Mountain View High School

	NO SCHOOL - MONDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2010

Current Cougar News

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Parent and Student Assistant

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H1N1 Flu Information

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	Spotlight

Students and Parents Take Time to "Love the Bus" this Month School Bus Drivers to be Honored on Valentine's Day and Throughout February.

Bend-La Pine Schools will join the nation again this year to celebrate school bus drivers during the national Love the Bus program. In its fourth year, the program encourages parents, students and teachers to take a moment on February 14 to thank the men and women who take more than 26 million children safely to school each school day.

"Our school bus drivers ensure that our children arrive safely to and from school," said Bend-La Pine Schools Superintendent Ron Wilkinson. "The service they provide allows parents to rest assured knowing that their children are well taken care of when they aren't with them."

To help celebrate Love the Bus, parents, teachers and children are encouraged to visit the program's Web site, www.LoveTheBus.com, to share stories about their favorite bus drivers, and make interactive valentines to email or print and give to their bus driver in honor of Valentine's Day. Educators also may log on to, www.LoveTheBus.com to download an educator's toolkit, which provides details on incorporating Love The Bus into their lesson plans and offers best practices for communicating about pupil transportation.

"We're encouraging parents, teachers and children to take a moment to thank school bus drivers for the wonderful job they do every day," said Wilkinson. "Love the Bus officially takes place in February, but we hope they're recognized for their position as role models every day."

Bend-La Pine Schools bus drivers transport nearly 7,000 students to school and home each day on 119 daily bus routes.

Continuous Improvement:

Looking at our use of time within the school day

Because time is one of our most valuable resources, it is imperative that we reflect on how to most effectively utilize our time during the school day to insure optimal student achievement. Our staff has been reviewing our daily schedule in order to enhance achievement with the goal that our students are able to achieve educational success not just at grade level, but in post graduation as well. We are evaluating our organization using four parameters to guide our discussion:

♦ Improve student achievement for all students
♦ Build Interventions and Enrichments into our daily schedule
♦ Facilitate Continuity of Instruction for core classes
♦ Improve untilization of staff

Next year, we are looking to design a daily Intervention/Enrichment time within our school day. This time will be utilized to address gaps in knowledge and skills specifically in math, reading and writing. In addition, students will work on strengthening the skills needed to be "college ready", such as, non-fiction writing and higher level math and problem solving skills. We anticipate growth in achievement levels for all of our students based on this focused effort. To compliment this Intervention/Enrichment time, we will continue year long math classes and add year long LA classes for our ninth grade students.

In the meantime, we will continue to explore how we may improve our schedule for the 2010-2011 school year. Current educational research has not determined a causal relationship between school schedules and student achievement. However, we believe that continuing to question our practices in light of the four statements above is an important step in our work to improve the efficient use of time during the school day.

ATTENTION!

Semester 2 schedules were handed out to students this week. Please encourage your student(s) to see their counselor by Thursday, February 4 to make any changes to their schedule. Thank you .