REPORTS TO THE BOARD

WHS Report

To:      Michael Green
From: John Shoup
CC:      School Board members
Date:  10/6/2009
Re:      September Review

Here is an overview of the key activities we worked on in relation to teaching and learning this month.

School Improvement Planning: We spent our Learning Improvement day in August working on the implementation plan for Navigation 101 and our change to Opportunity Time support.   The staff has been very receptive to both of these programs.  As a note, we are pleased with the start to both Opportunity Time  and the Navigation curriculum.  Right now, we have 32 students with 2 or more F's, which is significantly better than the 90 students we had initially in February last year.  These are students that we are actively tracking every week through our Opportunity Time support team.

Monday's: We used the three Monday's in September for staff to refocus their energies in group norms and power standards. The focus of this is to make sure we can clearly identify and properly assess the key learning standards in everyone of our classes and this was all developed in collaboration with teachers who are teaching similar classes. If you reviewed our master schedule, you will notice that we have far fewer teachers who are teaching exclusive classes which has allowed us to better use our collaboration time.  As another note, we did spend 25 minutes together with the middle school staff to make clear the expectation for the use of department collaboration time. 

Other information: Although we have fewer staff at WHS and no ISS room this year, we have found that the school climate has been very good with only 1 fight so far this year and a significant decrease in the number of classroom referrals.  We now have 105 parents who have agreed to have their monthly parent newsletter delivered to them electronically which will help cut down on some postage costs.  Our parent email distribution list is about 380 parents strong right now and will continue to grow.  This distribution list is used to send bi monthly reminders and comments to parents regarding school issues.  These emails to parents have also been helpful in stimulating conversations and problem solving and I am pleased with the positive feedback we receive.