LCHS Friday Focus

Happy Friday! I just wanted to say that I heard some good discussions Wednesday about the strategies being used to reach the various SMART goals. There are a lot of good things happening in the classrooms of LCHS! Please take the time to share this with others, let them know what we are doing and how it is helping our students. As the winter sports season is ending, the spring season is beginning. As you know the spring can get really hectic with students gone for various reasons. Please make sure students are keeping up with their classwork and if they start to slip, let the parents know. I have also had quite a few PASS plans take place. Remember to get these done early so that their is a chance for the parent to help get a student passed. I have been asked about Junior Assessments and when they will be this year. Looking ahead at the calendar, Iowa Assessments will be the week of April 11. We will do our local assessments the week of April 25. I will send out more details once...

Happy Friday! You all should have received a memo regarding requisitions for next school year in you mail boxes. We will be using the online requisitions again for next year, so please fill those forms out. Remember to use all caps when entering in your request. If you need a vendor that is not on the list, please let Kim know and she will add it for you. If I haven't made it to your department yet with projected enrollment numbers for next year, please stop by and see me. Midterms went out yesterday. This would be an excellent time to contact at-risk parents and hold a PASS Plan. It also would be a good time to talk to parents of students who have shown improvement and let them hear good news also. Wednesday next week we have our extra-hour building meeting. This time you will meet in your mixed groups and use the same protocol as before. Make sure you bring data from your strategy to share with your group. Give your group members a little time to look at your data and then ...

Happy Friday! Just a reminder midterm is this coming week. We will run midterms Thursday morning around 9;00 so please make sure your grades are updated by then. If you have a Senior looking like they may be in trouble grades wise, please let me know so I can check graduation progress. I have seen many emails going around about scheduling PASS plan meetings. This is an excellent time to get these done. It still gives the student and parent time to make a positive change to get moving in the right direction. I plan on trying to get to your PLC meetings in the next couple of weeks to start looking at numbers and potential sessions. The hope would be to have this done by the end of March. We are winding up our winter activity regular season. The wrestlers will have their district meet Saturday in Council Bluffs. The robotics club is competing at WIT this Saturday for a chance to move on to the state competition. The bowling teams will be competing in their state qualifying meet her...

Happy Friday! I hope everyone got to enjoy the extra days off this week. It is my guess that we will now be into the next week after Memorial Day for school. I am sure the board will decide in March/April sometime. I just wanted to touch more on moving parent teacher conferences next year to the beginning of October. This will give us a great opportunity to reach parents sooner in order to help with students that may be struggling. The earlier we have these conversations, the more of an impact we can make on the student's learning. It will be a little different at first, but we need to try something new to see if we can boost parent/student attendance. I am including a link to an interesting article on grading. I think it is appropriate for what we are discussing as a building. The article talks about standards based grading, I want to assure you that we are not moving towards a true standards based grading policy at the high school. In order to do this, we will need to educa...

Happy Friday! I wanted to take the time to discuss or refocus us on our professional development. Part of our building PD plan is to create SMART goals on how we can improve our students reading skills as we identified from our STAR data. During the time between tests, we are incorporating strategies that cover your content but hit the skills your group identified in your data analysis. During our building meetings, between the data analysis, you will each take turns going over your strategy, your data, what went well, what can be improved for next time, and what you plan to do next time. This discussion should lead to further refinement of your strategy. We will only be successful if we do this together and not in isolated classrooms. It is important that you hold each other accountable for this effort. We are a little over 2 months away from Iowa Assessments, so we really need to make a push now. I also want to remind you to make use of our model teachers. Keep in mind, when yo...

Happy Friday! I hope the start of second semester has gotten off to a great start for everyone. With the start of the new semester, please be proactive and make contact with parents of students who have struggled in the past. Starting this line of communication early can save everyone stress later in the year when we seem to get really busy. All it takes is a simple phone call to start the ball rolling.  We do have a building in-service next week where we will go over the STAR data for the test given this week. The SIT team will be providing copies of some of the data to help ease the process, but you will still want to bring your laptop. You may want to make sure you have your log-in info for the STAR website that morning also.  Mr. Borchers and Mrs. Addison are almost done registering students for 16-17. Once that is done, I will meet with each department to go over numbers and sections.  I will also be coming around to do our summer maintenance list. Please be ...

Happy Friday! Welcome to the last day of 1st Semester. It is hard to believe that we have finished one semester already. For those of you who did PASS plans don't forget to turn in an end of semester grade report for any student that failed a course. I should have these by Monday with grades. If a student can do credit recovery please let Mr. Borchers or Mrs. Addison know. If the student needs to retake during summer school please let them know that as well. As we begin second semester, students have 5 days to add a class and 10 days to drop. Mr. Borchers and Mrs. Addison have tried to get the students to come in the last couple of days to change courses so we shouldn't see the huge amount of changes as in the past.  Our English teachers will be giving our third STAR assessment next week. That means we will meet as a group on the library on January 27 to create new SMART goals for the third quarter.  Have a great weekend! Mark Students as Leaders Good ...