Dear Colleagues
Improvement Plans – I learned over the weekend from the OFT that the rules around Improvement Plans changed on November 17. The change is very positive. Instead of placing teachers on Improvement Plans based solely on student growth measures it must be done on their summative evaluation. This is huge. I am pretty sure that all 61 teachers on Improvement Plans this year would not have been placed on one if this was in place last year. As soon as I learned of the change I started a discussion through email with ARC asking for this change to be made effective immediately. We will discuss at our next meeting, although I can already tell there is resistance from administration. In any event, I hope it gives you all a ray of hope that common sense may eventually prevail with OTES.
Calendar – The Calendar Committee met again yesterday, December 8 to make changes in the 2016-17 calendar and beyond. The Board has to approve the calendar. Against our collective wishes to have the school year continue to start the week before Labor Day or later, the administration will recommend that school start one week early. That means that next year school will most probably start on August 18 for teachers and August 22 for students.
This is being complicated by the fact that business services wants us to start early next year and late the year after to make the high school and middle school moves easier. No conclusions on that.
Other changes include shifting winter break so the last day of school is December 16 instead of December 23. We will return to school January 2 instead of January 9.
There was discussion, but no conclusion about either taking the whole Thanksgiving week off versus going to school through Wednesday of that week. An idea was floated for making Monday and Tuesday of election week in November professional days, record days, and daytime conferences. Also no conclusion.
We also rehashed the whole spring break attached to Easter or a set week in March. The guideline that the group emerged with is to have the break between the last full week of March and end by the second full week of April. This is because sometimes Easter puts our break in late April.
We will see what gets sent to the Board for approval. I will have to let them know how we feel, but we are only one constituency. The Board has the right to shift our year, just not to make it longer.
In Union,
Ari Klein
CHTU President