As many of you already know, the district and MTI agreed on a new contract for 2015-16 and the Board ratified it on Wednesday. I will not review all of the changes, but want to tell you about one important change that we discussed at the principals' meeting. The elementary schools in MMSD have been struggling for years to have a clear agreement on planning time and the use of Monday early release time for individual planning and team planning as well as professional development. The new contract took all the old, confusing language out of the contract and started all over. I think the new agreement will vastly improve our work as a school and the district. Here are the key points:
1. The changes around planning time are not only effective for the 2015-16 school year, but also apply to this coming school year (14-15).
2. All teachers get 4.5 hours of planning time outside of the Monday early release. This has not changed. (As a note, at Nuestro Mundo we have worked with the schedule to maximize the amount of common planning time at each grade level). However, this time is all individual planning time, but may be used to collaborate and plan as teams, at your discretion.
3. Each month, regardless of how many Mondays there are in the month, we will have one full early release available for professional development activities aligned to the SIP. This is like our old staff meeting/PD sessions that currently occur on the first and third Mondays.
4. If there is a fifth Monday (there is only one this coming school year), that time is individual planning time.
5. All other Monday will include: 10-15 minutes to safely exit students from school to buses, taxis, parents, etc., 1 hour of "structured team planning" activities, and the remaining 45-50 minutes is individual or team planning time. The content of the one hour of structured team planning will be created by the principal with input from the School Based Leadership Team (SBLT).
6. If there is a month (like December) with only three Mondays, one of those will be a SIP aligned full PD or collaboration session.
If you have any concerns or questions, you are invited to attend the SBLT meeting on Tuesday, June 10th from 3:30-4:00 to discuss the Monday schedule for next year. Your feedback is welcome before we finalize our SIP and school PD plan.
We will be providing a lot more information and details on this plan when we have our welcome back professional development in August as well as our first Monday meetings in September.
It is an exciting time for our collaborative work.
Josh
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