Dr. Andrea Hyatt Principal Dr. Denise Johnson Literacy Coach Jean Cornwall Secretary

                                                                                                                        September 2010

Dear Winslow Family,

We hope you had a wonderful summer. We are so happy to welcome our students back to Winslow! It is always so nice to hear about all of the children’s summer adventures as they return to school. We are very excited about the work that has been completed during the past few months to prepare us for a successful school year. In particular, our teachers and students will start the year with our new family model structure. We are looking forward to expanding upon on the two-year relationship of looping to include a three-year team relationship. By having students stay on the same small team for three years, we will improve each teacher’s knowledge of the individual social, emotional, and academic needs of the students they teach. Student benefits of this family model include:

·      increased stability and security for children within a smaller learning community.

·      more instructional time because teachers know the strengths and needs of the children.

·      stronger relationships among students, parents, and teachers.

·      increased opportunities for students to interact with others outside of their classroom.

The academic, emotional, social, and behavior needs of your child are important to us! We need your ideas, support, and feedback to help all of our children be ready to learn and have the most successful school experience. We see our relationship with home families as a partnership. To partner successfully, we need to communicate throughout the school year. We ask for your support to please review the following important aspects of our parent-school partnership:

Communication to Meet Your Needs: Finding the best way to meet your communication needs is important to us! Your child’s teacher uses multiple forms of communication including phone, e-mail, folder notes, newsletter, and the district Web site. When your child’s teacher contacts you at the start of the school year, please let them know what form of communication works best to meet your needs. This year, all of our students will have a plastic home-school folder for homework, bringing work home, and for facilitating communication between home and school. Please feel free to send information to your child’s teacher through this folder system.

Family Information/Education Nights: We recognize the importance of guiding parents in the education of their child. Schools are always changing, and assisting families with information about current curriculum and learning strategies is our responsibility. Our Winslow parent education events include curriculum night, literacy night, family math night, our monthly Parent Teacher Organization (PTO) meetings, and the science fair. We encourage you to reserve the dates of these events now, by reviewing the monthly Winslow section of the district calendar.

Morning Announcements:We invite you to keep up to date with our school by reading our morning announcements. Photos of our student participants and award winners are often included. Each day, morning announcements are posted on our Winslow homepage at www.rhnet.org/winslow.

Feedback Surveys: We ask for your cooperation to participate in our district and school surveys. The information you provide is used to plan implementation of programs, make modifications to student services, and inform us about how to best support your children.

School Improvement Plan: Our SIP, or School Improvement Plan, makes up the guiding goals that all staff use to best support our students. The annual SIP process begins in the spring, with parent input. This input comes from our district survey data as well as from parents at PTO. This year, we will be asking parents to help guide our SIP planning even earlier, starting at our

March 9, 2011, PTO meeting. We welcome you to attend this meeting and give us your ideas for our school improvement. Please mark your calendars!

PBIS: As our students return or begin school this fall, we will be sharing our expectations for student behavior in a new way. We are going to talk to students about how to “Reach For the Stars” in making good choices, treating others courteously, and exhibiting good behavior. The bee will continue to be our mascot to encourage these positive behaviors. Our Winslow expectations continue to be framed around the ideas of being respectful, responsible, ready to learn, caring, and trustworthy. These ideas are uniform throughout Rush-Henrietta schools. We hope you will agree these are important traits not only in school, but everywhere. 

We are counting on your help in reinforcing how to Bee Your Best and Reach For the Stars! The Reach For the Stars matrix is printed on the reverse of this letter. Please familiarize yourself with it and review it with your children throughout the year. You will notice there is a blank column for “Home.” We hope you will discuss with your child(ren) what your expectations for respect, responsibility, readiness to learn, caring, and trustworthiness are at home. In this way, we can connect school and home behaviors and reinforce the important work we each do on behalf of children. Throughout the year, all staff members at Winslow will be teaching our expectations and reinforcing children for the good behavior they are exhibiting. Students will be recognized verbally, and on occasion with a tangible reward such as a pencil, sticker, or postcard. We will continue to have a monthly celebration assembly. You will learn more about what is going on with Reach For the Stars at Winslow in our newsletters and E-News bulletins. As the year continues, you will also be able to view pictures of students exhibiting Bee Your Best at Winslow in our photo gallery on our school Web page.

Our work with Bee Your Best is connected to district-wide focus on Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS). You can learn more about PBIS by visiting our Web site and viewing the parent information video titled “Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports.” The information is available at www.rhnet.org/pbis and www.rhnet.org/pbisvideo. As students move through the Rush-Henrietta schools, they will find that the expectations established at Winslow continue throughout their school careers.

Contacting Us:Your first contact regarding your child should always be your child’s teacher.

E-mail and phone messages are the fastest ways to reach your child’s teacher. From there, your child’s teacher may put you in contact with other specialists throughout our school.

As always, should you have any questions or if I can be of assistance, please contact me at 359-5098 or ahyatt@rhnet.org. You are an important part of our school community, and I thank you in advance for your support and assistance! Welcome back to another great year at Winslow!

Warmly,

Andrea Hyatt, Ed.D.

Principal

Parent Resource Guide For Parent Teacher Conferencing (doc file - 763kb)

Student and Community Handbook (pdf file - 494kb)
Student and Community Handbook

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