Letter from the MC Principal

Hello MC families,

Yesterday during Morning Meeting we celebrated our nutrition staff as a part of Chef Appreciation Week. During Advisory last week students decorated posters, and then they surprised the nutrition staff with the posters at Morning Meeting, thanking them for their hard work and for the wonderful food that they prepare for us each day. The nutrition staff was also treated to a song from the Nelson/Scott Advisory thanking them for the “Fresh Food” that they make. It was a wonderful way to Celebrate our individual and collective successes.

Good to see many of you at Meet the School Family Night last week. It is always a fun event. A great opportunity to put faces to names, and to generally catch up. The videos that teachers created are still available so please continue to leverage that resource to learn about about our teachers and staff and to get a window into your kids’ daily experience at school.

Current Events

As you know, we spend time at school talking about various current events. At the beginning of Morning Meeting last week we did a wish well for the families who were impacted by the school shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, Minnesota on Wednesday, August 27th. We talk about these issues, because they are in the news, on social media, and on our kids’ minds. We seek to create a safe space for them to process these issues, especially since their peers may be talking about them. When I asked how many students had heard about this incident about 85% of the students in the audience at Morning Meeting raised their hands.

Toddle and Reporting (assessment data, homework completion, what’s happening in class, etc.)

Last week you should have received an invitation from Toddle to set up a parent account on the platform. If you have not seen it already, look out for an email from “Atlanta Neighborhood Charter School via Toddle” inviting you to set up an ANCS Toddle account. If you would like to learn more about Toddle, there will be an IB MYP session on Thursday, September 11th at 6:30pm to teach parents more about Toddle. You can RSVP here. 

As far as information on the platform, at this point teachers will have posted:

• A bi-weekly message letting you know about what students are doing in class. These messages are posted every two weeks.
• Information about the current unit of study (teachers break their content up into 4-6 week units over the course of the year) and the upcoming summative assessment for that unit. A summative assessment is a culminating assessment in which students demonstrate their knowledge after the completion of a unit of study (a unit is a collection of learning experiences that are connected by theme or topic – a Math class may have a unit on fractions).
• Student progress data related to formative assessments. Formative assessments are check-ins to see how the students are doing as they progress through a unit. Teachers report on whether students are making “limited,” “adequate,” or “substantial” progress towards the aims of the unit. If your student is at the level of “limited” or “adequate” progress at a given point in time it’s ok! It’s just a check-in and a snapshot of where the student is at that moment. Students can also take that feedback to show improvement as they move towards their summative. 
  • We don’t want kids chasing grades anyway – we want them to simply focus on doing their best. We’re all growing! We also all have our individual strengths and weaknesses across subject areas. If you aren’t where you want to be at a given point that’s fine, but formative assessment data helps us to know where we are along the path and it helps us grow.
• Some teachers will also post information about homework completion e.g. over a 5 day period teachers will let you know how many assignments your student has completed.

As various units of study come to an end students are starting to work on summative assessments. This data will start to be added to Toddle as well. Additionally, MAP scores will be uploaded to Toddle hopefully by the end of this week.

We will lose access to ManageBac on September 15th – we have a bit more time than expected. On the 15th I’m not sure what time ManageBac will no longer be available, so if you have any report downloading that you need to do, make sure you complete that by September 14th.

Lockdown Drill Friday 9/12

We are scheduled to conduct a Lockdown drill on Friday of this week. In order to help students stay safe we do various drills during the year (Fire, Severe Weather, Earthquake, Lockdown, etc.). We are required to do fire drills monthly, and we do each of the other drills twice apiece over the course of the year. 

We talk a lot to our students about the work that we do to keep them safe. This includes the work that we do to build relationships with our students and to help them get connected with trusted adults. Part of us working to build a culture of safety in the building includes telling students that if they see something concerning they need to say something to an adult. We train students on how to use the Say Something anonymous reporting app and we have Officer Griffin, an armed APS Resource Officer, on staff. For our Lockdown drills I discuss the drill during Morning Meeting (I did so last Monday), we discuss school safety and allow students to process in a safe space during Advisory (we will do so on Thursday), and we conduct the drill in Advisory the next day (this Friday).  Please check in with your students to see how they are doing. The concept of school shootings can cause anxiety for all of us. However, being prepared is necessary for us to stay safe, and both creating safe spaces and having the willingness to have difficult conversations, helps us to navigate the difficult challenges that life and our fast-changing world present for us.

As always if you have any questions feel free to reach out.

Kind regards,

Mark

Mark Sanders

Mark Sanders began teaching at ANCS in 2011. Before coming to the school, Mr. Sanders worked in New York City. He spent three years teaching 7th and 8th grade mathematics at Middle School 50 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and two years at Harlem Village Academies teaching Geometry and Algebra 2/Trigonometry. He taught 8th grade Math/Science/Technology at ANCS for five years.