McCord Messenger
Last Couple weeks of June
Project Know! Parent Tips
Worthington City Schools is committed to educating and promoting health habits for the whole child. Several years ago, we partnered with Worthington C.A.R.E.S. and The Ohio State University in designing a Student Asset Survey for our students. At least 15% of our 10th graders responded to having experimented with alcohol, and 9% are regularly using marijuana. The survey also reported that students experimented with alcohol, marijuana, tobacco, and others’ prescription medication as early as 12-14 years old. We realize that it is never too early to begin talking to kids about the risks associated with substance use, and parents can have a great impact in this message.
Worthington Schools, with the support of United Way of Central Ohio, is proud to offer Know! Parent Tips to support you in your role of keeping your child substance free. Know!, a program of Drug-Free Action Alliance, provides parents, twice a month with Parent Tips via email to educate you about current drug trends and provide you with proven action steps to help you keep your child drug free.
We recognize that raising a middle school child is a challenging job. We are here to provide you with facts and encouragement for talking with your child about alcohol, tobacco, other drugs, and other at-risk factors. We want to send you the Know! Parent Tips by email throughout the year unless you tell us no! If we don’t hear from you by September 1st, plan on getting them soon.
Thank you for doing your part to help keep Worthington students substance free.
New Seating Outside Mrs. Kirsten's Office
Old Flooring Out - New Flooring to be Installed
Lunch/Option Area Getting Redone
Emergency Data Review
The Emergency Data Review on the Parent Portal was reset on June 1. So your parents can start filling out their information now and hopefully save some time on schedule pick-up days (credit to Jill B. and Kim F. for this great idea!). Parent instructions for filling out the emergency data review are attached in both English and Spanish.
Support@wscloud.org no longer accessible to parents
Parents should not email the help ticket system directly anymore. The support@wscloud.org email address still works for staff, but it does not work for external emails with our new help ticket system. If you have start-of-year instructions that direct parents to email support@wscloud.org, please change them out.
Resource for parents to find their own login credentials
Parents can access their own login credentials by clicking the Password Recovery link under Quick Links on the Worthington Schools main page. They enter their email address (it needs to be the email that we have on file for them) and will immediately get an email sent to them with their district-provided username and password, which they can use to login to the Parent Portal as well as Infinite Campus.
Finding Student ID #
For My Payments Plus, parents can find their child's Student ID # by logging in to Infinite Campus and clicking on Today. The 9-digit student number is under student name, visible on both the app and when accessing Infinite Campus through the Parent Portal or the Infinite Campus website.
Emergency Data Review Instructions
Old to New with Our Ceiling Tile
New Furniture for Our "Flex Space"
Worthington City Schools Attendance Philosophy
The Worthington City School District believes daily attendance is a foundational piece of a student’s academic success. In creating an environment for that academic success, the district works with students and their parents/guardians to encourage consistent ongoing attendance.
House Bill 410 was passed into law by the Ohio General Assembly in December, 2016 and the most recent state guidelines were made in July, 2017. This has changed the way school districts monitor student attendance across the state. Schools now must keep track of absences by “hours” (to include partial-day absences) as opposed to “days missed.”
● What are some of the changes that will go into effect?
Definitions:
Habitual Truant - any student absent without a legitimate excuse for absences of:
- 30 or more consecutive hours.
- 42 or more total hours in one school month.
- 72 or more total hours in one school year.
- 38 or more hours in one school month.
- 65 or more hours in one school year.
● If a student has exceeded one of the attendance thresholds for Habitual Truancy, a letter will be sent home and phone calls will be made to contact the student’s parent/guardian to set up a meeting. The purpose of this required meeting will be for the parent/guardian, student (when
appropriate), and building staff to be a part of an Absence Intervention Team and meet to
develop an Absence Intervention Plan. A plan will need to be developed to achieve “satisfactory” improvement in attendance, or truancy charges could be filed to the juvenile court.
● If a student has exceeded one of the attendance thresholds for Excessive Absences, a letter will be sent home and phone calls will be made to note the requirement for any additional absences to have a doctor’s note to consider them excused.
McCord's Bell Schedule for 2022-23
McCord's School Supply List for 2022-23
Securly Alerts
Dear Worthington Schools Parents,
Worthington Schools is proud of all students, families and staff for making year one of our initiatives to provide a Chromebook to every student a success. We appreciate everyone's openness and flexibility as we all adjusted to this new instructional model.
Heading into summer break, students who have been issued a Chromebook will keep the device over the summer break. Students who will be 9th graders next year will swap their devices out at the start of next school year for a new one while everyone else will keep their devices, even over breaks.
Securly Alerts
Worthington Schools will keep the Securly parent accounts active over the summer to allow parents to determine the appropriate filtering level. Worthington Schools will not be monitoring alerts over the summer, so we encourage parents to leverage the Securly Home App to monitor usage and enable alerts. More information can be found here: How to use the Securly Home App. Enabling the app and turning alerts on will allow you to receive alerts over the summer break.
Securly Parent Features
The Securly Home app has the ability for parents to:
View your student’s activity feed
View and enable alerts for flagged activity
Manage allow and block rules
Set an offline schedules
Pause Internet (New Feature)
Please note that not all of these capabilities are available if you access Seculry through the web portal. These features are specific to the Securly Home app. Also, if your student's Chromebook is not in use and there is no information to report, Securly will not send the weekly email. We will plan on turning the notification to the school officials back on beginning August 19.
We take student safety very seriously and online safety is part of the overall approach. If you have questions or comments please feel free to email me at jcollett@wscloud.org. Or if you need specific support from Securly you can access their parent support site here or contact them at homesupport@securly.com or
Sincerely,
Jeff Collett
Chief Technology Office
Worthington Schools
Special Guests Visiting Our Music Classes
McCord Middle School
Email: mkuri@wscloud.org
Website: https://www.worthington.k12.oh.us/Domain/11
Location: 1500 Hard Road, Columbus, OH, USA
Phone: (614)450-4000
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/McCordPTA/
Twitter: @McCordMiddle