The COnnection
MARSD Central Office Newsletter - November 2016
Thanksgiving Holiday Half Day All Schools
- Four Hour Session for All District Schools and Central Office on November 23rd (school end times will differ by building)
- All Schools and Central Office Closed November 24th & 25th
- District Reopens Monday, November 28th
Wednesday, Nov 23, 2016, 11:30 AM
Matawan-Aberdeen Regional School District, Monmouth County, NJ, United States
A Holiday Message from Dr. Majka
On behalf of MARSD, I would like to wish everyone a happy holiday season. It is hard to believe, but the first few months of school have flown by! As you can tell from each individual school’s newsletter, we have a great many exciting things happening. Walking through our seven schools, I can feel the excitement for learning. Our staff of teachers, paraprofessionals, custodians, bus drivers, maintenance workers, secretaries, security monitors, and administrators are doing an outstanding job of preparing our children and young adults for a bright future. I am thankful to be part of such a fine group of professionals. Enjoy the time you spend with your family over the course of the next few weeks and do not hesitate to reach out to those in need as we enjoy the holiday season.
Happy Holidays!"Whoever is happy will make others happy." Anne Frank
The Joy of Reading from Curriculum & Instruction
As the holidays approach and our inboxes become flooded with images of “door-buster sales”, it is a great time to reflect on the importance of giving the simple gift of reading to those around you.
The gift of reading can come in the form of an actual book from the bookstore, an online e-book or audio book, or a visit to the public library. What is even more priceless is if we can share the experience with those around us.
Reading provides us all with a way to learn more about our world, or gives us an opportunity to explore another world that is full of new adventures and ideas.
Below are highlights from articles on ways to foster the love for reading in your home. The ideas can be easily adapted to promote reading at all ages.
We wish you all a wonderful holiday season with your family, friends, and loved ones.
Get Ready to Read: Promoting Family Literacy – Raising Ready Readers
Value Books
Treat books as “members of your family” – create a special place for your child’s books. Assigning a place shows your child that books are special and deserve an organized storage place of their own. This can be a bottom shelf or a drawer where your child can safely and easily reach them. Parents and family members should model how to handle books and can also share in the joy of reading aloud to the child.
Create Picture Books
Create your own picture books using pictures from magazines or your child’s drawings. The books can then be placed in the home library. Family members can “read” the story with the child by asking him or her to take them through the story. As the child gets older, he/she can dictate or even write his/her own story on the page with the picture.
Storytelling: Talking about Family History and Creating New Adventures
Encourage family members to engage in storytelling. Not only is it a great way to share family history, but it is a great way to engage all members of the family – especially those who are building literacy skills. This can begin by having an older member of the family tell about a major family event (i.e. wedding, birthday, graduation.) Then a younger member can retell the story in his or her own words. This activity helps to build vocabulary, understand sequencing and recall information.
Raising Readers – Tips for Parents: Promoting a Love of Reading at Home for Students in Grades K-5
Jerry L. Johns Literacy Clinic (http://cedu.niu.edu/literacy-clinic/resources/raising-readers/love-of-reading-K-5.pdf)
Set aside a family reading time each day or at least several times per week. Older children can read to themselves, and parents or siblings can read aloud to younger children. Make this a special time when family members relax and enjoy reading.
Give books or magazines as gifts for birthdays, holidays, or other important celebrations. Carefully consider your children’s interests and reading levels to choose books or magazines that they will love.
Make regular trips as a family to the library or local book store. Most libraries or bookstores provide special programs such as storytimes, book clubs, author presentations, and holiday events. Spend time browsing with your children for interesting books, magazines, DVDs, and other materials to check out and enjoy.
Audiobooks provide a great way for families to listen to books while driving or relaxing at home. By listening to audiobooks, the whole family can enjoy and then discuss books together. Ask the children’s librarian for suggestions of audiobooks that will appeal to your family.
Start a 15 minute late-night reading routine at your home. Allow your children to stay up 15 minutes later if they read. Children can read independently or with their parents or siblings.
Most children enjoy reading series books because the characters become friends, and reading these books is easy, relaxing, and enjoyable. Some popular series books for elementary students include Arthur (Marc Brown), Junie B. Jones (Barbara Park), Captain Underpants (Dav Pilkey), Magic Treehouse (Mary Pope Osborne), Harry Potter (J.K. Rowling), A Series of Unfortunate Events (Lemony Snicket), and America Girls (Valerie Tripp), and the Matt Christopher sports books.
Play word games together to build your children’s interest in words. Some new word games are Scrabble Flash, Blurt, Bananagrams, and Apples to Apples Junior. You can also play favorites such as Hangman or online word games at http://wordgames.pogo.com/.
Encourage your children to become aware of and interested in vocabulary words around them. Have each family member serve as the Word Wizard one day per week. That family member can choose an interesting word to bring to breakfast or dinner to share with the family. Post this word on the refrigerator and have each family member listen and look for it and report back the next day how many times they encountered the word. If a family of four does this activity four times per week, your children will be learning about over 200 interesting words per year!
Stash books and magazines where your children will be – in the car, in their bedrooms, and even in the bathroom.
Be a reading role model. Be sure your children see you reading for pleasure on a regular basis. If your children see you reading, they will begin to understand that reading is valued in your family.
Read comics, jokes, riddles, and puns together. Read the comics from the newspaper or joke books from the library. Humor websites for children are another fun resource you may want to read and enjoy with your children. Some excellent free websites that contain jokes, riddles, and puns are: http://kids.yahoo.com/jokes http://www.azkidsnet.com/JSknockjoke.htm http://www.jokesbykids.com/
Plan a book swap with your neighbors, friends, or other family members who have children the same age as yours. Each family can bring books and magazines to recommend and trade.
Annual Audit & Budget Preparation from the Business Office
As we approach December, districts around the State see the annual audit process come to an end. The annual audit is not only an evaluation of the district’s financial position on June 30th, but it is also a review of district’s procedures and internal controls pertaining to safeguarding the district’s assets. At this month’s Regular Action Meeting of the Board of Education, the audit will be presented to the Board along with the financial reports required by the Department of Education’s audit program. The audit process takes approximately two months and is a collaborative effort between the auditors that are following the state audit program requirements, and district staff. We invite the community to attend the meeting to gain a better understanding as to the district’s financial position and its potential impact on future initiatives.
The conclusion of the audit season initiates the budget season. The district has a budget of $68.3 million which is supported by local tax payers with a local tax levy of $50.6 million. Much like a household budget, the district has the responsibility to evaluate programs and initiatives that will maximize the educational opportunities for our students within our revenue constraints. As a matter of practice, the budget process should be a ‘ground up’ discussion initiating with teachers to the administration to the Board of Education. We are fortunate to have a framework in place called the strategic plan that will facilitate the evaluation of initiatives through the lens of what the community values. Although the process concludes with the Public Hearing in the Spring and the adoption of a final budget, we look forward to engaging with the various stakeholders along the way as we prepare the 2017/18 school year budget.
School Climate & Social Emotional Learning Programs from Human Resources
The Matawan-Aberdeen Regional School District’s Board of Education adopted a multi-year strategic plan in June 2016. One of the Strategic Plan’s areas of focus is School Climate. The New Jersey Department of Education’s Office of Student Services defines school climate to include the following domains: Physical Environment; Teaching and Learning Capability; Morale in the School Community, Quality of Relationships; Level of Parental Support and Engagement; Safety Situation; Emotional Environment, and; Perception of Administration Support. The concepts and projects that are part of the Strategic Plan will enhance the elements of school climate.
Some of the notable areas that have been implemented since the inception of the Strategic Plan are a new student code of conduct and behavioral expectations that was approved by the board of education at the start of this school year and added to our school’s websites for grades K-3, 4-5, 6-8 and 9-12. Another area was the expansion of the Peer Buddy program at all grade levels. This program pairs students identified with special needs together with general education grade-level peers as buddies to interact and work together in after school clubs, activities during the school day and other extracurricular areas that some students may normally not have a chance to participate in. The new structure will allow students more opportunities to participate each month.
Another project focused on school climate is the participation in the No Place for Hate by the Anti-Defamation League. Last year all of our K-8 schools earned recognition from the ADL for our successful completion of the No Place for Hate Challenge. In fact, four of our schools, Lloyd Road, Ravine Drive, Strathmore and MAMS, were awarded a Gold Star status for exceeding the projects required by the No Place for Hate advisory council. Once again schools will be trying to earn the recognition that their school is ‘No Place for Hate.’
We have also begun to implement a Social Emotional Learning initiative in the district. One of district’s social workers, Rachel Alvarez, is pioneering and coordinating the effort. One social emotional program we have implemented in K-3 is “Bucket Fillers”, a program that creates a positive culture through increases in kindness, respect, and courtesy, and decreases in mean-spiritedness and negativity. The Power Solving Curriculum is a program being implemented for some of our students at the 4-8 grade level in some of the more challenging learning environments. There are also classroom activities involving Social Emotional Learning at the preschool level giving students an opportunity to understand social skills, norms and expectations. At the High School, student stress is being examined as well as increasing the amount of resources available for high school students who may need counseling services.
Some additional upcoming work will be exploring areas to continue to celebrate the diversity of our school district, generating slogans and the continued implementation of Social Emotional Learning Programs. We will also begin focus groups to continue to identify areas of what is working well and where we can build on strengths. We have also continued to utilize the Olweus Anti-Bullying Program at our schools grades K-8.
Furthermore, two of our schools, Matawan Regional High School and Matawan-Aberdeen Middle School, are participating in year 2 of the 2-year Rutgers School Climate Transformation Project. The schools are implementing surveys that measure the domains of school climate. This valuable data will assist in developing further school climate action items and to prioritize the work of the Strategic Plan. In the early Spring, the NJDOE-sponsored surveys will also be utilized at other schools in the district later this year to further generate data on school climate.
As you can see, the district is quite busy in the area of improving school climate. The district has seen reductions in student disciplinary incidents and decreases in documented cases of bullying. We will continue to share highlights that come out of the Strategic Plan as the year progresses.
Program Implementation in Special Services
The Department of Special Services is super thrilled to share how we are moving forward with new programs to ensure we are addressing the ‘whole’ child- academically, physically, and emotionally. This month we are proud to share our latest program implementation.
Get Ready to Learn (Yoga Program)
We are proud to offer our first yoga program to students with special needs. Our occupational therapist will pilot the yoga program in select self-contained classes at Lloyd Road and Cliffwood Elementary Schools. Children will learn breathing patterns associated with relaxation and building core strength; practicing yoga poses to develop body awareness motor planning, and strengthening; visualization techniques to help improve self-regulation; and language is woven into the sessions as well. This allows for vocal imitation, initiation, socialization, and classroom unity.
A special Thank You to Parents of Special People (PoSP) for their generosity, as they have supported the program by purchasing yoga mats and additional DVDs to support Get Ready To Learn in classrooms. Any families interested in joining Parents of Special People? You can learn more about our Special Education Advisory Council at the below link: http://www.parentsofspecialpeopleinc.com/about1-c1x1t
Monmouth University Autism Grant
We have begun our collaboration with Monmouth University Autism Project which included classroom observations, teacher, and parent collaboration. The purpose of this research project is to establish accessible and sustainable training modalities for school-based programs on evidence-based practices (EBP) for individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in the state of New Jersey. In collaboration with the National Professional Development Center (NPDC) on Autism Spectrum Disorders (which is currently funded by the Office of Special Education Programs, United States Department of Education), this project will serve as a dissemination of a national coaching model that was created for the exclusive purpose of training public school districts in evidence-based practices for individuals with autism.
Special Olympics Play Unified
We were recently awarded a $2000 grant from Special Olympics Play Unified. We are excited to participate in such a wonderful opportunity for ALL of our students. Special Olympics Unified Sports® creates an opportunity for people without intellectual disabilities to join in the sports experience by playing on a team with athletes with intellectual disabilities. Not only will the players all have fun, but attitude change, and transformation will happen on the playing field, and the experiences will create lifelong friendships. Unified Sports® combines approximately equal numbers of Special Olympics Athletes and athletes without intellectual disabilities (called Partners) on sports teams for training and competition. Age and ability matching of athletes and partners is defined on a sport-by-sport basis.
We are truly blessed to work with such a committed community of - parents, teaches, staff, Administration, and a Board of Education that supports programs to support the students of Matawan-Aberdeen.
Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!