August '24 Newsletter

Scott Reeves, Assistant Superintendent, Teaching & Learning

Hello staff and welcome to the 2024-2025 school year! Welcome back for most of you and welcome to Westerville for our newest colleagues. Our Teaching & Learning team is committed to supporting you in your work providing world class educational experiences for our students. Throughout this particular edition, our team will introduce themselves and their roles in their support of you!

This newsletter is for you! T&L Connections is one of several ways we will communicate with you about what is going on, what is coming up, and hopefully to simply keep you informed. At the top you will see a place where you can tell us what content is most important to you. We will do our best to provide you with exactly the content you want to know.

Like we did last year, we will highlight a different Portrait of a Graduate competency each newsletter. For a little consistency, we will highlight the same competency in the same month as we did last year. For your reference:

• September - Communication
• October - Collaboration
• November/December - Social/Emotional Wellness
• January - Problem Solving
• March - Critical Thinking
• April - Adaptability

Lastly, like Superintendent Hamberg, I too enjoy visiting, participating in, reading to your students, and experiencing the exciting experiences that you provide our students in your classrooms. In monthly increments, I will be providing a link to my available dates through September where you can sign me up to come visit your class. Simply click the link below, click on the box that comes up and navigate to a time that works best for you. If the time doesn’t exactly align with your schedule, email me and I can adjust. Looking forward to visiting you!

Scott Reeves Classroom Visits

Welcome, welcome to another year!

Here come the kids, but don’t you fear!

Yes We Are the ‘Ville

But they won’t sit still!

Oh my, what a wonderful career!

Planning an educational field experience for your students this year?

Our field/district-sponsored trip policy, guidelines, and request processes have been updated for the 2024-2025 school year!

You will find all trip information and forms in this folder. Please see the following workflow documents to easily access the resources developed to help you and your team design and plan experiences that extend students’ learning beyond the classroom:

• WCS Field/District-Sponsored Trip Workflow
• WCS Out-of-State/Overnight Field Trip Workflow

Tami Santa, Executive Director, Student Services

Jessie Martin, Director, Student Well-Being

Ja'Niece McAlpine, Director, Educational Equity

Megan Orlowski, TOSA, Educational Equity

Rachel Pinto, District Nurse Coordinator

Departments: Educational Equity, Student Well-Being and Clinics & Health Services

Meet our team! We are energized and ready to work together this school year.

If you see us in your spaces, say hello and let us know how we can support you!

Guerdie Glass, Executive Director, Specialized Learning Programs

Adam Flugge, Director, Special Education

Suzanne Kile, Director, Preschool Services

Jennifer Winters, Coordinator, Office of English Learners

Valarie Jasinski, Coordinator, Gifted Education

Elizabeth Jelkin, Civil Rights Coordinator

The Specialized Learning Team is excited to extend a heartfelt welcome back as we embark on another exciting school year! We hope you all had a refreshing break and are ready to dive into the new academic year with renewed energy and enthusiasm.

Your dedication and passion for education are truly inspiring, and we are confident that together we will continue to make a significant impact on our students' lives in Westerville City Schools. Let’s embrace the opportunities and challenges ahead with optimism and collaboration.

Here's to a fantastic school year filled with growth, innovation, and success. We look forward to working alongside each of you and seeing all that we will accomplish together because

WE ARE THE ‘VILLE!

Welcome Back!

Special Education Administrative Staff

• Adam Flugge, Director of Special Education
• Elizabeth Jelkin, Special Education/Title IX Coordinator
• Angela Nichols, Special Education Coordinator
• Kaylee Robertson, Special Education Coordinator
• Lisa Ryckbbost, Special Education Coordinator
• Mike Seitz, Special Education Coordinator
• Allison Wallace, Special Education Coordinator
• Lindy Whitson, Special Education Coordinator

Gifted Education

Welcome back! The gifted department is looking forward to another wonderful year! Below you will find a list of the gifted coordinators and the schools that they serve. This person will be your contact for all things gifted! Please feel free to reach out to them with any questions you may have!

Responsive Learning: One great way to earn gifted HQPD is through Responsive Learning. This platform has a variety of courses available to you, and all courses are completely asynchronous. Please click here to learn more about this great resource for your professional development hours.

Office of English Learners

Preschool Services

Suzanne Kile, Director, Preschool Services

Jill Fogel, Preschool Special Education Coordinator

We hope your school year is off to a great start, and we look forward to welcoming the community’s youngest learners to the district!

Anne Baldwin, Executive Director, Secondary Schools

Dr. Jennifer Knapp, Director, Secondary Curriculum & Instruction

Matt Misener, Director, Career and College Pathways

Becca Yanni, Coordinator, Extra and Co-Curricular Activities

It’s been an exciting start to the new school year and our team appreciates the work of staff, Link Leaders, and WEB Leaders to welcome our newest middle school and high school students on the first day of school on August 14th! This experience provided a strong foundation for a safe, inclusive, and student-centered environment for new students joining your learning community.

Secondary Curriculum & Instruction

Welcome to the 2024-2025 School Year! We are excited to announce new members of our team and some of our team members who have new roles who look forward to supporting you!

• Linda Amici - MS Instructional Coach
• Drew Farrell - Secondary Educational Technology Coach
• Lane Halterman - Secondary Social Studies Curriculum Specialist
• Lyndsey Manzo - Secondary Science and Engineering Curriculum Specialist
• Brian Meyer - Secondary MTSS Coach
• Molly Nottingham - Secondary Mathematics Curriculum Specialist
• Jill Williams - Secondary ELA Curriculum Specialist

You will soon be getting more information on our menu of services that outlines various ways we are here to help. We have great things happening in secondary - look for information from us and from your department facilitators after our first meeting of the year which is scheduled for August 29th.

Career and College Pathways

Happy New Year! I am Matt Misener and I serve as the Director of Career and College Pathways. I work with our secondary teams and support the variety of awesome post-secondary readiness programs we offer in the district including our Career Center Partnerships (Columbus City Schools and Delaware Area Career Center), the College Credit Plus Program, Work-Based Learning, and Pre-Apprenticeships, and our three in-house Career Tech Pathways (Business, Engineering, and Health). In addition, I support our secondary school counselor team. Please reach out to me if you have any ideas you want to share, need support in bringing career awareness and exploration to your classroom, or have any opportunities you think would benefit our students in preparing for post-secondary.

Do you want to learn more about SchooLinks, our Career and College platform? Please click HERE to view a menu of webinars hosted by SchooLinks. Pre-registration is required to get the Zoom link for the session.

Extra and Co-Curricular Activities

WCS Coach/Advisor Handbook is available in your WCS Bookmarks!

Here is the direct LINK.

If you feel that something needs to be added, or have any questions, please reach out to Becca Yanni.

Cheryl Relford, Executive Director of Elementary Schools

Kate Thoma, Director of Elementary Curriculum & Instruction

What a great start to the 24-25 school year! Thank you so much for your hard work in creating student centered learning spaces. As former elementary school teachers, we recognize the amount of time it takes to set up such welcoming elementary school spaces. Summer was a busy but productive time but WCS is so much more fun when our students and staff are back!

Elementary Curriculum & Instruction

For all things C and I at the elementary level, look for our bi-weekly smore newsletters. You can access our most recent newsletter here! Last year we did a lot of important work including making adjustments to Wit and Wisdom at the 3-5 level. We also have new courses of study for Social Studies and Health-have you seen them? Check out more information on those updates and many others by reviewing this WE Day session slide deck. If you have a question, reach out to Kate!

Nick McIlwain, Director of Alternative Education & Assessments

Welcome back to one and all!!! We hope you had a great summer. Our office is excited to get the new year started.

We are here to help and support your needs with all things testing, alternative education, discipline, attendance, roster verification, handbook and policy info. Please reach out to Nick (ext. 56105), Brandi (ext. 56103) or Molly (ext. 56102) if you need anything. We are here to help and support the teams in the building.

Assessment Authoring

Assessment Authoring, launched in August 2023, enables teachers to create their own tests from a large bank of Ohio test items. Teachers may administer these tests to their students using the Test Delivery System, and view results in the Centralized Reporting System (CRS). Training materials are available on the test portal.

Additional items will be available in Assessment Authoring in September for both the OST and Alternate Assessment for Students with the Most Significant Cognitive Disabilities (AASCD) item banks. Teachers can also use the premade checkpoint (about 5-7 questions on a specific standard) or benchmark (full length practice test) readiness assessments that are available in the Test Delivery System. Results from those two assessments will populate in the CRS for the teacher to view as they plan to support their students' learning needs in the classroom.

Please reach out to Nick or Brandi if any assistance is needed with the readiness assessments or the test authoring system.