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Following Are Archived Copies Of Previously Published
Commentaries
From St. Pius X School Principal Ted Caron, Ph.D. |
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PRINCIPAL'S
CORNER By the end of the day on Wednesday, we will make 3-8th grade second quarter progress reports available via parent’s individual Edline page. You can access these progress reports by clicking the link entitled “Report Cards.” This link can be found under the “Contents” menu on the right side of the front page of Edline. Upon clicking this link, you will find your child’s name listed. Click on his/her name after which an up-to-date summary of his/her grades will appear. A few related notes: (1) These progress reports are snapshots of students’ performance. They provide a summary of students’ 2nd quarter grades from Monday, October 13th through Tuesday, November 11th. Once the progress report has been posted, it will not continually update in the way that Edline grades are updated on teachers’ individual class pages. The date range will be printed on the progress reports to avoid any confusion. In order to evaluate students’ progress during the remainder of the quarter, parents should continue to check the individual class pages on Edline. (2) On each of the progress reports, you will find your child’s up to date for second quarter as well as the child’s first quarter grade. This will give you a comparative sense of how your child is performing in each subject area. (3) 2nd quarter report cards will also be uploaded to Edline in mid-January. No hard copies will be mailed or sent home. On the 6-8th grade report cards, you will find a “numerical average” listed at the bottom of the child’s quarterly grades. This number represents the average we use to determine whether a child has made the quarterly honor roll. To make this information more accessible, we will print both the numerical average as well as the honor roll grading scale. In order to provide this information, we had to make a change in the format of the report card. So, some of you might notice in January that the design of the report card has changed slightly. For the most part, the new report card format has the same information, just a different layout. (4) If you would like a copy of the progress report or report card, you are welcome to print one from home. For those parents that do not have convenient access to the Internet, please feel free to contact the school office for a hard copy.
PRINCIPAL'S
CORNER The Archdiocese has promulgated a new set of requirements for how schools and faith formation programs must integrate chastity education into existing religion curricula. In short, each school and faith formation program is required to implement a chastity education program (with accompanying student texts) for grades 5-8 by the start of the 2009-10 school year. Grades K-4 must have these programs adopted in time for the 2011-2012 year. Teachers and catechists for these grade levels will complete a day-long training program prior to implementation. We currently address issues of human sexuality and reproduction in the spring of the fifth grade year. As part of this curriculum, we take students to the Ruth Lilly Health Education Center as a way to support our discussion of such topics as the physical and emotional changes entailed in puberty; the anatomy of male and female reproductive systems; and the development of human beings from conception to birth. With this new requirement to integrate chastity education more comprehensively across grade levels, we will have to determine if and how we will need to revised this and other grade level religion curricula. It is important to note that, in my review of the texts that are recommended by the Archdiocese, much of the curricula does not cover issues you would immediately think of as relating to chastity. For example, one of the 6th grade texts I’ve reviewed, focuses on topics such as setting goals, respecting others, and aging and death. So we’ll ultimately need to discuss what topics could easily be integrated into existing curricula and which need to be addressed separately. As the Pope and United States Conference of Catholic Bishops remind us, parents are the primary educators of their children. Thus, not only will we want to keep you apprised of what topics and issues will be discussed, but also invite you to take part in this discussion at home with your children. I will have more to say about these curricular changes as we learn more from the Archdiocese and have a chance to discuss the new mandate as a faculty.
PRINCIPAL'S
CORNER Many thanks to all of you who attended last week’s Parent Night. As I mentioned, the school will be making a change in the way we supervise students at recess. Starting immediately, I will be seeking to hire three paid recess supervisors who will monitor each of the recesses Monday-Friday. Among other responsibilities, these paid supervisors would be responsible for communicating closely with the teachers and me on behavior matters; and they, as school employees, would also be empowered with the right to hold students accountable for inappropriate behavior. With a consistent presence at recess, they would be able to intervene quickly in ongoing situations involving students and work with teachers proactively to understand situations more completely. They would also be asked to participate in school meetings that relate to discipline/bullying. I can't tell you how pleased I've been at the work each of our parents has done in helping at recess. As you well know, recess supervision is not the most popular position, and all of them have done a wonderful job in being communicative (with me and teachers); monitoring students on the playground; getting equipment in and out; and consistently reminding students of our collective expectations. Even with how effective they have been, I've had a growing concern with the lack of consistency our approach to recess supervision provides students. When students know that the supervisor today will be different than the one tomorrow, their behavior changes. Further, as I am committed to continuing to address the issue of bullying at the school, I believe consistency is all the more important during a time of the day when bullying occurs most frequently. If you or someone you know is interested in such a position, please feel free to contact me. The ideal candidate will have a flexible schedule and a willingness to commit to this important responsibility. I will interview candidates on an ongoing basis until the selections are made. Until such a time as these individuals are hired, our current recess supervisors will continue to monitor students at recess. It is important to note that any parent who would like to continue to be present at recess as a volunteer is welcome to do so.
PRINCIPAL'S
CORNER I don’t know how many of you have had a chance to attend one of weekly school masses this year. For those that haven’t, the teacher/students that organize the mass for the week have begun cantoring as part of their mass responsibilities. While we continue to appreciate the good work of Mrs. Muller and our 8th grade cantors who cantor once per month, Mrs. Kirch and the teachers have done a wonderful job in preparing a different group of students to sing each week. The great work of our weekly cantors has energized students and created a heightened sense of community during mass. I want to thank Mrs. Kirch in a particular way for her leadership and hard work in this area! Other notes:
PRINCIPAL'S
CORNER Many thanks to all of you for providing me with your requests for conference times in such a timely fashion. On the enclosed sheet, you’ll find each of your children’s conference times listed. In almost all cases, I was able to accommodate at least the third highest time preference; in many cases, I was able to accommodate either the first or second preference. A special priority was given to those school families with more than one child. If you noted on the form that you are not able to be present for conferences or did not return your form, please contact the teacher directly to arrange an alternative time and date to meet. I know that it can be difficult to juggle professional and personal obligations in order to accommodate conference times. Thank you once again for your flexibility and support. Some other items of note:
PRINCIPAL'S
CORNER This past week, several teachers and I attended the Indiana State Literacy Conference at the Convention Center. The conference focused on building students’ vocabulary and comprehension skills. While the conference took us away from the classroom for a couple of days (by the way, our substitutes did a wonderful job filling in!), it provided many research-based strategies for engaging students in reading instruction and improving their ability to comprehend. Many of the speakers were nationally recognized for their research and teaching in these areas. Not only are our teachers committed to helping improve students’ reading skills. At St. Pius X, we are lucky to have parents that do so much to help support students’ reading as well. In fact, research study after research study discusses children’s home environment as the most important indicator of a child’s success in learning and using sophisticated vocabulary; identifying a story’s main idea; and summarizing key events from a story. As I mentioned last week, our school’s academic goal focuses on reading comprehension and analysis. In addition to discussing some other items, I will use the upcoming Parent Night (scheduled for Tuesday, October 21st at 6:30pm) as a way to provide more information about this goal and what parents can do to help support our instructional efforts. For those that attended the Parent Night a couple of years ago, you might remember that I discussed several reading comprehension strategies as part of that event. You can find the Powerpoint presentation on Edline (Principal’s Corner/School Improvement/Reading Comprehension Powerpoint). PRINCIPAL'S
CORNER During the spring-summer 2008, the Archdiocese of Indianapolis and the state of Indiana approved our school improvement plan. This plan outlines three broad goals--one academic, one "institutional" and one related to our Catholic identity. Each goal contains several specific objectives designed to achieve the goal. In our institutional goal, we seek to maintain or increase current enrollment figures through the implementation of certain marketing and promotional strategies. Our Catholic identity goal seeks to cultivate a climate of empathy among our students and, in explicit and implicit ways, encourage students to stand up as leaders when they see bullying behaviors take place. Our academic goal focuses on increasing students' nonfiction reading comprehension and analysis skills. This goal is cross-curricular and spans across grade levels. It will serve as the basis for the school’s collective professional development efforts. During the course of the year, the teachers and I will be examining how we can use effective instructional and assessment strategies not only to improve students' ability to recall facts from what they read, but, more importantly, to be able to extrapolate and apply ideas and extend thinking beyond what is written in the text. As part of this effort, we'll be looking to build upon instructional ideas we've discussed in the past year such as using graphic organizers and summarizing activities to help students frame their thinking. We're also seeking to integrate existing and projected technological initiatives as part of this process as well. Of course, we'll continue to use ISTEP+ as a way to gauge our progress. However, the teachers and I are also in the process of designing three assessments that would be used locally at the school to evaluate students' progress over the course of the year. We hope to have our first assessment finished in time to administer in January. If you would like to learn more about the school improvement plan, it is available on both the school web site and on Edline (Principal’s Corner). In it, you'll find much more specific information about all three goals and how we plan to achieve them.
PRINCIPAL'S
CORNER A few items of which I’d like each of you to be aware: Many thanks to all of you who submitted feedback about our use of electronic progress reports. The response was a positive one! The one item that I did hear from a few of you is an interest in having the school’s grading scale published on the reports. I think we’ve found a way to do this for future reports. Thanks again! Please be sure to read the conference letter included in this week’s newsletter. Please return your conference preference form no later than Tuesday, September 30th. Other pertinent information is included in the letter. As I mentioned in last week’s parent email, we will be starting a band program at the school for interested 4-8th grade students. The band instructor at Bishop Chatard High School, Amy Fry, will be the teacher, and practices will take place after school on Thursdays from 3:15-4:15/4:30pm. Wood and percussion instruments only (no guitar or piano). To generate enthusiasm for the idea, we are planning to hold an assembly for students in grades 4-8 on Tuesday, September 23rd at 2:15pm in the gym. Following this assembly, we will hold a parent/student meeting for all interested students on Wednesday, October 8th at 6:30pm in the music room. In order to attend the meeting, you must first contact Mrs. Kirch by Tuesday, October 7th to express an interest in your child participating. There will be a $25 per semester fee for each child. Paige’s Music will be present at the meeting on the 8th with instruments available to rent. We are excited about the program!! Many thanks to Bishop Chatard for their support of SPX!! Please see this week’s bulletin insert for information about Janice Gabe’s presentation on Thursday, October 2nd. She will be addressing the subject of how parents can address bullying with their children. I would strongly encourage you to attend!
PRINCIPAL'S
CORNER In the past couple of parent emails, I mentioned that we were working on a system by which to provide parents electronic copies of students’ grade reports. I believe we are ready to offer these reports. This Wednesday afternoon, September 17th, we will send an electronic progress report for each child in grades 3-8. These progress reports will be accessible via the parent’s individual Edline page by clicking on the link entitled “Report Cards.” This link can be found under the “Contents” menu on the right side of the front page of Edline. Upon clicking this link, you will find your child’s name listed. Click on his/her name after which an up-to-date summary of his/her grades will appear. Most of you know that in the middle of last school year, we stopped sending home progress reports for students in grades 4-8. Thus, starting immediately, we will resume sending quarterly progress reports albeit in this new, electronic format. Again, the first of these progress reports will be sent home this Wednesday. At least for the first quarter, we will continue to send home a paper copy of the report card (the distribution date for first quarter report cards is set for October 22nd). However, in light of the fact that these electronic grade reports are, in design, layout and content, exactly the same as a “paper” report card, we are seriously considering sending quarterly electronic progress reports AND electronic report cards beginning in the second quarter. I will certainly keep you updated as to our plans. A few related details of which I’d like each of you to be aware:
With this serving as our first attempt to send these electronic progress reports, I am very interested to know your thoughts. Once we send these electronic progress reports out, feel free to contact me. Many thanks!
PRINCIPAL'S
CORNER Last Tuesday evening, during a hard rain, the drain situated between the computer lab and library let in quite a bit of water. At one point, we probably had about 2-3 inches of water covering much of the hallway leading toward the school lobby. By the time Brett Fischer, our superb maintenance director, and I arrived at school, the maintenance crew, with the help of some football coaches who had just come in from practice, did a great job in vacuuming up most of the water. In a special way, I wanted to thank Mike Joseph and John Busald and all of the parents who stayed into the evening to help! Thanks to everyone’s hard work, we suffered no significant damage to any of the floors or, most importantly, computer equipment that is positioned across the hall from the lab. Another great example of how fortunate we are to be a part of this wonderful SPX community! PRINCIPAL'S
CORNER I wanted to take an opportunity to formally welcome all of our new school families. In a special way, I’d like to welcome two new students and families who have joined the school in the past two weeks. Destin Kitto (mom: Elizabeth; dad: Ryan) joined the 7th gr class two weeks ago. Destin is from Needham, Massachusetts, where he attended Pollard Middle School. Matt Zachocki (mom: Jenny; dad: Paul), formerly at Skiles Test, joined the 3rd class on Friday of last week. We’re thrilled that these two families—and all of our new families—have decided to join our school community. Both of these families—and many of the families who inquire about the school (including another prospective family who I met with last week)—have heard about St. Pius X from a neighbor, relative or friend. I believe that more than any newspaper headlines, awards or direct marketing efforts, the positive recommendations that each of you offers to others about the school is the most influential factor in families choosing St. Pius X for their children. With an exceptional group of teachers and staff, supportive parents like you, diverse extra-curricular offerings, and, most importantly, wonderful students, we’ve got a lot of good news to share! (Special Note: We also need to add “caring principal” to his list!) PRINCIPAL’S
CORNER With this being the beginning of the second full week of school, I wanted to take an opportunity to remind you of some very important safety precautions during morning drop-off and afternoon dismissal. First of all, when dropping your child (children) off in the morning, please have him/ her (they) exit on the passenger side of the car. With the large size of some cars and the small size of some children, it is dangerous for children to be walking between running cars. Second, please be certain that if you need to enter the school in the morning that you park in the north parking lot (by the playground). Again, we want to avoid students (and parents) having to walk across the drop-off line into the school. Third, during afternoon dismissal, please be certain that you turn off your engine when students are dismissed from the school. This past week, I noticed many engines had been turned off, but there were a few still running. I know during these hot summer months, we would all rather keep our air conditioning running, but, for safety reasons, it is very important that engines are off. Given the size of our parking lot and the number of cars coming in and out, parents do a great job dropping off and picking up. Please help us to continue to improve this process! Thank you so much for your cooperation and for a great start to the school year!
PRINCIPAL’S
CORNER Welcome back!! While I’ve already explained some staff changes and curriculum and programmatic elements for the upcoming year, there are several that I wanted to highlight in a specific way: I am delighted that Mrs. Jeanine Ritter will be taking over as the 1st grade religion teacher. We’ll surely miss Mrs. Hankee at the school, however we are replacing her with an exceptionally creative and enthusiastic teacher in Mrs. Ritter! She introduced herself to last year’s kindergarten parents at our end-of-year 1st Grade Open House. Our school improvement plan, required by both the state of Indiana and the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, was approved in May. You can find a copy of the plan on the school web site or on Edline (“Principal’s Corner,” see “Contents” on far right side). We will be using this plan as a guidepost for professional development in the coming years. This year, we will be using the highly-acclaimed program “Handwriting Without Tears” to teach handwriting in our kindergarten and 1st grades. For this school year, we will be using a 4th grade vocabulary curriculum (the text is entitled “Wordly Wise”) to replace our spelling-only curriculum. This new curriculum will emphasize word meanings, root words, writing, and spelling. Last year, 5th grade students made this same transition from spelling-only to vocabulary. As a way to bolster students’ typing skills, we will be requiring our 4th and 5th grade students to take a keyboarding class once per week. This change will mean that students in these grades will take music once per week. Mrs. Julie Cook will be increasing her time at the school to four days per week. She will split her time as the intermediate grades resource teacher and the teacher for the 2nd, 3rd and 4th grade enrichment programs. These programs, offered twice per week, are designed to provide a small group of students standards-based supplementary learning experiences targeting reading, writing and, in certain cases, math skills across the content areas. Let me also take the opportunity to remind you of the ISTEP+ schedule for the upcoming year. Starting on September 15th, our 3-8th grade students will take the regularly scheduled ISTEP+ assessment in English/language arts and mathematics. As part of a transition plan, 3-8th grade students will also take the English/language arts and mathematics sections in the spring. The spring administrations are separated into an open-ended section (short answer responses and essays) and a multiple-choice section. The open-ended section is scheduled to begin on Monday, March 2nd, and the multiple choice section is set to begin April 27th. In effect, these changes will bring with them three separate ISTEP+ administrations for next year (in future years, ISTEP+ will take place only in the spring). I’ve added these dates to the school calendar. The ISTEP+ schedule is not only the element that will change. In the spring, students in grades 4 and 6 will also take the science version of ISTEP+ (students in grade 5 and 7 will take the science version in the fall), and students in grades 5 and 7 will take a new social studies version. These changes will provide us with meaningful data on students’ performance in these areas, however, particularly in the case of next year, we will see a significant increase in the amount of instructional time we lose to testing. You can learn more about ISTEP+ by accessing the “ISTEP+ Infocenter” on the Indiana Department of Education page (http://www.doe.state.in.us/istep/welcome.html). There are some additional curricular and staff changes associated with the middle school: As some of you may know, Mrs. McNulty has been experiencing some health issues dating back to earlier in the summer. Although her health is rapidly improving, she will not be ready to begin the year in a full-time capacity. As such, Ms. Jenny Sullivan (daughter of Pat and Beth Sullivan) will be serving as an interim substitute for the 6-7th grade English and 6th grade religion classes while Mrs. McNulty recuperates. Mrs. McNulty is able to teach the 8th grade speech class, and she will also be working closely with Ms. Sullivan on the organization and design of the instructional plans for the English and religion classes. We anticipate that Mrs. McNulty will be ready to return to the school in a full-time capacity sometime in mid-October. I’m happy to welcome Mrs. Peg McEvoy as our new 7th grade religion teacher. Mrs. McEvoy comes to us as the former Coordinator of Religious Education for St. Louis Parish in Clarksville, Maryland. Prior to this position, she was a teacher of religious studies for Edgewood High School of the Sacred Heart in Madison, Wisconsin. I am also excited to announce that Mrs. Angie Hyre, our parish Youth Minister, will serve as our new 8th grade religion teacher. Mrs. Hyre (Angie) has been a great teacher as part of the confirmation program and, in addition to student-centered catechesis she’ll bring to the classroom, her new role at the school will provide her an opportunity to connect with our middle school students prior to them entering high school. We are excited to offer our 6-7th grade students an additional day of Spanish this school year. Thus, 6th grade students will take Spanish twice per week and 7th grade students will take Spanish three times per week. 8th grade students will continue to take Spanish three days per week. Most of the new middle school classes we began last year—Social Studies Concepts, Speech, and Debate—we will continue this year. However, due to time considerations, we were not able to offer our once-per-week “DEAR” (Drop Everything And Read) class (Mrs. Taber will continue to offer silent reading during all of her literature classes) nor were we able to fit in the once-per-week “Collaborative Projects” class (this is regrettable as I was particularly fond of the interdisciplinary and creative elements associated with this course). 6th grade students will also have a once-per-week “Flex” class that is designed to serve as an opportunity to complete homework or, if the teacher is available, receive extra help. Last year, we scheduled the 6th grade study skills class once per week for the entire year. In conversations with Mrs. DeGan, who teaches the class, we’ve opted to schedule the study skills class as a “rotating explore” class. This means that 6th grade students will take the class either 1st or 2nd quarter for four days per week. All of our middle school students will also have the opportunity to save and transfer school documents using the “Web Locker” feature on Edline. Each student’s account has a link, entitled “My File Locker,” that can be used for electronic storage. Students may wish to utilize this “locker” as a means to transfer documents to/from home and school. Document storage using the web site “think.com” will no longer be permitted (for a complete explanation of the reason for this change please refer to the letter entitled “Letter Regarding the Use of Think.com” which can be found on Edline (“Principal’s Corner,” “General Info”)). Mrs. Bastnagel will be offering all middle school students training on the use of the Edline File Lockers at the beginning of the school year.
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