Beach School

Dear Beach Families and Community,

A Message from Beach’s BSU~

Dear Beach Families and Caregivers,

Happy Black History Month Year and Happy Women's History Month!!!

We hope you are enjoying participating in Mr. Domo's Virtual Dance Class and are ready for more!!! Keep dancing with us!!!

"My Black is beautiful!"- Braylon D.

BHY Fun Fact of the Week: Stevie Wonder is not only the first Black artist to win a Grammy for Album of the Year for 1973's Innervisions, but the first and only musician to win Album Of The Year with three consecutive studio albums.

~The BBSU

We hope you’re having fun practicing with Mr. Domo’s dance videos!  We’re so glad Domo is feeling better and are excited to share video #3. The idea with Mr. Domo’s videos is to have fun with them and also, for children to be practicing moves so that once all 6 videos have been released, they can record themselves (a very short segment!) to be submitted and compiled into an all school dance video which we’ll highlight at the start of our Beach Connects! all school (virtual) event on Thursday evening, April 1  

Link for video # 1.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi9Kn_QjC7w   

Link for video # 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfRJZMKW4No 

Link for video # 3 https://youtu.be/yJM25c0j8dY

There is a lot of discussion taking place around next steps with hybrid and CDL models for 4th quarter, but not any concrete news yet, which I know is difficult especially for families who need to figure out childcare and work schedules. We’re reviewing our “4th Quarter Learning Choice” survey results, even though we know the survey didn’t provide enough concrete information about what either model will actually look like to necessarily lead to an accurate representation of what families will decide to do once we all have more details. Nevertheless, while nothing we can do in any model is ideal right now given the social distancing that is so important to maintain, the 4th quarter is only 9 weeks long. Whatever we end up doing, you can trust that our staff will do our very best to make the experiences we provide for children meaningful and worthwhile. 

As soon as we are able to envision what model we’ll be able to offer, I’ll draft it up and send it out to you so you can be planning for your child and family from a more informed place. Sometime soon we should be able to begin drafting student cohorts. We’ll prioritize ensuring siblings are in the same (ie, a.m. or p.m.) cohort, and across middle and high schools too (somehow). We’ll need to look at the room capacity of individual teacher’s classrooms (our room capacities range from 8 to 16 for a few rooms in our annex; it is dependent on the square footage of each room and the number of students who can fit in that room with desks six feet apart.) Where we have larger class sizes, we’ll need to figure out how many of the students in that class want to come back for hybrid and what we can do accordingly. The current challenge is we can begin to think about these things, but we can’t do anything concrete with planning yet, because we don’t have a negotiated plan in place; our union and district are currently working on that. Two things that are in place so far are that all classrooms will have HEPA filters, and simulcast (live streaming instruction for students doing CDL) will not be required. Simulcast is not a meaningful option for elementary school because teachers move around to their students, step over to utilize visual models around the room, etc. when they teach, versus sitting or standing in one spot where they could be visible (or effective) on a video stream. While teachers are doing their best to teach this way in CDL, they can’t possibly do what they are doing now during CDL, while they are simultaneously (hence, “simulcast”) teaching with students in their classrooms, spaced 6 feet apart. 

Whatever the model turns out to be, and whatever your family chooses, we’ll do everything we can think of to prioritize ways for students to interact with each other, have fun, learn school routines, and build or deepen relationships. And, to continue learning! Teacher teams have been analyzing assessments, whether those they’ve been doing themselves such as checking whether young students know their letter names and sounds or syllables, analyzing writing or math problems, or the interim assessment upper grades are just finishing up (ie, MAP/Measure of Academic Progress).  While implementing any assessment is extremely challenging for teachers and, as you know, families at home trying to support-- whether that’s helping a child understand what the teacher is asking them to do, or whether it’s getting connected to a test site, teachers are seeing encouraging results!  We hope these results are based on what children can do all by themselves, but, we are seeing strong learning gains in general for students who have been able to take the assessments. Thank you for your partnership with Beach’s amazing teachers in all the effort that has led to these outcomes!  

This week is National Classified Employees week, and last week was National Counselors week. A special shout out for our amazing school counselor, Ms. de Boer!  Katrina’s incredible website and all the learning you can find within it was highlighted by Superintendent Guererro during a recent school board meeting. The superintendent was highlighting Black History Month activities and learning happening across the district, and Katrina’s website was his visual!  This week we begin celebrating Women’s History Month; be sure to check out her content. Be brave, be bold, be fearless!

Our Beach Classified Staff are the absolute best. Each of our staff has been working in vital, important ways for our students and school despite so many challenging conditions… we absolutely couldn’t be the community we are without them. Our secretaries Tina & Esther, our nutrition services staff Monica, Laresa & Lacey (these three have been serving food in the cold three days per week, 2 hours per time, all winter!), our custodial staff Jitendra, Kevin & Dave, our Paraeducators Bill &Cieyre and our Educational Assistants Hector & Zach!  Thank you each, for all you do.

You're the best, hands down!  We’d cry all day without you!

Nutrition Services  On Friday, March 19, all grab and go, curbside services and home meal deliveries will include 7 days worth of meals.  Meal services will pause during the week of Spring Break, March 22-26 and resume Monday, March 29.  

Warmly, Lisa

Please find attached/linked, the Standard Operating Procedures for Ventilation and a Ventilation FAQ for information about what PPS is doing and has done, to ensure proper ventilations for our schools.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Laoi-Qk9hRex31HOtEBblxTHSpUV1qeFyyw5oimykrw/edit

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CN3yWEJZANnXW_5-BJYrV5Rd2DaDzvdweTvk8vPuBrY/edit?usp=sharing