Sellwood Principal’s Newsletter – December 1, 2023

Greetings Sellwood Community,

I cannot overstate how happy we are to have students here in school and getting back to their learning.

As you know, the school calendar has changed a bit in order for make up for days missed during the recent strike. Please note that the calendar changes were negotiated at the end of the strike and are district-wide; I cannot diverge from the changes. One of the more controversial changes was converting five days that had been previously part of winter break to school days. We realize that there are families and staff members who have previously made plans that cannot be changed. We also recognize that there are many families who have altered their plans in order for their children to attend school from December 18^th to the 22^nd to make up for missed instruction.  We appreciate that changing plans at the last minute is a sacrifice, and we will do our best to honor your efforts by providing quality instruction on those make-up days. This will be a bit of a challenge because we expect to have high numbers of student absences; students who will be missing instruction through no fault of their own. Rather than providing instruction on new topics that 25-33% of students will miss, we will use the opportunity to go deeper in content learning and provide opportunities for practice and enrichment. Through Canvas, we will do our best to make the learning accessible for those who are not able to be here. Although teachers will provide some fun and engagement on the winter break make-up days, students will not be watching movies and having parties all week.

In order to plan for these make-up days, we are polling families and students to gather information about expected attendance. I sent the Google Form to families earlier today, but in case you missed it I will include the link below.

In addition, we need to reschedule evening parent/teacher conferences, so I have included some questions about whether you are able to do virtual conferences or if you need to attend in-person.  Conferences will be offered on four separate evenings for three-hour blocks. One of the dates will be January 11th, so we will be selecting three additional dates.

Thank you for taking the time to provide this feedback, as it will be very helpful to us. Please complete one survey for each of your children.

https://forms.gle/AVbocppzMGdFjqoC9

Sincerely,

Jeandré Carbone

Sellwood MS Principal

jcarbone@pps.net