Author Archives: caroline-w

Bike Safety

Have you heard of the ABCs? Not those ABCs, but the ones that have to do with bicycling? Join our friends from the Massachusetts Safe Routes to School for a virtual bike session. You will learn some tips to make sure you and your bike are ready for a full summer of biking in your neighborhood. This program is geared towards children in grades 3-6, but since it’s virtual, invite your family members of all ages to join in! Bring your helmet.

Brought to you in partnership with Newton Safe Routes to School, especially for the 4th/5th graders whose bike safety training was canceled this spring due to COVID-19.

Pre-registration is necessary for this event. One registration per zoom account. The day before the program you will receive a reminder email with the zoom link along with any further instructions.

Here’s the direct link to register https://newtonfreelibrary.libcal.com/event/6788542

June 16th, 4:30 -5:15 pm via Zoom

Summer dance class

Still looking for a fun and energetic activity for your child this summer? All That Jazz Dance Studio has limited space still available for their online summer dance classes and camps. Classes are Monday-Thursday starting June 22nd and weekly dance camps are in July.  Register Now!

For additional information, please contact Deb Vogel at missdeb@allthatjazznewton.com
or 617-641-0784.

Drop-In Running Clinic for kids

Two rising high school sophomores on the Cross Country and Track teams at Newton South High School are eager to share their knowledge and love for the sport, and help provide guidance and support for the next generation of young distance runners (ages 8-12) in the Newton community.

Sessions will meet from 8:00 – 9:30 am on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays each week, from June 22nd – July 31st, at the Newton South High School track. The group will do some running (of course!) and also learn about proper stretching and other drills and exercises to enhance fitness and speed. They’ll also play get-to-know-you games and other group activities, while keeping proper social distancing at all times.

Masks will be required for all participants, and may – if allowed by the then-applicable guidelines – be set aside for activities where proper social distancing can be maintained. Instructors Felix Rogovin and Ben Pistiner will also cover training advice (including cross-training, such as biking and swimming), and discuss good habits for athletes – eating well, sleeping well, etc. They’ll talk about running as a team sport and the importance of supporting each other.

Flyer can be viewed here: Running camp. You can sign up for as many days as you’d like, but they need to know you’re coming, so if you’re interested, please sign up at https://forms.gle/TxvSHWwnWsLK5WsH7

The suggested (optional) participation fee is: $5.00 – $10.00 per session, or $20.00 per week. If you have any questions, please email, text or call Rogovin2@gmail.com or 617-821-3375.

Inclusive Online Summer Music camp and Band class programs

Virtual Band Class: Students will be grouped in bands by age, skill level and preferred music genre. Each session will offer two 1.5 hour rock band classes per week

Virtual Summer Camp: Students will be grouped in bands by age, skill level and preferred music genre. Each band will

  • Write an original song
  • Record an original song
  • Create a music video for original song
  • Create a video for end of session concert of performance of set of songs (recording and video)
  • Community Engage
  • Open Mic
  • Music Business
  • Online Benefit Concert Streamed on YouTube
  • Concert Naming and Logo Design
  • Potential Live Performance Opportunities

Plugged In will offer 2 four-week sessions of each program. Sign up for one or both. For more information and/or to register, please go to www.pluggedinband.org.

Online Kids & Artemis Girls Summer Camps

Online Kids Yoga Camp with Tracy Affonso for Grades K – 4

Each day of camp will begin with breathing/mindfulness exercises designed to help children focus on the present moment. Following the warm-up, they’ll have a fun-filled, active yoga class culminating with a guided relaxation. Kids love yoga with Tracy!

Camp fee is $75.00, registration available here. This is not a drop-in class.
June 22nd – June 26th, 10:00 – 11:00 am via Zoom

Online Summer Camp for Artemis Girls – Stand Strong, Stand Tall! with Tracy Affonso for girls Grades 5 -8, approximately age 10 -14

This week-long, online, summer camp program is based on the popular Girls Empowerment Program for middle school girls! This innovative program led by popular middle school yoga instructor, Tracy Affonso, helps girls to seek their own true voice with yoga, mindfulness, breath work, creative expression and self-reflection.

Camp fee is $85.00, registration available here. This is not a drop-in class.
June 22nd – June 26th, 4:00 – 5:30 pm via Zoom*

Tutoring available

Would your rising senior benefit from help with their college essays this summer? Jane Hirschhorn and her expert team at JBH Tutoring have more than 50 years of combined experience working with students on college essays, academic and creative writing. JBH Tutoring students have been accepted to a wide range of public and private universities across the United States, Canada and Europe.

In light of the unique circumstances surrounding applicants for the 2020-21 admission cycle, they are offering a discount on their Common Application Essay Package. To learn more, please click here.

Tutoring available

Maria Koutsouris, a Newton Public Schools and NNHS Alumni,is entering her PhD program at Boston University where she’ll be student teaching. COVID-19 has brought a tremendous amount of change and uncertainty to children’s education. Maria is reaching out to offer private online tutoring to students who might need the extra help over the summer and throughout the 2020/21 school year.

Trained as a writing and ELL tutor through the University of Vermont, she’s been tutoring for six years, specializing in English, history, and social studies. She can also help students work on their writing, language, research, and task management skills.

For additional information, you can reach her at mkoutsou@bu.edu.

Creative writing program

Educator and journalist Dale Norman is offering “Journeys in Writing”, a creative writing program which will explore a range of places on our planet using Google Earth as its GPS and the world as its map. Dale privately tutors students and is presently utilizing this method of learning and imaginative writing with them.

Dale, who was born in South Africa and emigrated to the U.S. at the age of 18, is uniquely qualified to develop and teach this program. Her background includes certification as a middle school language arts teacher; she also previously taught in the 5th grade at The Rashi School in the Boston area, where she produced unique and creative writing projects with students and has created newspapers and poetry books with seventh grade students at for more than 15 years. Most recently, Dale was educational director at two afternoon programs in the Greater Boston area.

If you know a student who may be looking for supplemental quality programming this summer,  you should seriously consider this one-off option.

Home location is not a determining factor for “Journeys in Writing”, given its virtual nature and Dale encourages friendship/family groupings to consider joining together. Groups are limited to a maximum of 12 age and grade-appropriate students. Presently, Dale has the schedule set up for 2 different sessions over the course of the summer. If there is enough interest, Dale will open the program for additional groups. Cost is $420, for 14 classes, with a reduction of $30 for a second sibling, or for larger groups (i.e.: 6 + students who sign up together). Should there be a need, scholarships are available.

A wider range of students age-wise than expected has expressed interest in this program. It is possible there will be more groups than anticipated and some of the groups will be smaller than expected. If this is the case, then pricing for 1:1 Journey explorations, or dyads and triads will be fully reviewed with you, with a withdrawal option. Dale is open to discussing options which best fit family need

Some examples of “Journeys” may include:
-Antelope Canyon, Nevada: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOLdOvpx-CU
-Paris, France: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roDY-cVHEAs (younger example)
-Older group of teens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADrIrx2vFts

Each program will be geared toward the particular students in the group, their age and developmental level. Students will brainstorm, write and submit two written pieces per week to Dale for her review. At the end of the summer a book (at the cost of $50 per student) will be produced, with two submissions per student.

For more information, please email journeysinwriting1@gmail.com or visit www.facebook.com/creativity36.

Update from the School Committee

Dear Friends,

This update covers the 6/8/2020 Newton School Committee meeting. Before we present the information about our meeting, we wanted to draw your attention to news regarding Unit C staffing for next year. While most NPS staff are permanent and long-term employees, we do have a number of staff contracted annually. For the coming year, NPS will not renew the yearly contract of approximately 100 of our roughly 700 Unit C paraprofessionals. Unit C includes special education aides, behavior therapists, classroom aides, and other educational assistants. In a typical year, the district examines these contracts to determine which positions to renew. Over the past 5 years, about 50 positions on average have not been renewed. This is no typical year as schools navigate the disruption to educational models and budgets caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The fact that we are still uncertain what school will look like next year, infinitely complicates NPS’s staffing decisions. Non-renewal of these contracts allows the district the flexibility to hire the highly qualified, differentiated skilled team we will need to provide the services all of our students require for both special and general education. Please know that NPS is planning for a range of scenarios with a variety of educational models, working hard to meet the academic, social, emotional, health and safety needs of all of our students.

Lastly, please know that NPS has no plans to alter the staffing models of our employees in Unit A, teachers or Unit B, administrators, curriculum coordinators, deans, department heads and assistant principals.

Superintendent’s Update:

  • Congratulations to the Class of 2020! Sunday, June 7th’s Celebration Lanes event at both Newton North and Newton South was a fun celebration for students, parents, teachers and staff.
  • We have received state guidance regarding summer programs. We typically serve around 900 students during summer for our Extended School Year (ESY) program. This will be done remotely, factoring in safety and social distance.
  • Parents and guardians should have received an email sharing information about our plans for the fall. The state has a 42-person team made up of various stakeholders including parents, educators, superintends and mayors all working to create guidelines for remote learning or safe in person school for next year.
  • Unit C special education aids, who pay a critical role in our educational system, are facing uncertainty in staffing for next year. We are inviting back 80% of our Unit C paraprofessionals. We are unable to hire everyone back due to the uncertainty of knowing what school will look like next year.

Discussions/Update:

  • Distance Learning Plan Update: Highlights, Challenges & Lessons Learned. “In general, school districts spend 2-4 years creating distance learning programs. We’ve had to create a crisis distance learning plan in a matter of weeks.”—David Fleishman
    • Elementary Schools
      • Highlights – increased creativity, problem solving, and growth in utilizing technology as a tool for learning, increased interdisciplinary teacher collaboration, relentless faculty commitment to students and families and consistent and helpful communication from district leadership.
      • Challenges – delivering virtual learning in a way that K-2 students can access independently and mitigate time impact on families, providing consistent feedback and holding students accountable, magnified inequities among students/families, teachers’ capacity to work from home and manage their own families, gauging the extent to which students are making academic and social emotional progress, social connections for students and supporting students/families in crisis.
      • Lessons Learned – Need to use the skillsets of our support staff to provide additional direct support to students, need to use technology platforms that are developmentally appropriate for grade levels, increased rigor and time on learning (live virtual classes/small groups) will benefit student learning, growth, and connection.
    • Middle Schools
      • Highlights – Technology platforms to help organize students and enable parents to provide support, online instruction with peer-to-peer conference, padlet, virtual bulletin boards for teachers to share promising practices and in the moment PD and dialogue. Also recreating Transitions & Traditions with classroom visit screencasts and Step-up Day virtual tours.
      • Challenges – Creating a technological platform for distance learning, developing a variety of engaging activities for online live sessions, responding to students social and emotional needs, widening achievement gap, providing academic, organizational, and technical support and reaching out to individual students. Also, transitioning students from one school to the next, especially preparing them socially and emotionally for the shift.
      • Lessons Learned – Need for robust technology platform, professional development for teachers to: create engaging online learning sessions with increased instruction, develop means to meet students social and emotional needs in a distance format and integrate online and onsite learning experiences.
    • High Schools
      • Highlights – Continued focus on relationships and culturally responsive instruction, focus on equity, mental health & connecting with ALL students, strong collaboration, bonding and creativity among teacher teams and with all educators in the building, cohesiveness of leadership teams, experimentation with new tools and ways of teaching, collaborative response to crisis and demonstration of student leadership as part of that response.
      • Challenges – Student Perspective: lack of social contact for students and teachers, supporting students/families in crisis and students who struggle, responding to inequities that are now more magnified and addressing them more immediately, supporting our students when incidents occur in our school and in our world, and student accountability and learning from feedback rather than using grades/GPA as motivators. Teacher/Leadership Perspective: everything takes longer and requires more top-down leadership at times, teachers’ capacity to work from home and manage their own families, how to teach electives, managing information flow/frequency, supporting educators when incidents occur in our school and in our world and taking action to be anti-racist schools and keeping that at the forefront with any other work.
      • Lessons Learned – Simplicity is better, share lesson plans, use the hive mind of departments, won’t be able to do everything, need clear, effective communication from everyone, how we build on this experiment in intrinsic motivation, how to use this moment to deepen our conversations about race and justice. Also, equity must remain our focus and students need time to connect with each other and their teachers.
    • Equity Committee Recommendations:
      • Remove CAS from Annual Elementary Equity Cap.
      • The Elementary CAS Limit is three “experiences” per classroom.
      • Change Annual Elementary Equity Cap to $40/student.
      • Defer implementation of recommendations to FY22 (effective July 1st 2021).
      • Committee set to vote on the suggested policy recommendations during the Monday, June 22nd meeting.

Consent Agenda

  • The School Committee voted Tamika Olszewski as EDCO Board Member, 7 voted in favor with 1 absence (Ray-Canada).
  • Approved 5-11-2020 and 5-18-2020 Draft Minutes, 7 voted in favor with 1 absence (Ray-Canada).

Next Meeting

On Monday, June 22nd at 7:00 PM the School Committee will have the last meeting of the school year. It will be a VIRTUAL School Committee meeting.

We hope you found this summary useful. You can access all School Committee meeting documents via the NPS website (www.newton.k12.ma.us/schoolcommittee). Additionally, if you are interested in watching an SC meeting from home or a recorded meeting, you can obtain access via www.newtv.org. On the district Facebook page, you can find videos of past “Virtual Office Hours,” which are held once a month and provide the community with the opportunity to ask questions through the FB Live format.

As always, we are very happy to answer any questions or discuss any concerns you may have. Feel free to contact us via email at schoolcommittee@newton.k12.ma.us.

Sincerely,
The Newton School Committee

2020 Newton SEPAC Special Educator awards

Nominations are now open for the 2020 Newton SEPAC Special Educator Awards. Although the ceremony will be held virtually this year, it is still a great opportunity to thank all the special educators in your student’s life!

The SEPAC Special Educator Awards are presented to Newton faculty and staff members who have done exceptional work with students receiving special education services. Parents, guardians, and students may nominate any NPS staff member who they believe has gone above and beyond in their work with special education students (i.e.: special ed staff, general ed staff, principals, aides, BT’s, administrative staff, custodians, crossing guards, etc).

All nominations must be received by June 17, 2020. Click HERE  to submit your nomination.