WE are Burlington Proud: July 14, 2023

Staff Calendar & Assessment Plans

Thank you to all of our staff for your suggestions, feedback, and thoughts on how we can improve our systems and processes when Jamie and I came around to each of the buildings. Based on some of the feedback given, staff were wanting a more clear outline of the year's calendar for planning purposes - thank you for sharing!
Also, elementary feedback was that PLCs in the morning are not as effective and/or productive as they could be. Therefore, the team shifted all PLCs to being after school on Wednesdays so everyone has the ability to meet in-person and work collaboratively during PLC time.
If you have any questions about the calendar please reach out to your building principals! Hopefully this calendar assists with the desire to have all dates in your calendars prior to school starting!
HERE is a staff calendar! Scroll to page two to see the assessment plans when it comes to screeners and state testing windows.

After School Care for Staff

We are a bit curious as to the number of staff who have students in the district who would like to have the opportunity to utilize after school care (at either a lesser charge and/or no charge potentially) during committee meetings and/or PLC times.
In order to gather some data to see the potential level of staffing that would be needed please fill out this Google Form if you would have interest in utilizing this potential service to BASD staff.
Again potential service as we first need to gather data from you to know if this would be feasible or not.

Board of Education Information

The board decided they wanted to start committees to encourage and engage board members more frequently within the school system. They have put together the following five committees and all of the committees have started and have been very successful so far:

There are three board members on each of the committees!
Also, we have started a STEM Taskforce as all board members have interest in expanding/exploring options for STEM across the district. Five of the seven board members are on the STEM Taskforce.
The committees have been valuable as all board members have been doing a great job being active participants and have a desire to engage and support the work within the school district! These meetings are taking place on top of regular board meetings! If you see a board member give them a bit of kudos as they have been engaging in A LOT of meetings in the last few weeks!

We have been working through board workshops to begin the process for the second operational referendum along with working with Studer for Strategic Planning.

Our most recent board workshop was on July 12 to go over the current state of BASD with the board.
The focus was to ensure all board members have a strong understanding of "what is currently under the hood" prior to making decisions about the operational referendum.
We discussed what costs what across the district, what our current class sizes look like, what our building usage looks like during the school day, what are we doing to generate our own revenue, etc.
Again, ensuring we make sure all board members are in the know and feel they have a strong understanding of the current state so they all can speak confidently about our needs and develop a stronger understanding when it comes to the need for an operational referendum.

At this time, Studer will be going into details with the board as to the process for the strategic plan.

The board will be meeting to discuss our current state when it comes to STEM offerings within the district and discuss next steps.

The board will be working with us to determine what reductions we would be making if an operational referendum were to not pass. Then, we will be setting up times to discuss what the referendum question will be and if it is a recurring or non-recurring referendum.

Studer will be holding focus groups with all of our staff during the August inservice time.

Parent, Businesses, & Influential Community Members will have focus groups with Studer in September.
All of the focus groups will help our steering committee develop goals for the school district!

Based on a suggestion from staff, could board members "adopt a school" the board loved the idea and they drew schools from a list as to which board member will be adopting which of our main 7 schools.
Here is the list:

The plan for this will be that each principal within the building will reach out to their building's adopted board member to invite them to specific events and/or activities within their school (or after school). This allows all schools to have a connection with at least one board member while also being mindful that board members have jobs of their own and cannot attend everything across the district! They will be able to focus their efforts on attending events and activities at one specific school! Again, great idea from staff - THANK YOU!

Other information to share

Staff who indicated they have interest in brainstorming and assisting with ideas/thoughts over the summer will have another meeting on July 31 from 8:30-12:00.
We will be going over ideas gathered from other districts in relation to operational referendums along with sharing information about our current state of our budget to gather feedback in relation to what makes sense? What is hard to understand?

WE are Burlington Proud