A Merry Christmas message from the office
Coming soon to Arno…
Dec. 14
Ad Council 9:00
Liedel X-mas 2:00
Wesley Xmas 2:45
MTSS district meeting 4:00
5th grade maturation program
Dec. 15
Steve @Riley all day
5th grade maturation
Dec. 16
Haskin/Warneck Field trip 8:45
Santa Cash pizza party per regular lunch schedule
Watson Xmas 1:30
5th grade maturation
Brown Xmas 2:45
Dec. 17
RESA leadership conf. Steve
Elementary Honor Choir
Dec. 18
Christmas sing-a-long 9:30
Kids Hope Pizza Party 2:00- cafeteria
1st grade to The Henry Ford
Dec 19-1/13/16
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Jan. 4, 2016
School Resumes
Please let me know if you need any room space to reserve this week if your class is doing any projects. Almost there, 5 days and counting!
Congratulations Mrs. Pushman, Mrs. Ellis!
Congratulations goes out to Mrs. Pushman for the Founder’s Day Award for Outstanding Educator 2015. This is a well deserved award for Mrs. Pushman’s hard work and dedication to her students, parents, staff, and her teaching craft. Mrs. Pushman, along with other award winners from around the district will attend a dinner in their honor in February.
In addition, Congratulations to Mrs. Ellis for the Founder’s Day Distinguished Service Award. She has been very active on the PTA and spent a lot time making sure our Arno Fun Run was a huge success. Mrs. Ellis currently serves as secretary for the PTA, among other responsibilities that she gladly takes on for our kids.
Other results just released from our PTA:
Stephen Zielinski for the 2016 Outstanding Support Personnel
Barbara Pushman for the 2016 Outstanding Educator Award
Kelley Ellis for the 2016 Distinguished Service Award
Title 1 room change
Cathy Gorski will be relocating all of our Title 1 materials, etc. to the larger room next to Sandy’s office. This will help accommodate her materials more efficiently, and we will use her old office as an extra room for testing, etc.
Arno Christmas Sing-A-Long
Get ready to fa la la la this December as Jeff Skebo has put together a wonderful Christmas sing-a-long down in the gym on December 18th . We are going to pack the whole building in to have some yuletide fun!
December 18 @9:30 in the gym
MTSS Site Visit
Lisa, Jennifer, Cathy, Barb, and myself were invited to participate in a building site visit to an elementary school in Livonia that as established an intervention system. It was great to hear their building dialogue and learn about their processes on implementing interventions, as well as learn of their core expectations (guided reading, 90 minute ELA block, math, etc.) Some of our key take-aways included thoughts about setting criteria on who gets additional time, who does the interventions, scheduling ideas (they have a building wide recess), and how they structured child study discussions. The MTSS district team will debrief after school Monday about what we are already doing (which is a lot, and what are the additional things we need to address moving forward. As with the district team, I would like to assemble a building team in January to look at all of things we are doing for kids, and what are our strengths and weaknesses. I will let you know when I schedule that open meeting.
This just in to the newsroom… Big education policy change
Senate scraps NCLB: education; battle moves to states
The Senate sent a bill to the president’s desk Wednesday that replaces much of the widely disliked No Child Left Behind Act and shifts more power over education to states and school districts.
The bill passed the chamber 85-12 on the heels of its passage in the House last week. After No Child Left Behind established a high watermark for federal involvement in education, the new bill slashes the federal role by historic proportions, experts say. The bill — which the president is scheduled to sign Thursday — would dump the current law’s intense focus on test scores and the well-intentioned but impossible goal of having all students reading and calculating at grade level.
The Every Student Succeeds Act (S.1177) allows states to set their own guidelines for rating schools and improving them, with federal oversight and restrictions. It was a victory for many Republicans and teachers unions, who were allied in their mission to undercut what they viewed as prescriptive, top-down regulation and intrusion into local schools.
The bill would “put education back in the hands of those who understand their needs best: parents, teachers, states and school boards,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Wednesday. “It’s conservative reform designed to help students succeed instead of helping Washington grow.”
Democrats see the bill as a chance to offload some of the aspects of NCLB that are unpopular with constituents, while maintaining their paramount goal of protecting poor and minority students, whose performance often lags their peers and who disproportionately attend the worst schools. The bill requires states to track performance of such students closely and intervene when schools are failing. Because of this, it earned the backing of the president and overwhelming support from Senate Democrats.
Senate Republicans supported the bill, with the exception of a handful of conservatives including 2016 presidential candidates Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, who don’t think it walks back the federal role in education far enough.
The bill “unfortunately continues to propagate the large and ever-growing role of the federal government in our education system—the same federal government that sold us failed top-down standards like Common Core,” Cruz, who didn’t vote, said in a statement Wednesday. “The American people expect the Republican majority to do better.” Fellow 2016 contenders Marco Rubio and Bernie Sanders also didn’t cast votes. Paul voted against the bill.
The new bill bans future Education secretaries from pushing a Common Core-like set of academic standards and limits what the department can and can’t regulate. Dozens of waivers from No Child Left Behind granted by the Obama administration would be void starting in August 2016. States would have more than a year to shift to the new system, which would take hold starting in the 2017-18 school year.
But there will also be places for the Obama administration to leave an imprint, thanks to a streamlined regulatory process written into the bill that it will have a year to leverage. For example, the department could place broad parameters on when a group of students would be considered “consistently” low-performing, signaling a need for intervention.
Even before the bill was headed to the president, a swath of education, civil rights and business groups were already lining up ways to shape the law’s implementation. Since the bill returns power to states, advocates plan on waging state-by-state battles over education policy that were previously fought in Washington.
Advocates in D.C. have worked furiously over the last year to preserve strong federal protections in the bill for poor and minority students. But in the coming years, they’ll be “trying to make equity at the heart of education in states,” said Ryan Smith, executive director of The Education Trust-West, the California arm of the Washington-based education advocacy group.
“With all of this wonderful flexibility comes great responsibility” for states, said Cheryl Oldham, vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber is highlighting the need to continue to focus on minorities this week with a conference it is co-hosting with the NAACP on African-American student achievement.
One central issue for the Chamber will be making sure states continue to heavily weigh academic measures of students success — like test scores and graduation rates — when they rate schools. The new law allows states to also use some non-academic measures, such as student engagement, when evaluating schools.
That change in school rating metrics alone was a major legislative victory for teachers unions. Unions pushed all year to ditch No Child Left Behind’s embrace of testing, which they’ve dubbed a “test-and-punish” approach. Lawmakers ultimately settled on keeping a federal requirement that schools test students annually — but they gave states more leeway in how much test results matter. The law will also provide new funding to help states audit and get rid of excessive tests.
“You’ve had 15 years of test, test, test, test, test, test, test,” American Federation of Teachers Randi Weingarten said. “This is a vast improvement over what we have right now.”
And in another win, states will no longer have to evaluate teachers in a way that takes student outcomes — such as test scores — into account, a provision in the Obama administration’s waivers that unions opposed.
Now unions are making preparations of their own for the new law.
The National Education Association is pulling together a task force to begin planning how to educate teachers and organize in states.
The Obama administration, too, has begun positioning itself for an intense new phase — designing regulations to implement the law.
“We’re gearing up,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in an interview Saturday. Getting the law passed now is important to the Obama administration so it has “13 months to think about implementation,” he said. On Tuesday, Duncan was at Maryland’s National Harbor kickstarting outreach about the new law in a speech to educators.
Duncan is set to step down at the end of the year, so the dash to regulate the law will be the work of his successor, John King. And King will be operating in a different environment than Education secretaries did in the past because of the bill’s limit on the secretary’s power.
Senators celebrated the bill’s passage, but the next steps already loom on the horizon. Senate HELP Committee ranking member Patty Murray (D-Wash.) pledged Tuesday to keep close watch on implementation now that the work in Congress is done.
“We can’t just sign the bill and walk away,” Murray said. “We have to follow through and make sure they’re doing what we wanted to do with this law.”
Kiwanis donates dictionaries to all third graders
Kiwanis, which has been in Allen Park since 1939 and is celebrating their 100 year anniversary, came to Arno on Thursday to donate a new dictionary to every third grade student. Dave Goodwin, who spoke with the classes indicated that this is the Kiwanis’s 10th year of donating dictionaries. We thank them for this great resource gift to our kids!
Santa Cash
Thanks to everyone for participating in Santa Cash. The pizza lunch will be Dec. 16th at the student’s normal time to eat. They can come down to the conf room for the lunch.
5th Grade band a holiday hit
Thursday night’s 5th grade band concert that included students from Arno, Lindemann, and Bennie helped raise our Christmas spirits as the band played a selection of holiday favorites in front of a packed crowd at the Center for Performing Arts. Although no snow was falling, the holidays never looked, or sounded better. Congratulations to all of our your band members, you sounded professional!
Arno 5th grade band members include: Alexis Ballard, Avery Loving, Teagan Montgomery, Glenn Doss, William Keysaer, Samantha Manson, Juliette Torres, Molly Hool, Victoria Koziel, Carla Schultz, Madilynn Vaughn, Jackson Pettit-Pokora, Drake Steele, Luis Diaz, Cameron Greene, Mia Hool, Cameron McGinnis, Cole Mucha, Damani Dewberry, Meadow Merchanco, DiegoSanchez
Make it a great week!