Community Newsletter 4/13/2020

Dear Escalante Middle School Families, 4/13/2020

Over the past week, I’ve received a great deal of feedback from a variety of parents, students, and teachers about our home-based educational program. At Friday’s staff meeting, teachers reflected on the feedback, worked collaboratively to identify the best instructional techniques we’ve discovered so far, and named the specific training that we needed to improve our systems. This week, we are providing training on five different home-based instructional tools. I appreciate our staff tremendously for their dedication to engage in professional development amidst the uncertainty of the times.

Additionally, much of the feedback I’ve received has been less about the quality of the lessons, but more about the quantity. Roughly one-third of families believe we are assigning too much work, a third just right, and a third reporting we are assigning not nearly enough. This feedback is a clear reminder that the school closure and COVID crisis are impacting each family in profound, yet unique ways. In order to assist families across this spectrum, our staff is working to provide all students with an accessible entry point, and then assign more work through extensions and options that create a very high ceiling for students.

In case you missed it over the weekend, the school district also pushed out a couple of very important documents recently that I want to make sure you are aware of. The first is that we are switching to a weekly attendance system, as opposed to a daily system. The attendance form will be significantly shorter as well, and will be shared with students on Fridays. You can read about the details here: (See ATTENDANCE link below)

I also am glad we can offer clarity on how grading will occur for the second semester. You can read the details on our temporary policy here: (See GRADING link below)

While I certainly miss our students and “regular” school day, EMS is determined to do the best we can to continue improving our home-based instruction until we get to return to our campus.

Thank you for your support.

Jeremy Voss
EMS, Principal

ATTENDANCE

GRADING

Published April 13, 2020 Print