February 2024

Congratulations to KJHS 7th grade science teacher Eric Stegemann and KJHS Special Education Building Chair Tayler Musselman! They are both recipients of an Award of Meritous Service from the Illinois State Board of Education as  part of the Those Who Excel & Teacher of the Year Recognition Program. This award is given to teachers who have shaped their communities for the better. Both Mr. Stegemann and Mrs. Musselman will recognized by the ISBE at an awards reception on May 18th. We are so proud to have them representing the excellent staff of Kingsley Junior High School. 

5 ESSENTIALS SURVEY

Every year, teachers, parents, and students across Illinois have an opportunity to participate in the Illinois 5Essentials Survey. This survey is designed to generate a detailed picture of the inner workings of KJHS. Your participation in the parent portion of the survey will help us understand your view of the environment at KJHS. Your identity and survey responses will be kept completely confidential and will never be connected to you or your child. 

 The window for the The Illinois 5Essentials Survey is now open and will close on  Friday, March 29, 2024.  KJHS Administration is offering a bonus of $5 in K Cash to students of families who complete the 5Essential Survey by March 1, 2024. In order to redeem this reward, please complete the KJHS 5Essentials Bonus Claim form after you have completed the survey. We thank you in advance for taking your time to complete this survey!

To take the survey:

1.     Visit https://survey.5-essentials.org/Illinois/

2.     Click on "Start here" under the Parent category

3.     You may enter your email address but that is not required. It is completely optional.

4.     Enter "McLean" for the County

5.     Begin typing your child's school name and you should see it pop up. Click on the appropriate school.

Please take a separate survey for each school where you have a child enrolled. 

The Illinois 5Essentials gathers data related to five indicators that can predict important student outcomes. These five indicators that affect and predict school success are...

• Effective Leaders

• Collaborative Teachers

• Involved Families

• Supportive Environments

• Ambitious Instruction

Why these factors? Research in more than 400 schools has shown that schools strong on at least three of these indicators were 10 times more likely to improve student learning gains in math and reading than those that were weak on three or more Essentials.

Please be aware that under the Protection of Pupil Rights Act. 20 U.S.C. Section 1232(c) (1) (A), you have the right to review a copy of the questions asked of your student(s). Survey questions can be found on the Illinois 5Essentials Support Center ( Illinois 5Essentials Survey Questions).

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact 5Essentials Client Services at 1-866-440-1874 or impact-surveys@uchicago.edu. 

The KJHS IMC is hoping to "shower" the shelves with some great new titles for your students. Want to help us out? Simply click on our wishlist, purchase any title, and it will automatically be shipped directly to Kingsley Junior High School for the IMC. 

We are seeing an increasing number of student conflicts at KJHS caused by social media usage, especially Snap Chat. Given this, we wanted to share some insights into Snap Chat from our friends at Decatur Public Schools in Alabama. We hope the information below will help our Kingsley families provide guidance to students in the usage (or elimination) of this app. 

Does your child use Snapchat? It's a popular app with teenagers used for creating multimedia messages referred to as "snaps" that consist of a photo or a short video, and can be edited to include filters and effects, text captions, and drawings. While the premise behind the app seems innocent, it can lead to problems if used inappropriately. With school about to start, be sure you are up to speed on all that snapshot offers(good and bad).

Snapchat offers extra protections for 13-to-17-year-olds, including requiring teens to be mutually connected or in their respective phone contacts before they can start communicating.

Please follow the links below to learn more about tools parents can access to learn more about Snapchat safety:

Snap has a set of in-app parental tools called Family Center.  The goal of these tools is to help parents get insight into how their teens are using Snapchat, including who they are communicating with and what public content they are viewing. https://values.snap.com/safety/family-center

Easily report concerning accounts to Snap’s 24/7 Trust and Safety team.  You can learn more here: https://values.snap.com/safety/safety-reporting

Here is a list of important actions to help protect your teens on Snapchat.

FAMILY AND FRIENDS ONLY: Tell your teen to only invite and accept Friends on Snapchat if they are friends in real life or family members. Encourage them to check their Friends List regularly to make sure they still want to be in touch with each friend.

LOCATION AND PRIVACY SETTINGS: Talk to your teen about their location and privacy settings. At Snapchat, privacy settings are turned on by default, so people can only see the things you want to share, for as long as you want to share them.

IN-APP REPORTING: Make sure your teen knows how to use our in-app reporting tools and that we don’t tell Snapchatters who reported them. These reports go directly to our 24/7 Trust and Safety team to investigate and take appropriate action. We also offer reporting tools on our website for those who don’t use Snapchat – which any parent can easily use.

THINK BEFORE YOU SEND: Remind your teen that, as with sharing anything online, it’s important to be really careful about sending anyone – even a partner or close friend – personal or sensitive images and information. Snaps and Chats may delete by default, but there are ways to capture images from a phone or other device without a person’s consent. This is true despite Snapchat sending a notification in some instances when a screenshot is taken.

JOIN FAMILY CENTER: Make sure you and your teen are signed up for Snapchat’s Family Center.

Given the fact that we have over 700 students in our KJHS community, conflicts are bound to occur. If your student is experiencing an issue with another student and needs adult assistance to help work things out, please encourage them to complete the "What's Up Kingsley?" form. This will alert the adults in the building to the issue and we will direct the students involved to the KJHS resource best suited to the conflict. 

If you are wanting your child to ride a different bus on a certain day (i.e. , they are riding home with a friend), please contact the Transportation Office (309-557- 4287) to make this arrangement as they will need to notify the bus driver. Please do this as early as possible in order to ensure that the message is communicated. KJHS cannot make this arrangement for you. 

Want to enjoy KJHS home games from the comfort of your own home? Check out our Kingsley Activities You Tube page for live streams of all home events and enjoy how our student led Stream Team broadcasts each and every game!