermore, there will be some additional opportunities to write electives and offer new courses, hopefully, to students, particularly opposite the PE courses that meet every other day.

Please consult with department heads about elective offerings that you would consider pursuing. We are entirely committed to getting students OUT of study halls, into more classes, and giving people opportunities during non-teaching time to collaborate and work on what is important to them, rather than baby-sit in a directed study!

MIDYEARS

Please check the high school conference or last week's blog for information about mid-year exams; in the interest of retyping everything, I will just refer you there. Sorry for posting in multiple places.

Enjoy your long weekends!