Edgenuity

Updates about Edgenuity:

We are now 3 weeks into school-wide use of Edgenuity and have received some great feedback from families and learning coaches regarding challenges and celebrations. Some of the challenges we are hearing primarily are tied to pacing and volume of assignments. In an effort to mitigate both of these, we are working with Edgenuity to reduce some of the redundancy and coverage of essential standards. Additionally, we recognize the amount of learning time that was lost in the Spring, so finding a balance will be our goal. Finally, we are so happy to hear celebrations of being back in some semblance of routine with regard to school in general, and that students are finding teachers to be interactive. Our hope, as we work on some reduction in volume, is to afford more opportunities for students to interact with teachers and peers during their day. Moving forward, we will be sending out a family survey as a means to gather more data as it pertains to eCADEMY K8 Magnet School.

Elementary Printed Materials:

We have a finite amount of printed materials to offer for the next week or so; communication was sent out a couple nights ago.

We are expecting our big shipment of spiral bound materials in the next couple weeks and will send out detailed information before the end of next week. This will cover the entirety of semester 1, with semester 2 being distributed before Winter Break. We cannot thank you enough for your patience!

Attendance

We wanted to provide some information to our families regarding attendance, as it stands for this semester.

Attendance will be formally notated in Synergy once weekly on Monday’s, and will account for the week preceding each Monday. There are various data points that will be considered when determining whether a student has attended school:

• Has the student shown up for live Google Meets during scheduled times?

• Has the student made progress in Edgenuity and with assignments?

• Has there been contact made by student or family in lieu of, or in addition to, a student attending live Google Meets?

• Has the student or family interacted with teacher(s) during the course of the week in any way?

All of these examples provide a well-rounded approach to determining whether a student has truly attended school for all or any part of the week. We fully understand there may be a need for flexibility, and that families have a multitude of factors they are grappling with at this point in time, but we also want to be transparent with families about how attendance will be determined. Furthermore, there is a difference between being in contact with school vs. genuinely engaging in school. Because this is a new school year and the compulsory attendance and expected grading will be formally monitored, those differences with be notated in Synergy as appropriate.

A contact point is considered to be corresponding with the school/teacher for any reason; responding to a chat in Google Classroom, Synergy, or Edgenuity; or it could be calling a student in.

Engagement would be considered to be interactive in nature; attending and participating in a live Google Meet; working in and progressing through Edgenuity assignments; showing up for small group time with teachers; or setting up a live Google Meet with a teacher.

PTA

We are looking for parents who would like to serve in the capacity of establishing our parent organization. If you have any interest in engaging in this type of work, please fill out this form and we will schedule an initial meeting in the near future. You can find the form here

STAFFING

While we have been so grateful to all the teachers who have continued to bond with, and support, classes other than their own; and we are grateful to have had substitute teachers who have worked so closely with our staff, we are pleased to let you know that we have onboarded almost a full staff and will have several more onboarding through next week. At that point in time we will have all classes assigned to a permanent eCADEMY K8 teacher. We believe we have been able to hire and onboard the best and brightest staff to work with your children, and that can take some time. That said, we know you will be able to enjoy the quality of teacher you desire for your children. We have covered a great deal of ground in the last couple months, and we owe you a lot of gratitude for hanging in there with us.