Dear MTUESD Community,
I hope you and your family enjoyed your Thanksgiving break. I saw many folks out in the community enjoying themselves and I want to thank again the volunteers who helped deliver food to our families to our partnerships with Refuge Church and Church of Christ. Those meals were well received. Sierra Hope will continue weekly bag grocery deliveries up to Christmas break for our families. I attended the Board of Supervisors meeting the Tuesday of Thanksgiving week to thank Supervisor Folendorf and Huberty for their sponsorship with funding to support this program. Good stuff. This partnership was also featured in an article in the Calaveras Enterprise along with our lobbying efforts for Senator Alvarado-Gil to help support unrestricting some of the ELOP funding to be able to use some of the existing money for interventions during the day and smaller class sizes. We just keep fighting the fight folks.
One of the things I do every day is run far too many miles on my treadmill and I watch documentaries to pass the time. I enjoyed a late in life interview with Astronaut Neil Armstrong as he recapped his quite amazing career and recounted his ability to be part of a team to go to the moon. I still remember that day he landed, I was playing Twister in my parents' family room with all of my cousins and aunties and uncles squished into the small pine paneled room and eating spaghetti dinner, as we all crowded around the one black-and-white TV and watched that magical day. Repeatedly, through this interview, he used the verb “thinking”. He used it to phrase how he was able to save himself from a plane crash with his copilot doing the “thinking” about the response of the aircraft while he did the actual flying because they had one set of severed controls. He referred to it ongoing in the landing process on the lunar module, including changing where the module was going to land when he manually flew it away from a crater. I bring this up because in a generation of Artificial Intelligence, my biggest concern is that we aren’t teaching thinking. Problem-solving and thinking and being able to work as a team are no less valuable now than they were in 1969. That moon module had less computer ability than what is available on a single iPhone today. Frankly, I don’t think our kids think enough and we don’t challenge them to think enough. Students shouldn’t just be able to demonstrate a skill. They should know how they got there and why they got there and think of alternate ways to get there. Tools are great, but foundations and basics and common sense are more important. Call me old school, but I am worried…
Over the break we had some construction happening at Mark Twain with a classroom that had to be rehabbed due to odor. The contractor did a great job turning it around in a week and I’m hopeful we can do several more of those modular rooms over this coming year. These old modular rooms are only meant to last 20- 25 years and some are 35 or 40 years old and we just have to keep working hard to keep them in decent shape. We’ll just keep doing the best we can for kids.
We also installed some permanent volleyball standards on the Mark Twain playground. This will replace the volleyball net that is propped up with sandbags and hope against the wind. I appreciate our maintenance crew getting that done. We will order a portable set for volleyball for the Copperopolis field as well. Volleyball has become both a boys and girls CIF sanctioned sport, and it’s a really great opportunity for fitness, teamwork, and skill building.
Congratulations to two students in the district, Daniella Espejel (Mrs. Rodriguez’s class) and Luna Duncan (Mr. Rosen’s class) for their first place and honorable mention awards in the Calaveras County Office of Education Student Attendance Review Board (SARB) poster contest. They will be honored with certificates and the first place winner, Daniella Espejel, won a $150 prize. Flat out folks, learning correlates to attendance. If a student misses 10 days of school every year for 12 years, they are chronically behind. Doesn’t matter how smart you are, if you’re not here, you’re not learning.
We are in the middle, believe it or not, of planning our summer school program. If I can get staffing, we will try to hold this at both sites. We are in the preliminary stages of this at this time. It will include swimming and all of the other activities that were enjoyed by all last year, as well as that deep, small group intervention work.
We are also working on Saturday School. Suspensions when kids are sent home and not supervised are like an earned day off for bad behavior. My hope is working with our transportation department and our certificated and classified unions that we can create a meaningful community service experience for students to serve detentions and suspensions for nonviolent acts. Some sweat equity in washing the bus might put a choice into perspective. I have some excellent folks that want to provide role modeling to the students. Further news to follow.
You may hear your kids make a reference related to I-Ready assessments. We use this data several times a year to track kids’ progress and to inform instruction. What that means is that staff use it like a roadmap. We take the testing snapshot of where kids are at and then depending on those results, and just like with Google maps, we go ahead and make adjustments to our route and plan instruction accordingly. The Covid years were a terrible loss for our students and we are making strong gains, but we need to make sure we aren’t wasting our valuable resources teaching in areas that they already know. Our kids are showing remarkable growth in many classrooms.
Lots of fabulous special activities are coming up soon. Mark your calendars and look at those site emails!
The ELAC Holiday Party is scheduled for Tuesday, December 9. Please join us for this wonderful potluck and celebration event. Children and families are all encouraged to attend in the Mark Twain gym at 5:30.
I hope you have a fantastic week ahead. Don’t miss all those great community events. There are some sweet parades coming up in Murphy’s on Friday and Angels Camp on Saturday. Our ELOP crew will be featuring a float in the Saturday Angels Camp Parade.
If you haven’t already had a chance to do so, please donate to the food drive sponsored by the middle school students. This will directly benefit Sierra Hope.
Thank you for your partnership in this holiday season. I continue to be in awe and grateful for all that this community continues to create.
Sincerely yours,
Louise Simson
Superintendent
650–996–3290