#KSD Reimagine
Update from Kuna Superintendent Wendy Johnson
1.28.2022
In this update:
Thank you for supporting our teachers, staff
- Superintendent's Advisory Council helps us improve
- New Junior Deputy Club meets Wednesdays
- Parents: Before you know it your students will graduate, what happens next?
- Sports Report: Girls basketball, dance, cheer head to district competitions
- Rumor Patrol: Whose included in COVID numbers?
- COVID Quick Links
- Mask use in schools
- Past Newsletters
Thank you for supporting our teachers, staff
Kuna families
We are always grateful for your support of our team of teachers and especially now as so many are challenged by filling in for absent colleagues or perhaps have been sick themselves.
Our goal is to stay open serving students every day in person. Our amazing team is making this happen.
I was asked by a parent whose schedule is such they can't volunteer or substitute "what can I do to help?" I saw this this idea from a school district in Texas and offer this suggestion:
1. Open your camera
2. Click the flip cam button
3. Choose the name of an awesome KSD teacher
4. Record a 30 sec shout out
5. Tag their school and post
Folks not on social media can send a note! Our health care workers could use this uplift, too.
Superintendent's Advisory Council helps us improve
I appreciate the parents, students, and community members who give up time to serve on the Superintendent's Advisory Council. The Council met Monday. We reported back to them progress on feedback they provided on improving communications and wanted to share it here. Our team has:
- Updated "Contact Us" sites on school and district websites with staff photos and we're updating the assignment information.
- Created an one-stop place to find information on school newsletters, official social media sites, news items, etc.
- Re-establish Rumor Patrol. (You'll see that later in this newsletter.)
- Identified an option for calendars. Parents (and us, too) would like a calendar that includes all school events. As we explored this option, displaying all events created some unwieldly days perhaps with information most don't want. We plan to launch a new Kuna School District app that will allow parents to pick and choose calendar to follow. In the meantime, we've provided links to all our school calendars here.
Our team is continuing to work on other items identified by the Council and we welcome your feedback, too, on how we can improve communication.
New Junior Deputy Club meets Wednesdays
Our school resource officers and law enforcement partners are offering a Junior Deputy Club for 5th through 8th graders to learn more about this profession. The Club meets Wednesdays afterschool through the end of the 2021-22 school year. More information is posted online here.
In this week's report
- Girls Basketball, Cheer & Dance compete in districts with an eye toward state
- Spring sports are around the corner! Find out what's happening with baseball & community youth programs
- Read more.
Parents: Before you know it your students will graduate, what happens next?
Questions about COVID data
Rumor: "I’ve heard COVID numbers are only counted for the 83634 zip code in the KSD numbers. I find this misleading since the KSD has students from not only Kuna, but also Boise, Nampa, and Meridian. This leads me to believe our COVID numbers are much higher than the reports say."
Response: Great question! We have three data sets we report and use for decision making: KSD staff, KSD students and the City of Kuna. The staff and student data includes only KSD staff and students regardless of where they live. The City of Kuna data is limited by residential address. This data comes from Central District Health Department. How is the City of Kuna data used in decision making? The City of Kuna COVID positivity data is one of two factors considered every two weeks when decisions about mask use in our schools are made. The other factor is the COVID data about staff and students in each school. If both City of Kuna and a school is "red" mask use is required for two weeks.
COVID Quick Links
Mask Use
The next review of data per our district mask policy will be Friday, Feb. 11
- Optional - Initial Point High School. (Note last monitoring period individuals in the school were required to wear masks, since that time the positive cases have dropped.)
- Recommended - All schools except Initial Point.
- Required - Silver Trail. UPDATED 1/29/22: An error in our database caused data to not be accurate. Silver Trail has a positivity rate of 4.73% and not 5.41%. As a result, Silver Trail is in "yellow" so Recommended.