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November 25, 2018

Good evening-
I hope your Thanksgiving break was restful and you had enjoyable time with family and friends.  Here comes the rush to the winter break! 

Attendance requests: We continue to have many students inaccurately marked present or absent.  This is a school safety issue and we all need to work together to make sure attendance is accurate.  Please take attendance every period and do it as soon as you can first period.  If you have a student with you when the first rings first thing in the morning (making up a test, getting extra help, guidance meeting, etc.) please call the teacher on record before the bell rings so that teacher knows not to mark the student absent.  Thank you for you attention to this!

As a reminder please make sure to accept or decline any IEP invitation you receive to help with coverage and attendance.  This helps us to meet coverage expectations and mandates.  We appreciate it.  

For your planning purposes:
Lead Learner meetings-
Our next meeting is this week on Tuesday, November 27 at 2:50pm in the library. All liaisons are required to attend but all others are welcome.  The topic of this meeting will be leveling and equity.
Cory McGann, Aleisha Egan and I had the privilege of attending the DESE Leading with Access and Equity Conference on November 1.  We all walked away with some ideas and questions about what equity means and what we should be looking at for continuous improvement at AHS.  We do a great job meeting the needs of diverse learners at AHS but we need to continually grow and evolve as our students change.  Here are some of the questions we will look at on Tuesday (credit to Aleisha for crafting a couple of the questions):
Lead Learner meeting - November, 2018
I invite you to add your own questions, whether or not you are able to attend.
Our January 22 meeting will focus on developing our vision of the graduate.

A reminder that on Thursday, December 13 the organization Minding Your Mind will present to the entire student body during the school day and we will co-host an evening presentation for the community.
11th & 12th - F block
9th & 10th - G block
See notes below (11/19/18) for more information on Minding Your Mind.


On Tuesday, December 18 we will once again host a group of students from South Africa who are here through Hammer & Chisel. We anticipate the group will once again do a presentation on education in South Africa during last block and that their visiting teachers will visit classrooms in the disciplines they teach. Pete Le Roux is a biology teacher at Elkanah House, the school the students are traveling from and Su Nightingale is an English teacher from Somerset College.

Save the Date: January 24, 2019  We will once again have co-department meetings with AMS to support vertical teaming and alignment.  All department meetings will be head after school at the middle school that day. 

We hope you will join the administration on Friday, December 7 at 4pm at the Southborough Owen O'Leary's to celebrate the holidays and each other.  You all work so hard and we look forward to the opportunity to say thank you for all that you do.  Hope to see you there!


Food for Thought...
One of our faculty members shared this with me. It's worth a read. I know many of you are grappling with how to best support all students. Reach out to each other for support and ideas.
5-ways-to-make-classrooms-more-inclusive

Relationships are so important but I am a believer in finding ways to connect our students to the world around them, with the goal of making sure they are prepared for the world they will enter.  This article touches on this and I liked the questions about how we use technology....
Using Technology to Humanize

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