Dear Families,
Happy Friday. I’m writing to you this afternoon after a great PTSO/Principal Coffee meeting. I don’t normally combine those two events, but September just got too busy to schedule both this month. We will hold them separately moving forward.
Thank you to all the parents who came. My nonmathematical estimate was we had about 30 people in attendance which was a really nice start to the year. Today we introduced two of our new teachers, Nate Banfield in English and Danny Loss in Social Studies. We had a presentation from our senior class officers on their event planning for the school year and parents got to watch our Friday morning announcements.
In my updates I spoke to everyone about our new Cell Phone policy implementation which is going very well so far. Kids are still adjusting in places but reports from staff and students alike have been that they think the classroom environment is better this year and that learning in class is more focused than last year for the classes that weren’t asking students to park their phones already.
I also spoke about how we are grappling with Artificial Intelligence here at the high school. We are feeling both the pressure of preserving and ensuring our essential learning by protecting it from AI influence so we know our kids are learning what they should, and we are feeling the pressure to help the entire community teach our kids how to use AI responsibly and ethically in a world which will likely require it of them moving forward. We are doing this through thoughtful experimentation and professional development. I encourage all of you to have conversations with your children about how they are using AI both for school and personal use. I also mentioned the environmental impact of using AI because of the tremendous amount of power the servers use.
Finally, I spoke about the considerable work we are doing to align the course team curriculum in the 10th grade at the high school. I chose to lift up the 10th grade first because it is how we are determining competency for the state. Our teachers on those course teams know they need to have at least one major assessment per quarter that is as close to 100% common as possible. They also need to be crafting common rubrics for grading, improving interrater reliability, and then using item analysis to examine the results in an effort to improve instruction where necessary. Some teams are very far along with this work already, but the expectation is for them to continue to improve this year. Other levels are also doing work in these areas with our normal PD time, but I only have capacity to give this extra time to our 10th grade teams this year. This is clearly more than a one year endeavor, but I wanted to share with you our commitment to it.
