Looking Ahead.....

First of all – THANKS to all of you for your positive attitude and hard work on Monday at our inservice.  I feel like we are ready to come up with some goals.  We can spend time at a faculty meeting working on that. The first five items below were discussed at Admin Council this week; the last couple are just things that I thought you would want to be aware of. If you have concerns and questions about any of these topics I would encourage you to talk to me and your colleagues who are directly involved.  Whatever does become reality, I hope that it will be a 'big picture plan' that all of us can embrace and support. 

5^th and 6^th GRADE PROJECT BASED LEARNING

Due to the number of students who will be in the 5^th and 6^th grade next year (70), a new teacher will be added to the PBL staff.  Michael Nelson will be leaving his technology coordinator position and taking the PBL teaching position.  He will still take care of the some of the ‘tech stuff’, but his primary job will be teaching math to 5^th and 6^th graders. 

3^rd and 4^th GRADES

Michelle, Carrie and Bjorn are doing some research and forming their opinions on the idea of Michelle and Kristi looping to 4^th grade with these students and Carrie and Bjorn teaching 3^rd grade next year, and looping on to 4^th grade with those students the following year.  At that point we would look at data to determine what kind of impact looping had on student learning.  If it’s a positive impact on how much our students are learning, we may consider doing it again. 

Daily Start/End Times

There is concern about the earliness / lateness of some of the bus routes.  There are discussions about starting school 15 minutes later.  If that were to happen there are lots of unknowns; would we go 15 minutes later in the day, would we add days to the school year, etc….

Rumors

Just be aware, there are lots of rumors circulating among our patrons.  I think the best thing we can do is to just be positive and supportive of our school district and explain that lots of decisions will be made over the next couple of months.

$$$$$$

The amount of money in our Capital Outlay fund (in real-life, I would call this a savings account) has decreased dramatically over the last few years in order for us to keep up with budget cuts.  This means that there will be less of this ‘savings’ to cover building repairs and maintenance.  So the money to take care of our building may have to start coming from the general budget (instruction) if we can’t figure out a way to build those funds back up.  These are, no doubt, tough times in education.  BUT you know the great thing about being old is that I know that we can make it through tough times, we’ve done it before and we’ll do it again!  It will take sacrifices, but it will happen.  There is no reason to think that those sacrifices will diminish the quality of instruction at Skyline. 

www.masteryconnect.com

Most of you are aware of this website that we were getting excited about on Monday afternoon.  If we purchase this web-based software it will provide us with a system that will allow us to keep track of each student's progress towards the common core standards.  The system will get its information from assessments that are provided within the software, or teachers can import their own assessments.  If we go with this you won’t need to develop a checklist; this will provide the checklists, plus a lot more!  I’m sorry if you have already spent time working on your checklist, I didn’t realize this type of product was available yet.

TITLE I, MATH & READING SPECIALIST

We will be hiring a full-time Title I coordinator.  We have received applications from several candidates.  The following people have volunteered to be on the selection committee:  Ruth Ann, Beth, Sue, Carrie, Denise, Joyce and Judy.  We will meet next week to set a date for interviews.