Oakland Family Connections

Dear CPS Families:

We want to hear from you!

Columbia Public Schools regularly seeks feedback from parents regarding how our schools and district are doing.

This year’s school climate survey is only 13 questions and should take you less than 10 minutes to complete. All responses to this survey are anonymous.

If you haven't already, please share your thoughts based on your experiences and the experiences of your students. If you have students attending more than one school in the district, please feel free to complete this survey for each school.

Parent/Guardian School Climate Survey

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/M9KNKY9

The survey will remain open through October 31.

Thank you for taking the time to provide your student’s school and the district with valuable and important feedback that will help inform future planning!

Oakland Middle School Families,

As we enter the month of November, we wanted to let you know about a goal we have related to our student attendance. The state of Missouri wants all schools to have 90% of students in attendance 90% of the time. Last year, we had approximately 70% of our students in attendance 90% of the time. We want to raise this percentage by 5% and need your help. Please talk as a family about the importance of good attendance in school. When students are not in seat, they can fall behind in their learning. Help us keep your student(s) caught up in their classes by sending them to school every day. We are currently at 75.6%! Please continue to reinforce to your scholars the importance of attending school every day.

We will continue to include you in this process by providing you our attendance numbers each month in our Oakland Family Connections emails. Together we can reach our goal!

In an attempt to encourage punctual attendance, OMS has been using tardy sweeps at various time during each school day. We announce the "sweep" at the beginning of a passing period. Students then have 3 minutes to get to their next class. If they do not get to their next class, they are "swept" to the office. The consequences of getting swept in a tardy sweep are as follows:

1st offense -- Warning

2nd offense -- Lunch Detention

3rd offense -- After School Detention

These will reset at the beginning of second semester. We have seen a drastic reduction in the number of tardies as a result of these sweeps

Oakland has 14 teachers who are volunteering their time after school to provide tutoring in the areas of math and english language arts. If you are interested in having your scholar stay after school and attend one of these tutoring sessions, please contact Mr. Soper who is the tutoring coordinator for OMS. His contact information: dsoper@cpsk12.org.

As a reminder, all CPS students and families can access the Tutor Me app in the student portal to get academic assistance in a variety of different content areas. Students may access this free 24/7 online tutoring resource which provides tutoring in more than 300 subjects with live tutors. This is a great resource for scholars to access at home while they are working on homework.

The next IPR (interim progress report) is being given to students this Thursday. We will also be sending your scholar's MAP results from last year home with this IPR. Please ask your child to show you both documents. Hopefully this can generate some good conversations centered around your scholar's academic performance and goals for this year.

School will not be in session on the following dates:

11/10

11/22-11-24 -- Thanksgiving Break

Students will be taking their next iReady growth check next week. Please encourage your scholar to do their best on this assessment. The iReady assessment program gives students and teachers the most accurate prediction of how students will do on the MAP test that is administered each spring. This is one of the reasons why Oakland places such an emphasis on students meeting their iReady weekly and monthly goals.

All students who demonstrate growth on this assessment will have their names entered into a drawing for iReady incentive prizes.

Parent-Teacher Conferences:

• November 7 and November 9
• 3:00-6:30
• Open house format
• Check in at our North Entrance and you will be given your scholar's schedule and a map to direct you to the appropriate teachers