3/22/18 Daily Bulletin

Shout Out

Shout out to Traka Smith, Cari Lopez, Danielle Moran, Kim Daly, Sarah Quatrale, Alicia Green Gennaro and Kate Davis for assisting with interviews late on Wednesday evening! Thank you for your time and honest feedback as we plan for next year!

Shout out to Kathy Powers for quickly realizing that Kids Art would be cancelled and for organizing a way to make an extra call to ensure all students would make it home safely. Thanks!

Shout out to Caitlyn Gable and Paola Pena for opening their practice to Heineman and offering to be video taped so teachers everywhere can have a chance to learn about literacy collaborative! Thanks!

Shout out to Julie Feeney and Teresa Javaloyes for hosting a large group of visitors from Showa Boston today at the Curley. Our visitors enjoyed seeing our school in action.

Shout out to City Year Boston for once again making a FABULOUS MCAS video! Your energy and creativity will help us all during a long testing window! The students were cheering and dancing through each assembly today! Thank you! The link is here for anyone who wants to watch it again with the students https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXl_EnNOgEs&feature=youtu.be%23https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DmXl_EnNOgEs&feature=youtu.be

Curley Silent Auction

Save the date for the 11th annual silent auction from 6-9pm Tuesday, March 27th! Please join us for an evening of grown-up fun at Canary Square. If you're interested in helping out with this fun event, please sign up here: 2018 Curley K-8 Silent Auction | Wejoinin All Curley Staff are invited and the money raised goes towards technology, arts, science and field trips.

Curley Shares

Our March share is coming up this Wednesday, 3/21! Please review the Shares expectations and rituals with your class. Attached here are the times for each share as well as the schedule for which classes are expected to share this week. Thank you!

STAR Reading Progress Monitoring (Grade 3-8 Only)

Progress monitoring is scheduled for March 19th – 23rd for students reading below grade level, including students ranked “On Watch”, “Intervention” and “Urgent Intervention” on the winter STAR Reading Benchmark report.
Progress monitoring is completed independently by identified 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 15-20 minutes per student.
Please contact Eileen Cronin if you have any questions.

MCAS 

MCAS Information - Action Required
All staff should be informed of the protocols and logistics around MCAS. Please review the MCAS Roles and Responsibilities (and links included in the Roles and Responsibilities).
As a resource, you can also reference our MCAS Quick Check document.
Please find the ELA groupings attached. Locations are still being worked on. Please let Jessica Burque know of any concerns before Friday, March 23rd.
ELA MCAS 3/7/8
ELA MCAS 4/5/6
Math will be out shortly.
Please check out the MCAS Calendar April/May 2018 as you map out your planning for the spring. If you have any questions or concerns please reach out to David Diaz.

Street Cleaning

April 1st street cleaning will begin. Please check this link to find out when street cleaning will be taken place. http://www.cityofboston.gov/publicworks/sweeping/

Artifacts

Artifacts are due April 13th. Please reread over your formative evaluation. If your evaluator has indicated that you are missing an artifact please add that artifact and update any data that is connected to your goals.

MCAS Practice Test

We will conducting a trial test of the Curley K-8's Wi-Fi servers on Tuesday, March 20th from 1 pm to 2 pm. We are testing our servers to ensure that our internet connection is ready and reliable for the 1st and subsequent days of testing starting April 3, 2018.
Grades 3 and 6-8, will be taking a practice test on line from 1 to 2 pm. We ask that all other grade levels do not go on line or use their Chrome Books during this time. In addition, administrators will be moving and borrowing computer carts to ensure that all the grades taking the practice test have enough Chrome Books.
Please contact Mr. Diaz or Mrs. Jackson if you have any questions or concerns.

PD

We will host our teacher PD (this is for teachers unless paras owe time from a missed day in the summer) on Thursday, March 22nd from 3:45pm-5:45pm. We have broken up the staff into 4 smaller worker groups for the remainder of our PD sessions. Please click here to see your group and your plan for the remainder of the sessions. Please email Katie Grassa with any questions.

Happy Teacher Challenge!

Thank you to everyone who sent in pictures for week 1 of the Curley K-8 Happy Teacher Challenge. We're excited to have 50+ names in our raffle thus far! Please keep them coming! Each picture you send is a separate entry. Here are some of the pictures sent in from our week 1 challenge. See all entries here.

 

For week 2 we have two more challenges for you! We can't wait to see who you meet and what you do for yourself. Here's to a happy week!

Laminator

The Laminator has been loaded and is ready to go. Please practice the normal precaution that the finished laminated product is feeding out the back; always slow the Run Speed from 4 green bars to ONE green bar. Don't be shy about asking for an experienced person to assist if you've never used our laminator. One more word about self-imposed laminating limits. This double roll I've loaded is our next-to-last replacement roll. There is the likelihood that there can be no money spared for ordering any more laminate this school year. It's a long time until June 27. Do some planning before the laminator's in motion - pool your laminating projects among teams, rethink the need to laminate everything you'd wanted to, take advantage of a teammate for quicker loading of the laminator and reducing the space gaps between items. These practices might spell the difference in stretching our supply of laminate until school's ended.
Contact Charles Tewksbury with questions or for advice on laminating.

Health and Wellness Update

Thanks to the help of parent volunteers, staff responses to our survey, and BPS Facilities, the Curley Walkthrough and Environmental Audit in December 2017 has yielded the following results and action plan. If you do not see your room number on there or your environmental concern, please email Nina right away. A lot of work has already been done and is still being done to address your environmental concerns. Please be patient with facilities at this time as they work to complete all work orders to fix things.
The walk through yielded three easy things that staff can do to help make our school environment better:

• If you have book shelves or supplies blocking air vents, please move them. This will help in temperature regulation in the classroom and decrease dust and allergen blowing around in the classroom. If you need parent volunteers to help move bookshelves or other objects (declutter), please email Nina and we will arrange a service day to help you. 
• In order to ensure healthy air quality for all students, in 2017, all BPS schools and staff should switch all their cleaners to green cleaners. Due to this policy, we will be hosting a Green Cleaner Swap day on Monday April 2 (7:45-10am) where all staff can swap or get a bottle of green cleaner. Parent volunteers will drop off cleaners to your classroom or you can come to the upper school cafeteria to swap out your cleaning solution. Refill Stations will be set up for staff who will need future refills. Your specific refill station will be written on your bottle so you know where to drop it off and pick it up. 
• Based on the walkthrough, there have been some sighting of pests. If you see live or dead pest(s), please be sure to document your sightings in our pest log with Ms. Vasquez or Ms. Powers. Once the pest sighting has been logged, facilities will come in immediately to take care of the problem. We don’t want sightings to go undocumented because then we would have a bigger pest problem on our hands in the future.

New Field Trip Request Procedure

Starting Monday, 3/12/28, all field trips requests should be submitted in the following way. If you have already submitted a paper previously, that is ok, but all new requests should be done in this way. Check out this powerpoint for additional information on the steps.

• Fill out electronic form at least 2 weeks in advance. This link will be available in the blog daily. Field Trip Request Form
• Print your form submission.
• Email list of students attending to nurses.
• Get nurse and cafeteria signature at least 2 weeks in advance. They can sign anywhere at the bottom of your page.
• Turn in to either main office.
• Pass out permission slips and have students return. (English p.12, Other Languages)

2018 BPS Climate Survey - Due 4/2/2018

Parent, Teacher, and Student Climate Surveys will be released online on March 12th. Chromebooks and document cameras will be awarded to schools with high parent participation rates and the greatest improvement in parent participation. We are asking teachers to have students complete these in class and for staff to complete them during Climate CPT time (your climate rep will have more info). Also any encouragement you can give to families to have them complete it would be greatly appreciated! We use this data to plan for next school year and really value the feedback! Teachers can also anonymously complete the survey using the following link: https://cce.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6VetKNvS3e0mUqF
Shortened Link: https://tinyurl.com/teacherclimate18

Sporting Events

There will be no student spectators in the gym during after school sporting events. The gym is very small and cannot accommodate many people. Please be sure to escort students out of the building at the end of the school day. Students spectators may not attend the game with staff or partners. If a student is with his or her parent, he or she may attend however, the student must vacate the premises when the parent leaves.

Winter Term Report Card Grading Window for Grades K2-8

The elementary grading (Grades K2 - 8) window is open from March 5th to March 25th. 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
Please see Ms. Morgan (K2-2), Mr. Diaz (3-5), Ms. Ward-Jackson (6-8) if you have any questions.

Hiring New Staff

All jobs were posted on www.teachboston.org as of Thursday, March 1st. We are looking for staff and families to help us interview candidates and select the best staff to join our team next year. Please reach out to the person leading the committee if you are interested in participating. We will also share this with families and encourage them to join committees as well.

Job	Lead	Interview Date	Interview Time
K2	Cari	Tues. 3/20/2018	3:30-6:30
ASD K2-2	Liz & Cassie	Tues. 4/10/2018	3:30-6:30
Elem Sci	Lindsey	Mon. 3/19/2018	3:30-6:30
Dance	Adrian & Lindsey	Thurs. 3/29/2018	3:30-6:30
Grade 5	Katie	Tues. 3/20/2018	3:30-6:30

City Year Grades 3-8

City Year would like to introduce you to an SEL initiative that invites students to recognize each other for showing that “Curley Cares.” All students in grades 3-8 are eligible to participate. The initiative asks students, alongside City Year AmeriCorps members, to act as “detectives” on the lookout to catch students around the school caring. A poster with pull-off tabs attached to its bottom will hang in every participating classroom. When students or a City Year see a classmate “caring,” and with teacher approval, they can rip off a tab, write the name and grade of the student who was caught caring, and place the filled-out tab in the manila envelope located next to the poster. Students should use Curley values (i.e. “I care about myself, my classmates, and my school”) to determine whether or not a student should receive a tab. We are asking teachers to introduce the initiative to participating classrooms, grades 3-8, the week of February 26th so students are prepared to start their search for caring classmates by March 5th. Guidelines both for students and teachers could be found here. City Year will collect and count all tabs by March 22nd. Recognized students will be entered into a raffle for various prizes, like a brand new backpack. We will announce raffle prize winners the week of March 26th. Please do not hesitate to contact us at jrusso1@cityyear.org orawelch1@cityyear.org with any questions and/or concerns.

CPT at a Glance

Thanks to the staff who have provided feedback we will have a weekly update about what should be covered at CPT. The CPT at a Glance document will be updated each week. This week is an Instructional week. Due to the snow storm ILT did not meet and will therefore not present learning but ILT facilitations should plan and support their team with instructional work this week in the meeting.