Alpharetta High School

September 26 – October 28 – Gallup Poll for all Sophomores and Juniors through World History and US History classes

October 7 – Pink Out

October 7 - Get some ice cream after school!

October 10 – Columbus Day Holiday – SCHOOLS CLOSED

October 11 – Professional Development Day (students off)

October 12 – AED Drill (includes soft lockdown drill)

October 13 and 14 - PSAT Proctor Training

October 15 - Upload Professional Learning documents into TKES

October 14, 15, and 16 – 1 ACT PLAY

October 18 - School Governance Meeting

October 18 – Fall Chorus Concert

October 19 - PSAT

October 19 – Balance Night

October 20 – Junior Night, 7 PM

October 21 – Big three drills – intruder, tornado, evacuation - to the stadium for the pep rally

October 21 – Fall Pep Rally & Homecoming Game

October 22 – Homecoming Dance

November 1 - Parenting 2.0 Night

November 2 - End of 12 weeks

November 3 - Load 12 week grades

November 3 - Band Cluster Concert

The AHS Yearbook staff would like teachers and staff to send us their high school yearbook picture. Please email them to Rita Flowers.

Look at Cheryl Solan!

8:30 - 10:00 - IG groups - same locations as last time

Throughout the day - PLC Leader work with Thomas

I will send out a meeting schedule Thomas is creating based on the "next steps" leaders left as their ticket out the door last month. PLC leaders will attend the session that aligns to the topic that best matches his or her need.

Throughout the day - Department and PLC meetings

From October 17th – 26th, 21 students and 2 teachers from Versailles, France will be at AHS. They will be hosted by students taking French and will be shadowing their students for their full day schedules. The visiting students are here to practice their English and learn about American school, culture and society.

We would like to include AHS t-shirts in their welcome bag. If your team or club has any extra t-shirts (sizes S, M or L) that you would be willing to donate, please contact Katherine Rozei by Wednesday, October 12th.

Merci!

Monday 10/17 – America Day

Tuesday 10/18 – Tacky Twin Tuesday

Wednesday 10/19 – Jersey Day

Thursday 10/20 – Career Day

Friday 10/21 – Crazy Color Carnival Day

There will be a prize for the staff member who demonstrates the most spirit through dressing up for spirit days!

Take photos of you, your colleagues, and your students illustrating AHS spirit and send them to Pam and Rebecca for the newsletter and website.

Student Council is in need of homecoming dance chaperones for the late shift (9:15 – 11 pm). Please email Whitney Decaminada if you are available!

The first link was shared with all (including students) and was deleted. Here is a link to the new folder:

Go to 2016-17 AHS Policy Videos and Documents

This activity was an exercise in analyzing relationships in bivariate data. The AP Statistics classes were doing “Statistics Olympics” where they participated in activities at different stations. They did

1. standing long jump distance v. height

2. how many whacks with a paddleball can you do in 30 seconds v. how long can you stand on one foot with your eyes closed, and

3. how many Blow Pops can you pick up with one hand v. hand-span

After students completed all stations, they did a numerical and graphical analysis to determine how strong the relationships were between the two variables, including details to describe the relationships.

Charitable fund campaign is asking for staff to complete the following sentence and return replies to Michelle:Waliaga@fultonschools.org

Please share with us WHY YOU GIVE to the Charitable Fund by completing the following sentence:

I GIVE TO THE CHARITABLE FUND BECAUSE ________________________________.

Name (optional):

Title:

School:

The PSAT will be administered on October 19th, and we will be on an altered bell schedule for that day. PSAT proctor training will be held on October 13th and 14th before school, 4a, 4b, and after school. Please choose which training works best for you. Training is mandatory for all staff including those who do not have a homeroom and those who have senior classrooms.

Congratulations to Neha Embar and Sandya Vikram who took first place in the Alliance Française / Goethe Zentrum European Day of Languages Video Competition for high school students. Students from around the metro area created videos in French which explained how not to commit social faux-pas while living abroad. Sophia Hanchey and Emma Sivitl’s video won third place in the competition. Félicitations to these students!

Frosty Treats just became an AHS Business Partner and will be Friday, October 7th at 3:30pm to give treats to ALL AHS staff members!

Banned Book Week was created to promote and educate the community that censorship is still a very serious problem in this society and that we should all be aware of our freedom to read. It is shown that surveys indicate that up to 85% of book challenges receive no media attention and remain unreported. Not every attempt to have a book removed from a library is known as many people are successful in removing or restricting access to ideas. In time, no one talks about these books at all and it seems that they have all been forgotten.

I wanted to celebrate Banned Book Week because books have been one of my closest friends. They have been there since my oldest memory of childhood and they have been there since I travelled and moved to America.

They have been my sanctuary to hide from reality and they have been my pastime.

Books have been a comfort to me for a long time and I wanted to share this feeling with my school. As students of Alpharetta High School, we should all understand that books are meant for sharing, cherishing, and reading by all. By spreading awareness about these banned books around the school, we are communicating our love for books and our desire to bring attention to books that never get to be read.

Vy May Le, AHS student

Business Partner - Mr. Tire - has given us coupons for 7.99 oil change, and they are in the mail room if you are interested. Pick yours up today!

They are located at 11910 Alpharetta Highway

October 12 - AED drill (soft lock down)

When a medical emergency occurs, an administrator will come on the loud speaker and let the school know we are moving into a soft lock down drill due to a medical emergency and then state the location.

Teachers should clear the halls and keep students in their rooms but continue with instruction. No visitors should be allowed in the building. People who are outside, should move in doors.

Members of the emergency response team will move to the scene and take action. If a member of the team is near your classroom and supervising students, he or she may move his or her class to your room before moving to the scene.

October 21 - Big Three (hard lock down, severe weather, evacuation)

We will conduct these drills with our 6th period class in the order below and use an alternate bell schedule, which will be emailed out. We will end in the gym for our fall pep rally.

1. Hard lock down/Intruder
2. Severe Weather/Tornado - Return to room after drill
3. Evacuation to the gym

I will send out the procedures for these drills soon. Please make sure they are in your Red Emergency Folder along with your current class rosters.

We will come over the intercom and walk you and your class through each drill.

CPR/AED trained staff members:

If you are scheduled to attend a CPR/First Aid class an America Heart Association CPR/First Aid Student Workbook is available in the clinic for your review/check out.

Environmental Students designed bio geochemical cycles explanations. They drew and then visited each other's artwork. Who knew you could get kids to write school stuff on their desks and have fun doing so?! They were engaged all period trying to outdo one another

Arias

Austin

Bergeron

Binder

Binford

Bostick

Brookshire

Brown, G

Burton

Castillo

Chiclana

Cohen

Comparetto

Daas

Davies

Davis

Decaminada

Dice

Doetsch

Donnenfeld

Drummond

Duran

Elick

Gottlieb

Greenwald

Hatcher

Holland

Hubbard

Hunter

Jain

Jassani

Jenkins

Johnson

Jolle

Jonhson,T

Karg

Kearney

Kelly

Kersey

Kilroy

Kornegay

Lacy

Lassiat

Lauer

Laux

Loudy

Magill

Mando

McDonald

McLemore

Misner

Moore

Moore,C

Nichols

Nicholson

Nieves

Nutter

Ramsey

Reddick

Renaldo

Romero, A

Romero, C

Rozei

Scott

Sepsey

Sibold

Smith, L

Smither

Snelgrove

Solan

Velazquez

Villarinho

Wallace

Walsh

*If your name is not on this list and you know you’ve given out a R.I.C.H. ticket, please remind your students to put their tickets in the buckets in the cafeteria! We appreciate you embracing our PBIS initiative! J

We have a blog on the home page of the school website with all the great happenings here at AHS. Please add this link to the monthly newsletter. Click the picture for the link-

http://alpharettahsraidersrevealed.blogspot.com/

**Open Enrollment dates are October 17th through November 4th.

**Benefits has notified us that those who did not complete the dependent audit will have dependent coverage ended 9/30/16.

If you did not respond, you will need to call 800/610-1863 and see what you need to do.

If you are new to FCS, please check your paystub in advance to verify that all benefit deductions are as you expect.

Log into Employee Express, click on “Benefits and Payments,” then “Salary Statements.”

Deductions start with the Sept. 15th check, so if you don’t see them, email benefits@fultonschools.org or call 470/254-6845.

Attached to this email is the new 2017 insurance rates *Open Enrollment is October 17-November 4 More info go to:

www.myfultonbenefits.com

If you are not changing anything you do not need to do anything If you want flexible spending, you must go into employee express and select the amount.

October is Farm to School Month. Please support the movement to eat more Spinach and other veggies too by taking your selfie with our Downtown Alpharetta Awareness Scarecrow -POPEYE or working spinach into your lesson plans this month. Tag us in social media (Instagram, Twitter or Facebook) and we will show our appreciation by preparing a spinach themed lunch for you at the end of October.

#LeafittoSpinach #AlpharettaCulinary #AlpharettaFCCLA

Imagine bowling against your department chair or playing laser tag on a team with your department administrator!

Join us in for a staff outing on November 7th from 4 - 6 at Stars and Strikes. For $18.00 you get an hour of bowling with shoe rental, 2 pieces of pizza, unlimited soft drinks, one game of laser tag, and two hours of games.

November 7th is a AHS PD day and the November 8th is a FC work day, so you can have some fun in between! RSVP to Rebecca at perkinsr@fultonchools.org

Anthony Hobbs 3

Zhi Zhang 4

Colin Renaldo 5

Amilia Cadet 8

Stephanie McDonald 15

Jessica Robinson 16

Teresa McGahee 19

Tom Mulroy 23

Jermaine McDowell 24

Tracylynn Wagner 25

"Whatever you want in life, other people are going to want it too. Believe in yourself enough to accept the idea that you have an equal right to it."

Lila Diane Sawyer

Tech Tuesdays are returning this month! These are mini-sessions of IT which will be one topic per month, to be held on Tuesdays of each month at different times to accommodate various schedules. This is a great way to learn if you are new to Fulton County or coming to Windows from Mac.

This month three sessions will be held after school.

These are open to all and by no means mandatory. There are no PLU’s attached to these sessions, no certification, no diplomas, but hopefully they will be informative, informal, and a lot of fun. Not required, but please feel free to bring your laptop.

October Topic: “Backing Up Your Data: How To Do It, When To Do It, and the Choices That You Have”

“Be sure to back up your data” is a phrase that we hear all the time, yet it is always unaccompanied by instructions. If your computer crashes, the first thing that your Tech will ask is “Do you have your data backed up?” if not, your valuable data is gone forever which can include but not limited to legal documents, e-mails, and pictures.

In this session, you will learn how to back your data up to a drive other than the one on your computer. Also covered: the choices available to you of where to back up to, explanation of cloud services, and a suggested strategy for your own personal backup plan.

*Please be mindful of the following fact: every User is responsible for backing up their own data. If you perform backups infrequently or not at all, any liability that may be associated with loss of data will lie with you.

So, why take chances? Come and learn some of the best and easiest ways to back up all of the data you have worked so hard to create.

Tuesday, October 4, 2016

4:00 pm

Conference Room 1240

Tuesday, October 11, 2016

4:00 pm

Conference Room 1240

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

4:00 pm

Conference Room 1240

This information has been placed in the AHS Technology folder on the T drive and also on my website. These dates and times have been placed on the Master Calendar as well.

Hope to see you one of these Tuesdays!

If retirement may be in the near future, it pays to understand how your retirement benefits really work. In an effort to provide you with some tools to prepare you to meet your financial goals and plan for your retirement, VALIC is pleased to offer an educational workshop on Social Security and your TRS Geogia Retirement. This seminar discusses the role of Social Security in retirement planning, ways to maximize benefits and the importance of leveraging other sources for retirement income to supplement Social Security benefits.

In this seminar, you will learn about:

• Your TRS Benefits
• The cost of retirement
• Social Security benefits
• Bridging a possible income gap

This seminar will be on Wednesday, November 9th from 5:30pm-7:30pm at Alpharetta High School, 3595 Webb Bridge Road, Alpharetta, GA 30005. We will be located in the Media Center. Please be prompt! This event is hosted by VALIC Financial Advisor, Joyce Krinsky, (770) 395-4706 or cell: (770) 715-7508, joyce.krinsky@valic.com.

Please click on the link below to register for each individual that will be attending:

https://my.valic.com/seminarregistration/availableseminars.aspx?regcode=FCBSAN11AA

FCS requests that our returning employees review some essential policies/training materials annually, so that there is an awareness of the serious expectations outlined in each. The list of this information is accessed and submitted electronically in order to establish a record of the training. It is not an exhaustive list. Also, when policy revisions are made or new ones created, a systemic alert is made to notify district personnel of the policy change(s). (If you are a new hire this is part of your “First 30 days” requirements; please review the instructions listed on the New Employee portal page link).

In order to complete this review,

1. Please go to www.fultonschools.org, Human Resources/Talent Department the bottom of the page

2. Click on Access Personnel Records/Forms link (at bottom right of page)

3. Log in using your FCS email address and click on Forgot Password to have the information sent to you if you don’t recall the password (it may not be your normal network password) OR to receive your initial password

4. Click on Forms tab, Start New Form and select Employee Policy Code/Review

5. Click on Start Form to begin your review

Several of the essential trainings are housed in Edivate. Edivate has recently undergone an update and how you access the trainings has changed. Watch this brief tutorial to see how to access required trainings and other trainings/courses: Edivate Basic Navigation

It is important that all read Policy GAM (Staff Rights and Responsibilities). Failure to report an arrest within the stated timeline (5 days) can result in the immediate termination of one’s employment with FCS. The electronic Notice of Employee Arrest form is on the HR portal and is to be used for submitting an official notice to the Employee Relations department.

Finally, OCTOBER 31, 2016 is the deadline for completing this review. Again, the checklist is not exhaustive, and it is expected that employees are aware of all the FCBOE policies/procedures that inform their work. Board policies, procedures, and operating guidelines are accessible via the district website.

Please contact the Technology Help Desk if you need assistance, technologyhelpdesk@fultonschools.org or 470-254-4357.

We want to create a community filled with more balanced lives. The School Governance Council proposed a solution, and the Instructional Leadership Team agreed; thus, we have declared two nights a semester during the 2016-17 school year as "Balance Days."

October 19th

November 16th

February 15th

March 15th

The nights above are Wednesday nights the week of the 17th (to celebrate the class of 2017), and on these nights there will not be any homework assigned, no assessments will occur the next day, and no AHS meetings will be scheduled.

The idea is that Raiders will go home right after school and work to create balance in their lives. Staff members and students alike will take a night off. Club sponsors and coaches and directors may hold meetings and practices and games as needed. We feel students release stress through these extracurricular activities.

Please plan to enjoy yourself and work your assessments around these dates this year.