Post #6 Welcome Back! PD, Racial Equity Detours, PLC Survey

Welcome back! I hope your first remote day with staff went well. I was able to drop in on several PD sessions. I'm especially grateful for those of you who have connected the year's work to the anti-racist/CLSP lens. I've started adding your nine-day PD plans into this folder and appreciate your sharing links to the sessions.

I dropped in on the Quincy Lower and the Shaw today. Both schools are working to be anti-racist. The Quincy is using data from last year's equity roundtables, and the Shaw is continuing its work discussing Kendi/Love teachings and holding affinity groups to make space to be intentional moving forward. Tomorrow, I will begin the day at the Timilty where they will bring CLSP/Implicit Bias/CRIOP to the table. Every school is on a continuum in this work. [OGPS and Mildred both got an early start last week - so I think I missed their actual openings. 😢]

I'm resharing an article named Avoiding Racial Equity Detours by Paul Gorski. It describes the ways in which we avoid addressing race in our schools; the detours remind me of Kendi's definition of non-racist (denying there is racism). We need to name these detours with our staff. I hope to make this article a focus for a future region meeting.

Region Meeting: This Thursday, September 10 at 3:00 pm

Family Wants to Change Answer to Survey? Parents who want to change their remote/hybrid choice can call the transportation hotline 617-635-9520. The transportation staff have language capacity AND are trained to either take a parent's choice because they haven't answered OR change their choice.

Clarification on Group C: Students in Group C will return two weeks early. Right now, we have to hold on providing four days due to space and transportation limitations. These have to be assessed before providing four days. Additionally, you need to make sure there is enough space so that 100% of As and Bs can choose hybrid. It's possible that there is neither enough space nor transportation available for students in group C to attend all four days.

Reminder - PLC Survey: From Natalie, Tommy, and Mary Driscoll:

We know you are off to a busy week, but we are asking you to make one final push to complete the initial PLC survey:  PLC survey #1 (originally included in last week's Thursday Memo). As of now, there are 26 responses from ES principals across all regions. 

The purpose of the initial PLC survey is to anonymously assess interest in various PLC topics for SY21. In addition to the pre-suggested topics in the survey, school leaders are welcome to add or suggest any other topics in the open-response section of the survey. The results from the initial PLC survey will inform the preference/selection of the finalized PLC offerings that we plan to send out by the end of the week or early next week. For interested school leaders, we also hope to finalize the PLC Leader role description by the end of the week.