Dear Parents and Caregivers -

Please join us for the first annual French School Parent Party on November 19th!

This adult-only party will be a chance to share potluck dishes and socialize with other families on a casual basis. Please bring a dish that serves 6-8 people. No child care is provided, so plan accordingly.

Our party date purposely coincides with the worldwide release of the Beaujolais Nouveau wines.

The cause of much revelry in France and among francophiles in other countries, Beaujolais Nouveau wines are traditionally released the third Thursday of November. They are the first wines out of harvest each year and are drunk to celebrate life and hard work.

So in this tradition, come along to celebrate our children and ourselves – the founding families of The French School.

No beret or passport needed!

I sent this note to our founding staff members last night.

Thursday, October 29th, I spent the morning visiting Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School, an eleven year old school in Washington D.C.  EWS has a French immersion track and a Spanish immersion track, a very diverse student and staff population, a commitment to service learning, a strong parent engagement practice, a commitment to inclusion services, and love, love, love.  With each site visit I look for a school that feels like our sister school– an urban, mixed income, mixed ethnicity, tuition-free, language immersion school with IB curricular framework.  Most of our partner schools have some combination of these characteristics and are great sources of best practices and resource-sharing for us.  The living, breathing spirit at EWS was utterly inspiring.  I didn’t spend long periods of time observing teaching practice and I look forward to having further conversations with the about instructional philosophy and leadership.  What was most impactful for me was the school culture.  We’ve spent the past year talking with families about the community that we want to create, what we believe in and how we envision our work and engagement long-term.  Each day we make strides towards our dream.  At Elsie Whitlow Stokes, for the first time in any school visit, I could feel where our dream is headed.  Don’t take my word for it, check out the video on their website.

The longer time I spend away from classrooms, the harder it is for me to recognize the transformational work that you’re each doing with our students every day.  I believe deeply that education is a work of faith, that few teachers get to see the long-term effects of their daily work, see their young people grow into amazing adults.  I realize now that I need to reframe that belief.  Every day we see glimpses of the best parts of our young people and if every day we can train ourselves to see those glimpses, to appreciate the possible, then we are living the dream.  Before I get back on the road next week I want to get in a walk-through in each school and get my daily glimpse of the awesome progress that we are all making.  A heartfelt thank you to all.

Rhonda

If you have spent any time inside our founding walls, you have surely noticed the lack of aforementioned walls and the resulting high noise levels.  Today we received the second set of drawings for the acoustical products soon-to-be installed in our kindergarten and first grade classrooms.   All classrooms will receive verticle baffles that hang from the ceiling and are anchored in the oak tops of the walls.  The kindergarten classrooms, because they have flat ceilings, will receive ceiling-mounted horizontal banners.  Some classrooms will also receive wall-mounted panels to absorb additional sound.  Teachers and administrators voted on the color options for the baffles and banners and Golterman & Sabo is completing our installation.  One of their representatives will do the final measuing Monday and we look forward to the installation being complete by the holidays.  We will continue to fundraise to complete phase two (cafeteria), phase three (expansion classrooms) and phase four (multipurpose room) with the goal of getting this work done in time for back-to-school in August 2010.

Our founding students have made amazing progress so far this fall and surpassed our expectations for their productive language skills– in this challenging environment.  We can’t wait to hear the difference in their learning and ability to focus. Aplausos!!!

Dear Parent,

In our effort to improve communication between parents and school, starting in November 9, 2009 St. Louis Language Immersion Schools is instituting a telephone broadcast system that will enable school personnel to notify all households and parents by phone within minutes of an emergency or unplanned event that causes early dismissal, school cancellation or late start. The service may also be used from time-to-time to communicate general announcements or reminders. This service is provided by SchoolReach, a company specializing in school-to-parent communications. St.Louis Language Immersion Schools will continue to report school closings due to snow or weather on local radio and TV stations and will use this system as an overlay to the public announcements.

When used, the service will simultaneously call all listed phone numbers in our parent contact list and will deliver a recorded message from Heads of School or another school administrator. The service will deliver the message to both live answer and answering machines. No answers and busies will be automatically retried twice in fifteen minute intervals after the initial call.

NOTE: 1) This requires NO registration by the parent on the SchoolReach website. 2). All information and contact numbers are strictly secure and confidential and are only used for the purposes described herein.

Here is some specific information you should know:

• Caller ID: The Call ID will display (314) 533-0975 which is the main
number for St.Louis Language Immersion Schools.

• Live Answers: There is a short pause at the beginning of the message,
usually just a few seconds. Answer your phone as you normally would; “hello” and hold for the message to begin. Multiple “hello’s” will delay the message. Inform all family members of this process who may answer your phone.

• Answering Machines: The system will detect that your machine has answered and
will play the recording to your machine. The maximum number of rings before hang-up is five. Make sure your machine answers after four rings or you may miss the message.

• Morning & Day Calls: In the event a cancellation decision is made the night before, or in the early morning hours, the broadcast message will be sent to home phone numbers only. In the event a cancellation decision is made mid-day, the broadcast message will be sent to home and cellular numbers. General announcements would be sent only to home numbers.

• Message Repeat: At the end of the message you will be prompted to ‘press one’ to hear the message again. This is very helpful when a child answers the
phone and hands it to a parent, who can then ‘repeat’ the message in its entirety.

• Emails: If you have this option and if you supply the school with your email address, you can be included in the email broadcasting service. The principal can then send a text message to you or even attach a .wav file of the message sent home.

• Attendance: If your school is using SchoolReach for daily attendance,
you will be notified each day your child misses a required
number of classes. To minimize these calls, make sure to
inform the school when you KNOW your child will miss classes on a given day.

If you have any questions, please contact the school at (314) 533-0975.

SchoolReach, the service provider, uses the best available technology in the industry to detect the difference between human answer and machine answer.

Here’s how detection works:

1. The system detects and measures the voice energy when the phone is answered.
2. The system measures this energy in combination with the background noise and line impairments.
3. If the system determines that it is a “live” answer it will immediately start playing the message.
4. If the system determines that it is a machine, it will wait for three full seconds of silence before playing the message with a maximum wait time of twenty seconds.
5. If the system cannot make a determination, it will default to answering machine thus requiring three seconds of silence for the message to play. In this case, you may hear a prompt to “press any key to hear the message immediately.”

Some reasons for false detection:

1. Loud background noise; television, radio, general noisy environment.
2. A cordless phone that has static or other foreign noise.
3. Not saying “hello” or delaying saying “hello”.

What can be done to remedy this?

1. Do not say “hello” more then once. If the system detected your answer incorrectly, all noise will reset the three-second counter.
2. If, after you answer, the message does not immediately play, cover the mouthpiece of the phone to cutout all background noise. The message should begin after three seconds.

Hi, all,

Our new task force facilitators are hard at work getting organized and setting up meetings.

Brandon Moore, head of the two committee below, asked me to post these announcements:

The School Promotions Task Force will meet Thursday November 5 at 6pm. The By Laws Task Force will meet Monday November 9 at 6pm. Both meetings will be at the school.

There are two posters for recess help hanging in the lobby. If you can volunteer for recess at your school, please sign up. Recess facilitators: Could you put the time commitment on the posters?

Coming soon! List of task forces and their facilitators.

We will not have a November Parents’ Assembly meeting since some groups are still working out their first meeting date.  The next meeting will tentatively be on Tuesday, Dec. 8 at 6:00 at school. I’ll check with the administrators and post an official meeting time ASAP. An agenda will be attached to this announcement. If you would like to have an item on the agenda, please let me know. lisaberman@rocketmail.com.

Interested in learning more about The Spanish School?  Visit our Open House, meet the teachers and administrators and get a sense of what the SLLIS spirit is all about.

Open House for The Spanish School

Thursday, November 5, 2009 7pm-9pm
Saturday, November 14, 2009 2pm-4pm

Please RSVP at enrollment@sllis.org

Our fall has been very well spent building our outdoor play/exploration space for our students.  It is truly amazing what a small group of dedicated individuals can do.  Many thank yous to Lisa Berman who continues to organize this effort.  A special thank you to SLU students who joined our forces for their annual Make a Difference Day.

Our teachers are busy preparing for our first ever report cards.  As part of our research in best practices and common practices, we requested sample report cards from other schools whom we admire: a public district language immersion school, a public district PYP school,  an independnt language immersion and PYP school, and a public charter language immersion and PYP school.  Each school indicated that they were planning a revision of their report cards and we will be interested to see how/what they update.  Our admin team reviewed the samples and we learned quite a bit about what other schools report to their parents, how often and how.  Every sample that we reviewed was a standards based report, many boxes with statements from the standard and a symbol indicating how the student was progressing in that standard.  None of the samples that we requested had any space for teachers to write a narrative about the child’s progress.   We were quite shocked that these early elementary reports were so impersonal and spent more time drafting our first report cards than we had anticipated.  We intended to send report cards out Monday, November 2nd, but will delay sending them home until Monday, November 9th.  Writing narratives for each student is a time-intensive process but one that we believe provides a more comprehensive understanding of who each child at each stage of the school year.  We are committed to including narrative reports for all students at every grade level in our schools.  Below is our reporting philosophy (which will be added to our website soon).  Let us know what you think of the philosophy now and again after you receive your child’s first narrative report.

Report Cards, Reporting, Standards and Success

At SLLIS we do not use overall letter grades or number grades in our elementary schools.  We report student learning with two specific tools throughout the school year: Narrative Progress Reports and Student Portfolios.

Narrative Progress Reports are snapshots of where your children are each quarter.   These reports are not cumulative and families will receive a unique one at the end of each quarter.  These reports are designed to answer three important questions for parents:
•    Do the teachers really know my child?
•    Do the teachers know what my child is mastering?
•    Do the teachers know where my child is struggling?

In a Narrative Progress Report teachers will provide the following information:
•    which units, short projects and long projects the class experienced
•    how your child approached the work
•    which types of/which questions they asked of the work
•    which discoveries they made that inspired further study
•    physical, intellectual and socio-emotional development

Those of you with older children may be very familiar with the Missouri Show Me Standards and Grade Level Expectations (GLEs).  The state of Missouri uses these standards and expectations to design the mandatory statewide standardized test– MAP.  Our teachers use these standards and expectations to plan the sequence of skills introduced in each subject area at each grade level.  If you have questions about how your child is progressing on any subject-specific skill, please ask your teacher and s/he will be able to explain when and how the skill is being introduced in the classroom and how your child is mastering it.  Each year SLLIS will distribute checklists of each set of GLEs for your reference.  Teachers will not produce a tally of each checklist for the progress report.

Narrative Progress Reports will be distributed November 9, 2009;  January 15, 2010 (at Family Conferences); March 26, 2010; June 22, 2010 (on last day of school).

Our Student Portfolios are designed to answer slightly different questions for parents:
•    What is my child producing?
•    Which elements of his work make my son proud?
•    How does my child synthesize complex ideas?
•    What does my daughter know about her own learning?

Student Portfolios will be built throughout the school year and will remain in the classrooms.  Students will learn to select pieces of their work that represent a variety of concepts, skills and understandings from each unit.  Students will learn to reflect on each piece in their portfolio and, with some assistance from their teachers, explain their selection of each piece in the portfolio.  Portfolio presentation days occur in the last six weeks of the school year as part of our culminating learning celebration.

Reporting student progress and success is a difficult task and one that we are committed to reviewing annually.  At the end of the school year we will convene a Progress Report Focus Group of teachers and parents to review how effective this reporting is for teachers, parents and ultimately students in understanding their own learning.

The Green Space Task Force is seeking donations of new wheeled toys for the outdoor science classroom and play area. The items were chosen because they meet one or more of the following criteria:

• teach a concept in physics
• develop upper body strength
• and/or do not require use of a helmet

We can’t put out any toys until we have at least 8. Here are the options with websites that have the best prices:

• Junior Whirly Wheel $49.99
• Classic Row Cart $74.99.
• Plasma car $49.99.
• Pedal roller $64.99,
• Razor A Scooter also available at Target $29.99,
• Trilingual traffic signal $29.95
• Trilingual railroad signal $39.95

If you have another suggestion, please contact Lisa Berman at 773-1995 or lisaberman[at]rocketmail.com before purchasing. You can have your item delivered to the school. We can assemble any item. Thank you for your support.

We’ve had two excellent workshops on replication of charter schools campuses.

Take-aways from Caitlin Farrell of USC:
Only grow at the rate at which you can maintain quality in your existing schools
Build your central office staff in anticipation of expansion
Demonstrate success that exceeds other area schools, funders require data to substantiate their investments

Download the brief on successful replication at http://charterresource.org

Here are my take-aways from Joe Nathan of UMN:
Prepare the ground for fruitful return.
There is no single way to replicate or single strategy
Focus on two or three goals
Provide PD in respectful times/contexts
Align PD with our goals
Celebrate schoolwide success
Communicate our events with the same shops and markets as we publicize enrollment