Principal's Message - December Edition 2010-2011

LETTER FROM THE PRINCIPAL…

Dear JHS 13 Community,

The holiday vacation is quickly approaching us. We are doing a tremendous job identifying and addressing concerns from as many members of our community as possible. Administration truly appreciates the patience many of you have been showing as we adjust to the new structures set up in September and we continue moving toward accomplishing our five school goals.

One of the key procedures to making sure we reach our goals for the year is the process of reflecting. We have put plans together to drive our departments and various areas of the school. The next step is to assess if we are on our way to meeting our goals for June. For instance, the attendance team is able to easily assess our progress toward meeting our goal of 92% attendance. Each week we measure how we are doing by looking at our average daily attendance. We noticed our average dropped from 90.8 to 90.4. The day before Thanksgiving really hurt our average (our attendance for that day was 81%). The pattern over the past few years tells us the day before holidays has consistently yielded low attendance. We are now in the process of figuring out how we can increase student attendance on December 23rd. We have the great challenge of creating enough incentives and getting enough communication to our parents to motivate as many students as possible to come to school.

By looking at what is commonly called Benchmarks, we can make adjustments to make sure we have a better chance of meeting our goals. Benchmarks are various assessments during the year to see if you are in route to meeting your goal. My growth for this year is make sure every entity of the school has set up a goal, a plan to reach the goal, and a way to benchmark the goal to determine if the people involved are on course to meeting the goal. In so many words, people must be able to figure out if their current efforts are making a difference or not. We all have so many responsibilities that devoting energies to initiatives that have no effect on what we are trying to accomplish does not make sense.

Key ingredients to this process is making sure we are not using benchmarks to blame people for lack of productivity but to provide support for people who are struggling, reassigning or redistributing responsibilities for people who are legitimately overwhelmed, or revamping a plan with efforts such as expanding the number of team members to ensure the goal is met.

Reflection is essential. It is one of my core values that I think is the difference between winners and losers. Winners take a moment to see what they did wrong, they do not look for a scapegoat to blame, and they are gathering as much feedback as possible from valid resources. Losers believe what they are doing is enough and it is the circumstances around them that hinder their growth or potential. We must all strive to be winners. By structuring time to reflect with thought provoking questions, reflection can drive your work to great levels and winning becomes inevitable.

Sincerely,

Jacob T. Michelman
Principal

CHECKING IN WITH THE SCHOOL GOALS

10% INCREASE OF STUDENTS MEETING PROFICIENCY IN ELA AND MATH

The Cabinet continues to work on setting up student goals. We will be setting up two goals for each student, one for critical thinking and the other for writing. The goals will be decided using a rubric to identify the current status of each student and then a target of where we want each student to be by June of 2011. We understand we will only have one semester to move our students forward to meeting the goals. The system of student goals is intended for aligning efforts to supporting our students in progressing in both writing and critical thinking. Both of these areas have been our weakest areas for the last few years. By concentrating our work to helping our students improve in these areas, we can achieve our goal of a 10% increase of proficient students both in ELA and Math. We will be using the January 3rd staff meeting to unroll the student goal initiative. We are confident it will be essential in preparing our students for their state assessments, preparing our school for the Quality Review, and a big step in developing Professional Learning Communities.

In addition, the administrative team has been making it around the classrooms and meeting with teachers to work on improving the instruction to meet the needs of our students. For most staff, they have seen significant growth since first moving into the informal visits. The conversations around instruction have proven to be worthwhile from both the teacher’s perspective and the administrator’s as well. By selecting a focus each week, it gives the teacher time to prepare and it drives the discussion in a clear direction. This prevents various aspects of the classroom from being included in the conversation resulting in a checklist of areas to improve. The goal is for more of an exploration of the work we do with children. As mentioned in the “Letter from the Principal”, reflection is essential. The work administrators and teachers are doing together is driving the process of reflecting on the instruction we provide to our students.

92% ATTENDANCE

For almost an entire month, we have been 1.2% away from meeting our goal of 92%. We had great days of attendance such as November 11th, when we had almost 94% attendance on a day sandwiched between a vacation day and the weekend. A feat we have barely been able to achieve in the past. We realize the impact the short week had on our overall attendance. We are in the process of setting up programs for December 23rd to make sure more students come to school. Right now, we know we would like to set up spirit week during the shortened week with Winter Olympics to end it with. We are also considering including the Pep Rally that was planned for November being hosted on the 23rd. When our plan is solidified, we will let you know. For now, please continue to encourage students to come to school. Let them know you missed him or her when he or she is absent. Make sure you have procedures in your classroom for catching these students up. The more they fall behind, the less inclined they are to come to school.

EXPANDING INTERVENTIONS TO PROVIDE ADDITIONAL SUPPORT FOR 15% OF OUR POPULATION

With the help of Teacherease, we are able to summarize the disciplinary reports of all our students. Mr. Ciano has been able to run reports communicating how many times each child has been written up (only for the students who have actually been written up). About 20 students have been written up a significant number of times. This is definitely a concern to administration and especially to me. My bigger concern is the lack of referrals we have for the child study team. There are a number of staff members who have removed or written up the same child over 10 times but yet, no referral was made to the child study.

As the Student Management Team and I continue to improve the implementing of Chancellor’s Regulation A-443, teachers should be taking the time to explore the interventions they conduct to assist in improving student behavior. Simply moving a seat, having a conversation during class, and redirecting are in class maneuvers. If the same problem with the same child continues to happen despite the in class interventions, then outside support should be sought. The outside support should not only be reprimands from administration or the SMT. It should be the child study team as well. These professionals can take a deeper look at the child, generate more involvement from the family, gather outside support from other organizations, and/or simply develop a plan with the child, parent, and teacher to promote better decision making. Find out how helpful they can be by completing a referral today. Access this help, I guarantee the fifteen minutes you take to fill out the form using Teacherease, a report card, and/or ARIS, the happier you will be. It will be one of the best investments you can do with a pen, paper, and a computer in 15 minutes.

CITY-WIDE SURVEY ACHIEVING “ABOVE AVERAGE OR HIGHER” ON ALL 12 CATEGORIES

The Crisis Management Team continues to be a great source of communication for issue arising through the school day. I, for one, have felt better connected to staff on the situations that we have faced since putting the team together. Although some of the procedures of this team need to be further developed, it has fulfilled its role of providing a source of information to all staff members. We are currently exploring following up with people when steps are assigned during the meeting and making sure we stay within the driving questions rather than going off on connected issues (which does not happen often but it has occurred.)

The School Improvement Team put together our Staff Development Plan for November 2nd which, judging from staff feedback, was a very productive meeting. We have been concentrating our efforts toward improving the communication in our school. We have put together a Strategy Plan to advance productivity of meetings. We are considering changing the structure and establishing norms and protocols to eradicate a culture of unfocused and undisciplined efforts. Simple steps are being developed to do this such as mandating an agenda for all meetings, beginning meetings on time instead of waiting for people, and ending a meeting with each participant taking something away.

Upon completion of the Strategy Plan next week, we will be forming committees within the team and outside the team with the areas of focus established in the plan. The plan for our December Staff Meeting is to continue the work we started on November 2nd.

Please continue to work hard toward our Destination of Excellence!
One School, One Future!