Task Force Tasks from Grange

Attendance: We will reach out to families of chronically absent students over summer and also send a letter to all students at the start of 16-17 about the importance of attendance (using the letters from Count Us In!). We will also continue our mentoring groups, check ins, and incentives for our chronically absent students.

Community Engagement: We have been working with Celebrations Church next door. We have tried to arrange a couple site visits but due to unforeseen circumstances had to reschedule. We look forward to a site visit from one of their youth pastors soon!.

We had Ernie from Solano County Office of Education come to walk our campus and interview one of our students who will be receiving an "Every Student Succeeds" award. We were thrilled to have him here.

Customer Service: It was a pleasure to see our customer service results. We shared the positive comments with our front office staff and discussed ways to improve our service.

PBIS: Teachers completed the School Assessment Survey during our staff meeting. Additionally, we are working on developing a PBIS handbook for teachers. Initially we were thinking flip chart of resources but then decided to try a blog to share this information!

Teach for Success: Data was shared at our March staff meeting with teachers. We decided to continue in our focus areas for next year. We also mad a draft action step in our SPSA.

Writing Survey at Grange

For our Writing Data Collection task, 39 classrooms were surveyed  to determine a baseline for posted student writing examples and rubrics. Current writing was found in 41% of the classrooms, with 10% of the total classrooms (25% of those with work on display) posting a corresponding rubric.

One of the best examples was found in 8th grade Social Studies- it is clear that the criteria for a quality piece of written work was incorporated into each step of the writing process. BTW, this teacher has participated in the Area 3 History Social-Science Project hosted at UC Davis and has learned a great deal about Common Core instruction that integrates History content standards and CCSS Literacy standards! (A plug for that professional development opportunity...)

Other examples of writing seen in classrooms during this data collection include:

Grange has recently gone 1:1 with devices, so a new challenge will be to continue to make student work visible even while it's stored in the "cloud" of cyberspace. We will need to focus on utilizing tools such as the Google Add-on "Goobric" to help students more fully understand the characteristics of high-quality writing, have opportunities for self-evaluation, and focus on feedback rather than final grades!

Parent Engagement Outreach

Parenting is a difficult task in today's day and age! As a part of this month's task force activities, phone calls were made with identified families at Grange. As well, thank-you notes, with wallet-size encouragement cards, are being sent by mail to appreciate the home efforts of parents and guardians.

Grange gives back

Celebration Church, next to Grange, offers frequently support and goodies to our staff. As part of our community engagement and alternative to suspension, Grange students participate in cleaning up the church.

Grange PBIS

We had the pleasure of hosting J.P. Grelet this morning at our PBIS Site Committee meeting. We are making progress in our implementation of SWIS, school-wide expectations of "Safe-Respectful-Responsible" and Check-in Check-out (CICO).

CAASPP Training Underway!

The amazing Williams Duo (aka Connie and Ken) did a great job handling all of the details for initial training for CAASPP administration at the Grange Staff Meeting on February 2, 2016. Affidavits were signed and we are on our way to the 2016 testing season. Additional training opportunities for teacher TAs (testing administrators) offered by the Assessment Operations department will be advertised in our weekly newsletters.

Technology at Grange

During our December staff meeting Grange talked about SAMR in preparation for 1:1 Chromebooks for our students. We discussed SAMR again at our February staff meeting (2-2-2016) and teachers shared out ideas on how to teach students when to have their Chromebooks out (stoplight method) or how we can start using Chromebooks at the substitution level (hyper doc warm up). Teachers were encouraged to being thinking how they could move their technology use to the next level (if they weren't used to technology at least substituting, if they were already substituting then moving to modification, etc).

Grange Teach for Success

Grange shared Teach for Success data at our staff meeting on February 2. Teachers discussed data in small groups and shared out. 

Attendance at Grange

At Grange we have two different incentive programs we are using this year to help us focus on attendance.

First, we have our quarterly triple A awards. These awards focus on the categories of achievement (grades), attitude, and attendance. Those students that have perfect-perfect attendance (no tardies or absences) are awarded at a quarterly ceremony in front of their peers and parents.

Our second program is new this year and is intended to help us address our chronically absent students. Each quarter we look at a list of students that were chronically absent, break them into smaller groups and each assistant principal and counselor take a group. We then check in with these students and offer incentives for students attending school. Incentives include an out to lunch early pass or treat of their choice.

Attendance is where its at!

Connie Williams, AP at Grange Middle School - PRESENT!

Hi everyone,

I am super excited to be part of the attendance task force - creating ways to make sure we get our students to school and learning.