Hope everyone has made the proper preparations and is ready to ride out the storm! If all the predictions are correct, we will all be spending Sunday digging out from an historic weather event.
Junior Parent Night/Junior Conferences
As many of you know, the Junior Conferences with Guidance have been ongoing, and the junior parent night was held this past Wednesday evening. The conferences will be continuing through March. These have been extremely productive, and we are readying the juniors for the first steps in the college search process, at least from a formal standpoint. If you have questions about either of these, feel free to check in with one of the counselors.
Mandatory Parent Meeting
The first of the mandatory parent meetings has been rescheduled to Monday, February 11. A reminder that the parent of any student who wishes to attend Ring Dance or the prom must be present for this or a second event, which will be hosted in March, in all likelihood. We are also working on a plan for parents who are unable to attend these workshops. The program is very similar to the one the students saw last week, basically underscoring and highlighting the social host laws and their ramifications for families.
As you can imagine, there has been some pushback, but the issues relative to substance abuse are shared by all of us in the community, and the dialogue with parents is a crucial part of this. We appreciate your support of the programs, and urge you to direct parents with concerns in the direction of the administration, particularly those of you who are class or club advisors and hear of complaints in advance of your social events this spring.
Scheduling
We will be finalizing the process for scheduling the building for the 2013-14 school year in the coming days, with a timeline just about complete. We are tentatively planning a Grade 8 Course Selection night for the first week of March, and we will also have Program of Studies night for all parents in grades 9-11 the following week. That same week, we intend to meet with students in class assemblies; as we know what periods those will take place, we will let you all know for planning purposes.
This timetable will also be published for the faculty when it is complete, hopefully by next week, to ensure that all teachers know where (and when) their steps fall in the process.
We will be attending a scheduling workshop in early March as well, and the goal is to create a schedule that is more efficient and that meets the needs of more students - and thus satisfies more course requests. There have been a great deal of conversations with the Unified Arts (art, music, PE) to shore up some gaps in their scheduling and support their programs, as well as to increase the number of students enrolled in electives.
New Field Trip Form
This has not yet been made final, but in an effort to make the field trip approval process easier, particularly with all the pieces of information that need to go to certain places and people, the following document was developed:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zGii50P4sjbc8E8vIsYM-2967IOkF87QikP1AN_PwtU/edit?usp=sharing
Before posting to the P drive or sharing on the conference, let me know if there is any feedback; this has already gone to department heads, who had made a couple revisions, and it should be rolled out in final for the second half of the year.
Read of the Week: How Will Common Core Change Teaching?
Video of the Week:
Be safe!
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