THANK YOU for participating in the Staff Well-Check Survey!
During the last week of October, our team spent much time reviewing and reflecting on your feedback so that we stay in tune to your needs and experiences and respond in a thoughtful and meaningful way.
You can review full survey results here.
The following team dedicated two days to analyzing the data by reading every single comment and sorting them into the themes below: Jim Adkins, Stephanie Alexander-Johnson, Barb Bowen, Chiquita Cannon-Jones, Linda Coad, Beth Diedrick, Julie Garcia, Erin Graham, Jeff Graham, Tim Jama, Ross May, Bill Ohle, Michael Scott, Stephen Sturgill, and Aretha Taylor-Paydock.
STAFF WELLNESS SURVEY THEMES
- We are developing positive in-person relationships with students
- We are getting more comfortable leaning on our colleagues for support
- We do not feel like we are being communicated with frequently enough or well enough
- Some student behaviors are overwhelming
- Some of our students have large skill gaps for their grade levels
- We need to collectively catch our breath, connect with each other, and feel appreciated
- We should be focusing on positive climate and emphasizing kindness
Here's how we're responding to your feedback:
- We need to collectively catch our breath, connect with each other, and feel appreciated:
- We are modifying the professional development day on Tuesday. Here is what our schedule and activities will now look like:
- 8:00 - 9:30 AM: All staff will meet in their buildings to catch your breath, bond with colleagues, and build fellowship
- 9:30 - 10:00 AM: Travel time for your sessions for those who need to travel
- 10:00 AM - NOON: Professional development work time
- 12:00 - 1:30 PM: We are providing an extended lunch and we will be buying all staff lunch. We will have 2 food trucks at the high school, and one food truck at each middle school. You will receive a ticket that is good for one lunch at a food truck. We have a favor to ask on this. We aren’t able to pay gratuity, so we ask that you please tip the workers.
- 1:30 - 3:00 PM: Professional development work time
- Some student behaviors are overwhelming:
- We are loading videos of Dr. Bruce Perry’s "Stress, Trauma, and the Brain - Insights for Educators" series into Mobile Mind.
- WHY? Dr. Perry is the leading national expert on the effects of stress and trauma on the brain and what educators can do to help create a regulating environment for all students, and specifically students who have experienced stress and trauma.
- His most recent book, What Happened to You? is a New York Times Best Seller which he co-wrote with Oprah Winfrey, and will be our next book study for those who are interested in participating. In these videos you will learn how stress and trauma impacts the brain and how humans display the effects of that stress. You will also learn how to help mitigate the impact of stress and trauma and how to create a calm, kind, and predictable learning environment for all of our students, and again, for those who need it the most.
- By watching these videos in our Mobile Mind platform, the time you spend watching the videos will also accrue for Continuing Education Units (CEUs) that you can use towards renewing your license.
- We recognize that the video series is not enough by itself, but coupled with a book study and ongoing learning about trauma will help us better understand how to support our students.
- We do not feel like we are being communicated with frequently enough or well enough:
- A deeper dive into some of the comments revealed that some of our email distribution lists are inaccurate, and that Outlook groups further complicate the struggle. We are working with our IT department to resolve these issue.
- We also understand that sometimes there is too much communication through email and sometimes not enough communication about what’s going on across the district. Starting today, we will be sending out a weekly update to keep you posted about what is happening in the district. We will also be posting the information to our website so that you can reliably locate information by topic in one place.
- We will be including District Leadership Team and strategic plan updates in this communication as well.
- We should be focusing on positive climate and emphasizing kindness:
- We are going to continue developing our district-wide approach to Positive Behavior Intervention Supports. We now have common expectations across the district: Be Kind to Self, Kind to Others, and Kind to Environment
- The district PBIS team is also developing a PBIS handbook so that all employees across the district have access to these expectations and procedures.
- In the next couple of weeks each school will be receiving signs, featuring our own students, to be posted throughout the buildings to help remind students and staff of our kindness expectations.
- We also will be planning a kindness day (or days) or kindness week (or weeks) to celebrate being kind to self, others, and environment.
- For the first time, each school PBIS team either just completed or will be completing the Tiered Fidelity Inventory which is designed for PBIS teams to assess what is currently in place and not in place
yet.
- Finally, the PBIS team has developed a slightly revised referral screen in PowerSchool so PBIS teams will have data about referrals to determine where, when, and the type of behavior that is occurring
so we can be proactive in preventing discipline. We still have to test the process in PowerSchool and this likely won’t begin until the second semester.
- Some of our students have large skill gaps for their grade levels
- We hear you.
- First, as we said all last year and are continuing to say: please prioritize taking care of yourselves and your students.
- This means that we support you taking time during the day to teach the social emotional learning standards, such as:
- Creating Peace Corners and practicing with your students how to regulate their emotions;
- Doing a PBIS re-kick-off to return our focus to kindness;
- Integrating the arts through music, visual art, and dance into your classrooms to help students regulate;
- Taking students outside for a brain break for them to play and re-regulate.
- We know well that our district is in academic distress and that there are pressures on us that 607 other districts do not have.
- We also know that if our students aren’t regulated, and that if our adults aren’t regulated, that it will be extremely difficult for learning to occur. But very simply, if we attempt to focus on improving test scores without supporting our students to be regulate we will not improve our test scores.
- We will continue to develop our scope and sequences for implementation NEXT school year. This will help us design creative unit plans and will provide an excellent foundation for our TBTs to stand on.