Shawnee Mission Public Schools East Lancers 52 Years
Lancer Newsletter Shawnee Mission East High School
October 2010—Published On-line Monthly
Key Dates: 10/4 NO SCHOOL, Improvement Day 10/5 LATE START 9:40am 10/5 PTA General Meeting 11:30am, Village Church 10/7 Picture Retake Day 10/11 Spirit Week 10/13 PSAT & PLAN Tests 10/13 College Clinic 6:30pm 10/15 NO SCHOOL, End of Quarter 10/16 Homecoming Dance 8pm 10/22 Grade cards given to students 10/22 -10/23 Used Book Sale 10/23 SHARE Garage Sale 11/2 LATE START 9:40am 11/3 Parent/Principal Coffee 9am, Library 11/6 Lancer Blues and BBQ Auction, Milburn Country Club 11/15 Winter Sports Begin 11/16 EARLY DISMISSAL 1:10pm 11/17 College Connection 7pm 11/19 MORP Dance 7:30pm 11/24-11/26 NO SCHOOL Thanksgiving 12/7 LATE START 9:40am 12/9 PTA General Meeting 7am, Library 12/22 NO SCHOOL, Winter Break
Office Hours The main office at SME is open until 4:00 p.m. each day. The counseling office is open until 3:30 p.m.. Due to changes in staff hours and rotating schedules, not all support staff are here until those times, however. Please call the office to verify if you have a question about hours and availability.
www.smsd.org/schools/smeast
Message from the Principal Update and Progress: Development and Implementation of Professional Learning Communities We are entering our second year of implementation of the Professional Learning Communities (PLC) process at SME. For those of you who are new to SME, the PLC process focuses on student learning, collaboration, and a results-orientation. As we reported in the August and February newsletters, implementation has gone extremely well. In some teaching disciplines we have progressed further than the goals we had initially established for the year. One of the most important goals we faced last year was to develop a new mission statement for the school which reflected the language of PLCs. A special committee of staff members was assembled to complete this part of the process. After weeks of brainstorming, writing, and editing, the committee presented the new mission statement to the faculty in April for approval. The new mission statement was approved unanimously. The mission of SME is to guide student learning with high academic expectation. As you can see, the mission statement above is simple to remember and aligns with our purpose. Copies of the new mission statement can be found throughout the building and in each of our classrooms. In our second year of implementation we plan on working on common assessments. In addition, we want to assist staff members so they understand the value of analyzing data from the assessments to improve teaching in the classroom. Historically, educators have often had limited experience with analyzing data from student assessments. As such, changes in teaching rarely occurred. Our emphasis is to teach assessment analysis to our teachers so they can objectively review data for improving teaching. This past summer we sent eight teachers to a PLC conference (held locally) on assessments and assessment analysis. These teachers will serve as resource people as we begin this phase of implementation. In August, Dr. Dennis King from Solution Tree, Inc. provided additional assessment training to our entire faculty. It is going to be important for us to continue with our training as the year progresses in order to ensure that teachers understand and implement the process of assessment analysis. We are also looking into possibly purchasing an assessment statistical software program to help teachers with processing and analyzing data. Once this data has been analyzed, teachers can make the changes necessary in their teaching to promote student learning. On a side note, we would like to share with you that our school did exceptionally well on the Kansas Assessments back in April. Building wide, our scores across all the tested curricular areas were in the range of 94-97% proficiency. Maintaining these high performance scores will continue to be a challenge as we continue to change demographically in our attendance area. Nevertheless, our goal is to be sure all sub-groups (socio-economics, ethnicity, and Special Education) meet the same levels of expectation. Karl R. Krawitz Ed.D, Principal