3/17/17 Daily Bulletin

Shout Out

Shout out to Kim Daly, Kate Davis, Danielle Moran, Sara Quatrale and Debbie Bryson for working an extra long day after our snow days to help interview! We look forward to collaborating to find an excellent new member for your team!

Destination Imagination Regionals

The Curley is sending five Destination Imagination teams to compete at Regionals at Stoughton High School (232 Pearl St) this Saturday. You are all invited and encouraged to come watch as they present their solutions to the challenge they were given in October. All solutions are presented in the form of a short skit in which students wrote an original script, planned for and created props, costumes, and scenery, and integrated technical effects such as electricity they wired themselves or chemical reactions. This event is child friendly (I'd recommend ages 5+). More information on the program is here.

Presentation schedule is as follows:

• 8:50am - Central Challenge for 6th Scientific (Uma, Jahzaria, William, Mazen, Flora, Arlene, Elizabeth) 
• 10:20am - Central Challenge for 7th/8th Scientific (Emma, Victoria, Lea, Joselyne, Nairobi) 
• 10:40am - Central Challenge for 6th Technical (Leslie, Stephany, Hanna, Katie, Samiya, Yami, Jaslyn) 
• 11:40am - Central Challenge for 6th Fine Arts (Lily, Catherine, Jo, Janie, Kirsten, Vianna, Victoria) 
• 2:00pm - Central Challenge for 6th Engineering (Max, Alec, Brennan, Tikal, Lewis, Ben, Robeson)

BTU Vote

There will be a BTU vote (BTU members only Paras & Teachers) on Monday, March 20th from 7am-8:15am in each main office. The first vote will be about the January 2nd PD date and either reporting to school that day for PD or converting it to hours to be used throughout the school year. The second vote will be part of a waiver that will need approval through the SSC. (See explanation below). Attached is the ballot. 

Trimester Proposal -- Fact Sheet
The ELT team would like to propose a move to trimesters across the whole school. Currently Grades K-5 use trimesters for grading and Grades 6-8 use quarters. This creates several challenges for teachers, staff and families.

Moving to trimester grading from K through 8 would give us:

• uniformity and consistency throughout the school
• opportunity for longer elective classes in MS
• more equitable distribution of coursework for MS students
• opportunity for a school-wide report card night
• less work for teachers and staff

This change would most significantly impact the way that we calculate 6th grade and 8th grade GPAs when reporting these data to exam schools. For both 6th and 8th graders, the first trimester grades would be submitted instead of grades from the first and second quarters. This does not necessarily put our students at a disadvantage; it is however a big change from current practice. This practice is done at other K-8 schools and they have not seen any negative impact on exam school acceptance.

The ELT team believes that this change would greatly benefit our school community by creating uniformity across the grade levels.

We Care About Our Community!

The Curley Community is excited to announce that we are launching a Community Caring Project this spring.  We will kick off the project by hosting a school-wide Caring March on April 12th at 1:30pm.  All staff and students will participate and families will be invited to march with us.

Many of our students have participated in marches for various causes over the past few months and there have been discussions in many classrooms about the rights of different groups of people in our community.  There is some inspiring work already happening at the Curley.  Ms. Strait’s 4th grade class is doing a Hunger Project, Ms. Mylett and Ms. Moran’s class is spreading kindness by making kindness rocks, and Ms. Merdkhanian’s K1 class had their own march after several students attended the Women’s March in February.

We would like for all classes to gather with their buddy classrooms to collaborate on this project. Students should think about what they care about, and work with their buddies to create signs and posters for the Caring March.  There are lots of things that we care about in our community.  The possibilities are endless!  

Here are some things that students may care about and want to put on signs:

• Animal rights
• Illnesses 
• Hunger
• Access to school
• The environment
• Immigrant rights
• LGBQ rights

Timeline for the Curley Community Caring Project

• March: prepare for the Caring March by talking to your students about what they care about and creating signs and posters with your buddy class
• April: March with your buddy class on April 12th at 1:30.  
• May and June: Create and complete a community service project.  Ideas, lesson plans, resources and support will be provided.

MCAS

In preparation for the MCAS please take a look at the MCAS google slides. The administrative team will be visiting grade level meetings to go over MCAS logistics. Please take a look at the MCAS google slides so that you will be prepared to ask any questions you may have when the admin team comes to your grade level meetings. Below is the schedule of when the admin team will be at your grade level meetings.

MCAS Google Slides

3rd grade: Monday 9:45am
4th grade: Wednesday 1:30 pm
5th grade: Thursday 11:15 amGrade 6: Weds 3/15 12:40pm
Grade7/8: Thurs. 3/16 9:00am

Also . . . Please find the MCAS groups below. All questions/concerns should be brought to Jessica's attention by Friday, March 17th (jjburque@bostonpublicschools.org). If you are an ESL and/or Special Education teacher, please make sure you check both lists. We have a large amount of accommodations and will be using staff across grade levels. Homeroom teachers please make sure all students with have an IEP or 504 plan with testing accommodations are listed.
MCAS 3-5MCAS 2017 6-8

March, 2017 Curley Cares Student Awards

Recognize those students who are doing their best to show growth and support the Curley Cares way by using THIS FORM to submit names so students can receive an award at our upcoming Thursday, March 23, 201 7 Curley Cares assemblies.
Please refer to THIS LIST to see those students who have already received awards this school year .
The intent behind Curley Cares is reinforce positive (caring) behaviors and that each Curley K8 student receive at least one Curley Shares award each year.
All Curley K8 staff members - not just for homeroom teachers - can submit student names for an award.
If you'd like to give more than 3 awards, please coordinate with your grade-level colleagues such as specialists or other staff. If it is for a larger group of students (such as a sports team, etc.) please email Kate (kdavis3@bostonpublicschools.org) directly.
Submissions are DUE by 4:00pm on Monday, March 20 , 2017 .

STAR Reading Progress Monitoring (Grade 3-8 Only)

Progress monitoring is scheduled for March 20th - 24th for all students reading below grade level, including students ranked “On Watch”, “Intervention” and “Urgent Intervention” for the winter STAR Reading Benchmark.

Progress monitoring is completed independently by focus students, and can be scheduled during the WIN block or other convenient time. To begin the assessment, students log into “STAR Reading”, and begin testing. Progress monitoring should take no longer than 20-25 minutes per student.
Please contact Eileen Cronin if you have any questions.

Winter Term Report Card Grading Window for Grades K2-5

The elementary grading (Grades K2 - 5) window is open from March 7th to March 24th. Please refer to the materials below for assistance entering your grades. After entering grades, teachers need to click the "Post Grades" button to write the grades to the report card.
Entering Grades Handout
Elementary Comment Codes Handout
How to verify that your grades are posted

Instructional Focus Review - POSTPONED TILL 3/28/17

On Tuesday, March 28th from 8am-1pm representatives from BPS will join us for a walkthrough of classrooms and look for evidence of our Instructional Focus "Teachers will vary demands and resources, to optimize challenge, so students can express a clear, organized idea." Visitors may enter any classroom during this window.

Lion King Performances

The Lion King performance dates have been announced:

School Shows
· March 21st and 22nd at 9 a.m. Curley Auditorium
· March 22nd at 1 p.m. Curley Auditorium

Evening Shows
· March 23rd and 24th at 6:30 p.m. Curley Auditorium

*****April 6 Shubert Theatre Doors open at 5 pm & Show starts at 5:30. (This is an amazing opportunity for all of our students!!!!!)

Families are welcome to come to either performance and all students will attend one of the daytime performances.

REVISED SCHEDULE based on feedback

Here is the link for the Lion King schedule:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15CezwWnrjIk8g5avYF30Wkkx02yoV0GCowuFERHrmXs/edit?usp=sharing

10th Annual Curley Silent Auction

The Curley School Parent Council (SPC) will be hosting their 10th Annual Silent Auction at Canary Square on Tuesday, March 28th from 6pm-9pm and would like to extend an invite to all staff, friends and families. The money raised from the Silent Auction goes to directly supporting our school such as Playworks, BalletROX, Arts supplies, science supplies, staff luncheon, Chromebooks etc... There will be more information that will follow about the online auction. Any donations or specific questions can be directed to Ann DeGeorge (ann.c.degeorge@gmail.com) or Eyleen Iraola (eiraola@gmail.com).

Hiring

Hiring season is here! We have 10 jobs posted on www.teachboston.org. We need your help in hiring the best teachers to join our team. Please sign up to be on the interview committee ASAP. No previous experience is necessary but we value your opinions.

Position	Interview Date	Interview Time
K0/K1 ASD	Wednesday, March 22	3pm-6pm
K1/K2 ASD	Wednesday, March 29	3pm-6pm
Grade 1	Tuesday, March 23	3pm-6pm
Grade 5	Thursday, March 16	3pm-6pm
Grade 6 Math	Friday, March 17	3pm-6pm
Grade 7/8 Math	Friday, March 17	3pm-6pm
Grade 7/8 Science	Tuesday, March 14	3pm-6pm
K-8 Theatre Arts	Monday, March 20	3pm-6pm

Save the Date

Please reserve Friday, June 2nd for our End-of-the-Year and Retirement Party.

Place: Florian Hall

Time: 5 p.m. to 10 p.m.

Appetizers, Buffet, Music, Dance, Celebrations!

Field Trips

Are you going on a field trip soon? Have you shared this information with the nurses and the cafeteria? This is a friendly reminder that the nurse's and cafe should be notified 2 weeks in advance of scheduled field trips. Teachers should also be carefully checking the returned permission slips. They should notify the nurse's office when a parent checks the "yes" box stating that their child requires medication while on the field trip.

MCAS (Yes, it is that time of year again!)

As we get closer to our MCAS testing date we want to make sure we are continuing to make progress towards our team goals that are linked to the school wide instructional focus:

• Teachers will vary demands and resources, in order to optimize challenge in writing tasks, so students can express a clear organized idea. 

It is important that we are preparing students to express clear organized ideas because this will lead to improved student outcomes. We want to be able to see improvements in our data from last years results.
Please use the link below to prepare students for the technology that they will be using on MCAS 2.0. Our students come to this online test with a range of exposure to technology. It is expected that all students taking MCAS 2.0 will have taken the practice MCAS 2.0 online for math and ELA by Friday March 3rd. The admin team will be checking in with teachers to ensure you are familiar with the online tools of MCAS 2.0.
Please map out how many weeks you have until your MCAS dates and plan to cover the major standards that you want to cover before the MCAS. It’s more important to cover essential standards over trying to cover as much as you can before MCAS. This is a case where less is more and quality trumps quantity.
MCAS Calendar Link
Any questions, concerns or ideas regarding MCAS scheduling or the practice test should be sent to David Diaz.

Using ESS

If you wish to request a day off (medical appointments, religious holidays, professional day, bereavement, personal day etc...), sign on to Boston Employees Self Service (ESS, Please bookmark this page). When possible, request a personal day at least two weeks in advance. Staff members will request sub coverage through SubCentral (https://subcentral.bostonpublicschools.org/logOnInitAction.do). Please do not decide whether you think a sub is needed and submit the request as soon as you know a day you will be absent. We have many unexpected coverage needs that might need sub help. We are attaching a list of subs who usually work at the Curley upon request.

Sick Day Procedure (teachers and paraprofessionals)

• Call/Text Katie Grassa at 857-265-4954 immediately, no matter how late/early
• Enter the absence in SubCentral (teachers only). Link: https://bostonps.eschoolsolutions.com/logOnInitAction.do
• If it is after 6:30am, also send an email to Katie Grassa, David Diaz and the secretary.

Buddies Update

Are you struggling to think about what to do with your buddy classroom during these cold, snowy, winter days? Check out this link for ideas and feel free to add any fun ideas you may have!

SPED PD Options

Below are some PD options being offered at the Curley during our contractual PD dates. Staff may want to include one or more of these into their team PD plan. Here is the link to sign up   https://goo.gl/forms/BwtGbumLgXBfLUMF2

• March 16th --- Behavior Supports 
• April 27th --- Understanding Disabilities and Services available 
• May 18th --- Middle School Transition/Life Skills 
• June 1st --- Inclusion