District Student Achievement Team

As we all prepare for Thanksgiving and gear up for the holiday season, I would like to take a moment to reflect on what I am thankful for: our Warren Woods family!

I am thankful for our parents and families. Thank you for choosing us to help support and guide your child. We appreciate your continued support and willingness to remain partners to ensure we provide the best education opportunities for your child.

I am thankful for our Board of Education. Their unwavering support for our efforts to improve student achievement and provide a top notch quality learning environment for our students and staff are invaluable.

I am thankful for all of our staff. Thank you for your hard work day in and day out to serve our students and make our school district feel like family. Without your commitment, creativity, and high standards, we would not be successful.

I hope you have an enjoyable Thanksgiving with your family, friends, and the ones that you love.

Wishing you a happy Thanksgiving!

Our administrative team remains committed to advancing collective responsibility of our professional learning community process. With this as our focus, our leadership team attended one full day and one evening learning session with Dr. Anthony Muhammad, as well as one day (first of a series of three sessions) with Dr. Thomas Many. Both of these sessions were offered in partnership with Macomb Intermediate School District. These sessions are intended to help us recommit to our PLC process through careful review of our implementation policies and procedures with the end goal of ensuring learning equality in every classroom.

November 5th also provided an opportunity for our entire instructional team to share in this learning and hear honest and constructive feedback from each of the teams. This provides some of the information needed to help us move forward together and ensure that we’re holding each other accountable.

Our goals November 5th included helping our team:

• Understand Professional Learning Communities

• Understand the loose/tight expectations of the district

• Identify Critical Issues of your current team

• Identify needs of your team

• Plan agenda for Nov. 13 Early Release that focuses on the 6 characteristics

• Identify any additional needs

Our professional learning community remains a work in progress as we continue to gather feedback and brainstorm together a response that encourages ownership and builds upon our sense of collective efficacy.

This year Warren Woods PS welcomed Dr. Tara Nattrass, Education Strategist from Dell Technologies to guide both our Administrative leadership team and Instructional Technology team through the process of designing an actionable technology vision. This work will guide both teams in building supports for the use of tools and resources as well as brainstorm innovative ways to leverage technology to engage our students.

On October 15th we held our first Instructional Technology Team meeting of the school year. Just like in the past, our meeting followed a rolling start time to allow for greater flexibility with different release times for our teaching staff. The goal of that meeting was to share some of the ways in which schools are shifting learning experiences and the role technology plays in those shifts.

As a team we discussed what supports might be needed to implement some of the ideas our team came up with and plan to explore “what that looks like” at our next Instructional Technology team meeting on December 10th and Administrative leadership team meeting on December 16th.

Within the PLC process, all of our instructional teams continue to review and revise their use of common assessments to help their team measure students' progress towards the established learning essentials. In doing this work, their team guarantees that students will have access to the same curriculum, acquire the same essential knowledge and skills, take assessments of the same rigor, and have their work evaluated using the same criteria. Undoubtedly, the common assessments designed by our teams are one of the most powerful strategies and provide the information needed so that teams can continue to work together to create supports for students who may struggle and need remediation.

We're excited to have partnered with Macomb Intermediate School District on Saturday, November 9th. The event was aimed to increase awareness of the power of literacy and encourage young readers.

Our district's 31A student eligibility list has been submitted to the state and is available to all building principals and 31A grant funded staff. The criteria for identification is provided by the MDE and includes, among others risk factors:

• At-risk attendance = 18 or more absences based on 2018-19 reports.
• Limited English Proficient
• Immigrant within the last three years
• Economically disadvantaged
• Demonstrated lack of proficiency on recent NWEA testing and/or state assessments

This information help our team plan and implement support to our most at-risk learners.

In response to the districts growing EL population, Warren Woods Public Schools will continually assess our level of implementation and reflect on our supports provided to ELL students. Our district will ensure a team meets regularly to review data, entry and exit protocol, and supports provided to EL students. These efforts will insure our systems are aligned with best practice that support the goal of continuous improvement. Additional our goal continues to be to provide educators with high quality professional development opportunities that support staff in their work with EL students. Within our drafted Section 41 plan, we will help build instructional capacity by helping staff obtain their ESL endorsement to enhance their teaching certificate. We also want to provide our EL with extended learning opportunity before and/or after school and during the school breaks. The focus of this time is to help EL student with language acquisition or, for or more advanced EL students, help them build knowledge of academic language and content. As a district, we also intend on providing district transportation to help support participation in summer EL camp hosted by Macomb Intermediate School District and in collaboration with Michigan Great Start Collaborative. These learning opportunities maximize community engagement and effectiveness by involving parents/guardians to attend trainings. Lastly, additional outreach efforts to our EL parents/guardians will be made through existing technology is planned to help encourage participation in the community and the school district, in part through parent and family engagement events.

Because the state budget was adopted so late, they've only recently opened the application window for 35A Additional Instructional Time grant. Our team will be working in the coming weeks to draft that plan and submit to MDE for review & approval. Fortunately, we're able to still maintain before and after school supports through some of the carryover funds from last year. We've recently posted two positions intended to provide one on one and small group literacy instruction for each elementary school.

This grant is focused on sustaining and growing our existing elementary STEM program. As a district, we'd like to offer additional STEM learning opportunities to students after school and during the summer with curricular materials from Club/Camp Invention. Additionally, we'd like to build a makerspace lab in each of our three elementary schools to compliment and expand our Project Lead the Way (PLTW) enrichment coursework. To sustain this growth, we'd like to build capacity of our existing elementary STEM teachers by sponsoring their attendance to the PLTW Summit. These efforts, in addition to our existing PLTW K-5 program, will help us further our commitment to increasing student access, engagement, and achievement in STEM.

Please don't hesitate to contact us if you have questions, concerns, or feedback.

Email: kbeal@mywwps.org
Website: http://www.warrenwoods.misd.net/
Location: 12900 Frazho Road, Warren, MI, USA
Phone: 586.439.4469
Facebook: facebook.com/Warren-Woods-Public-Schools
Twitter: @WarrenWoodsPS