Good morning Fowler,
I apologize for sending this email on a Saturday morning instead of Friday afternoon as usual. Yesterday was an early release day and the end of Teacher Appreciation Week, so I was quite busy and forgot to send this email.
As you can see from the schedule below, we have a lot of end-of-the-year events planned for the rest of the school year. We are currently in the final stages of conducting our state-mandated MCAS testing. I would like to request that all students try to be present and on time for the testing dates.
I would like to provide some context as to why I am asking for this support. When we have testing, the entire grade and staff assigned to that grade are busy administering, hosting small groups, and providing support to students who are testing. This means that the entire staff from that grade is unavailable. If a student is absent on an MCAS testing day, we need to use staff to proctor the exam in a different setting on a different day. This creates a pattern of need that repeats itself every time a student is absent for an MCAS test. This can lead to a shortage of staff for field trips and other activities.
Thank you for your understanding and support and I hope you have a fantastic weekend!
Keith
IMPORTANT: Please see the message below from Maynard Public School's Central Office:
Good morning,
I hope this email finds everyone well as we rapidly head toward the end of the school year.
I am contacting you today to request that you participate in a community survey regarding your students' experiences in the Maynard Public Schools.
We have partnered with the Education Commonwealth Project (ECP), a research group now located at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, to administer our survey, which has been developed over the past year with the full cooperation and assistance of the district’s Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Committee and building based administrators. ECP is the group that facilitated our student and staff surveys over the past two years, and their reliable and valid surveys are currently in use in districts across the state, encompassing more than 10% of all students in Massachusetts public schools. Since all of the work done by ECP is state grant funded, there is no cost to the Maynard Public Schools for any of this work. More information on the Education Commonwealth Project can be found here: https://www.edcommonwealth.org/
The information we have gained through our staff and student surveys has been extremely valuable, but we also need the information and thoughts from our parents and caregivers regarding their experiences, thoughts, and opinions as members of the Maynard Public Schools community.
With that in mind, we hope you will take the time to share your feedback with us. Community feedback is very important in our overall planning process as we move toward the close of this school year and plan for the 2024-2025 school year. This is why we partnered with ECP to create a new survey specifically for our parents and caregivers. The survey will not collect personal information. All responses will be anonymous.
The survey itself will take 15-20 minutes to complete. If you have students in multiple schools, it would be greatly appreciated if you could complete multiple surveys as they are specific to each school. The survey window will open today, May 1st, and close on Wednesday, May 15th.
Your personalized link to the survey is copied below. Parents with students at more than one school will receive a separate email and link for each school.
Notes on the survey:
The survey saves progress automatically. You can start, stop, and complete a survey that you started later.
All survey links are unique to the person receiving them and can only be submitted once. They will not work if forwarded to another email address.
Survey translations can be accessed in the dropdown menu in the upper right-hand corner of each page. (See the screenshot below.)
Thank you for reading and for completing the survey.
