LCHS Friday Focus

Happy Friday! It it the last day of the 3rd quarter. Reminder that grades will be due on Monday at 8:30, so Beth and Amy can run report cards and we can send them out before break. If you have a senior fail, please let myself and the guidance office know so we can check their graduation status. We do have a building meeting next Wednesday at 7:00 am. We will meet in the library and will go over the data from the STAR assessment given this week. This will be our final push to the Iowa Assessments that will be given April 12-15. We will use the assessment schedule in the student handbook. The reading test will be given on the 12th, math on the 13th, and science on the 14th. The students will take the test in their advisory rooms. I will be meeting with the Juniors during advisory on April 4 to go over our local assessments and to let them know who is in the random sample. The social studies and health tests will be on April 26, with the other tests on April 27. If you are looking...

Happy Friday! Don't forget to move your clocks ahead a hour Saturday night. Just a few reminders for the upcoming weeks. The end of the quarter is next Friday, the 18th. Grades will be due on the 21st at 8:30 so Beth and Amy can run report cards and get them sent out before spring break. Requisitions are due on March 14 to me. Make sure when you fill out the form online you use all caps and include shipping. If their is no shipping, please add a comment so I know. I will go through them on the 14th and either approve or have you make adjustments to them. We also have an evacuation drill on Thursday, March 17th at 2:05 pm, weather permitting. That will leave us with one more evacuation drill for the year. Barry and Nicki are starting to input information to create our schedule for next year. When we get the schedule finalized, we will send a copy out to you. It should be sometime in April, hopefully. Next Friday is also the Music Boosters Spaghetti Supper here at the high ...

Happy Friday! I would like to thank the grading committee for getting a proposal done for our building. They will be sending it out for input on Monday. But before they do that, I wanted everyone to know the expectations set before the committee. First I asked them to decide what the purpose of our grades are. Throughout history, schools were used to sort students from the haves and the have nots. To do this, they needed a way. So lo and behold the 100 percent scale was created. Their was no research or anything used to create this. It was something that was just done. Today, there still is no research to support the 100 point scale, but it is something that all our parents, us, and basically everyone not in school now grew up on. It is something people can accept because it has always been done that way. Now the grading committee was told that we were not going to transition to standards based grading. To do this is going to require more than just a committee of 4 people. This ...

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...