Oak Hills Newsletter
January 5, 2018
Principal's Message
Dear Oak Hills Families,
Happy New Year and welcome back!! I hope you had a great break and enjoyed the mostly amazing weather including a white Christmas! I also hope you were able to relax and play as a family. Family rituals around holidays are keepsake memories of a life time. I can tell that students are recharged and ready to return to the academic world. January, February and March are my favorite months of the year as students seem to be “in the zone” for optimal learning. I look forward to a strong start to 2018.
This year we will be starting a new attendance process. As an attendance team, we will meet twice a month to look at attendance data for those students falling below the 90% attendance rate. Research shows that chronically absent students (attending below 90%) can suffer academically and may continue to have attendance issues with attendance throughout their school career.
Below are the steps we will initiate once a student has fallen below the 90% mark and continues to struggle with attendance.
Step 1: Attendance team identifies student with less than 90% attendance rate. Teacher will make a phone call home.
Step 2: Post Card with attendance data is sent home.
Step 3: Letter from the attendance secretary will be sent home.
Step 4: Student will be interviewed by counselor then there will be a phone call followed by a letter home.
Step 5: Principal or Assistant Principal Letter will be sent home along with a scheduled family meeting
Other interventions may include alarm clocks, home visits, transportation assistance, and social work referral. Our hope is to problem solve with each family so that we can have all students attending class on time daily. Thank you in advance for your assistance with this.
Warm regards,
Sheila Baumgardner
Principal
Attendance Reminder
- illness
- illness of an immediate family member
- an emergency
Beaverton School District is strictly enforcing this absence policy. Therefore, if a family goes out of town, even if they prearrange it with the school, they will get a phone call each day of the absence stating that their child has an unexcused absence for the day. If you schedule a doctor's appointment during the day, even if you let us know in advance, it will count as unexcused and you will get a phone call. The phone calls are triggered as soon as the absence is entered. We, at Oak Hills, cannot turn off the phone call mechanism.
On the Move Marathoners
Canned Food Drive
A big thank you also goes to Lindsey Burnham and Subhashini Sreeramsetty for doing the final counts of all the food! Thank you also to Lark Ashbury for putting together the bulletin board for the food count. What an undertaking! We appreciate it!
Oak Hills Directory
Hello Oak Hills Families –
Your 2018 Directory is online only – and free!
https://oakhillsotters.joinourclass.com/member/login
Login email: directory@oakhillspto.org
Password: Otters2018
Please find the attached document with instructions on how to update your child’s info, along with your info, with as little or as much detail as you wish to include. This directory is very basic, and simple to use. Moving forward we can create a higher functioning site, with more tools for our community if we would like to invest as a Parent Community. Please share with us your feedback once you have had a chance to use the tool.
Only families who opted to have their information released for the school directory were included in the set-up of the directory.
Sincerely,
Oak Hills PTO
Oregon Battle of the Books (OBOB) Updates
OBOB will quickly be upon us! Winter break is a great opportunity for students to make sure they’re finishing their OBOB books. Your public library should have copies of these books, and OBOB books could also make a nice holiday present if you’ve got a voracious reader at home!
Our school level OBOB competitions will begin mid-January. Currently we’ve scheduled them to begin in the second full week of January, around the 16th. Ms. Baker and Mandi MacAskill will be reaching out to the fantastic parents who have volunteered to run OBOB tournaments with volunteer slot sign ups.
The student battles will be 100% volunteer run, so if we don’t have volunteers, the students won’t get to battle. We are really relying on our parent volunteers to make this a fun and rewarding experience for our students!
This year the group of volunteers who run OBOB have decided that due to the number of participants, our region will be holding 3 “mini-regional” tournaments with 18-20 schools per tournament rather than one large regional tournament. When we have more information about how this new plan will work, we will pass it along to you.
If you want to help your student prepare for the upcoming tournaments, Ms. Baker has linked a few great resources for practice OBOB questions on the Oak Hills library website (on the Oregon Battle of the Books page). Ask your student who is on their team - winter break could be a good opportunity for some team bonding and running practice questions together! It is also highly recommend to quiz your student on the author names/full titles of each book. This could easily be done with flash cards.
Remember that above all the purpose of OBOB is to encourage reading and expand your student’s reading interests by introducing them to different genres. Even if they only read one book, that’s likely one book they wouldn’t have otherwise been exposed to! Happy reading!
Thank you!
Jessica Baker
Library Media Assistant, Oak Hills Elementary
jessica_e_baker@beaverton.k12.or.us
(503) 365-2410 Ext. 6-2416
Career Fair - Volunteers Needed
Oak Hills will kick off its first annual Career Fair on April 10th from 8:15-10:30! This will be a great opportunity to highlight some amazing careers that our students might like to pursue after school! We are looking for presenters to give 10 minute presentations about the jobs they do. Students would rotate to your station, you'd give a 10 minute presentation and then another group of students would rotate to you. You'd give the presentation approximately 8 times.
Some of the questions that we'd love to have addressed during the presentation are:
- What do you ?
- What did you have to do to prepare for a job in that field?
- How has the shift in technology impacted your job?
- How do you impact the global workforce?
- How do you impact the community?
- Who are the key players you collaborate with in your field?
- How is your job are interconnected with other jobs?
If you feel like you could participate in this informative day and help prepare our students for college and career readiness, please email Jennifer at jennifer_demartino@beaverton.k12.or.us!
Thanks,
Jennifer
On Time Awards - Donate Swag
Oak Hill's Tech Crew T-shirt Contest
Oak Hills Elementary is having a Tech Crew T-shirt Art Contest, which is open to all grades. The winning picture will be printed on the 2017-2018 Tech Crew T-Shirts.
Are there rules?
All entries are to be submitted to Mrs. Vallee either in her mailbox or the Tech Lab T-shirt Entry Box.
The artwork must contain at least 1 otter or robot using at least 1 piece of Technology.
Entries must be received by January 19, 2018.
You do not have to be in Tech Crew to enter.
What am I drawing?
To be eligible, your artwork must depict an Otter or a robot using a piece of Technology. For example, an Otter using an Ipad.
Can I copy something off of the internet?
Noooo! Your artwork must be original. Please make your artwork using crayon, ink, pencil, colored pencils, or color markers,
Prizes
1st Prize: The first prize-winner will have their artwork printed on the 2018 Tech Crew T-shirts and receive a TECH Crew T-shirt.
Runners Up: Award certificates will be given to the finalist in the top ten.Tentative Dates for 2017-2018
1-15 Holiday
1-17 Global Citizenship Committee 8-9 a.m.
1-22 PTO Mtg. 7pm
1-30 Technology Parent Committee 8-9 a.m.
2-2 No School-Grading Day
2-19 Holiday
2-26 PTO Mtg. 3pm
3-7 Conferences 3:30-7:30
3-7 Global Citizenship Committee 8-9 a.m.
3-8 No School for Students - Conferences 7:30 am-7:30 pm
3-9 School Closed
3-13 Technology Parent Committee 8-9 a.m.
3-22 STEM/Future Ready Night 6-8pm
3-26 to 3-30 Spring Break
4-10 Career Fair 8:15-10:30
4-13 No School Assessment Day
4-16 thru 4-20 Book Fair
4-19 Volunteer Tea 1:15pm
4-23 PTO Mtg. 7pm
4-26 Kindergarten Orientation 4:00-5:30
5-2 Global Citizenship Committee 8-9 a.m.
5-8 Technology Parent Committee 8-9 a.m.
5-11 Fifth Grade Wax Museum
5-17 Choir Program 6-7pm
5-21 PTO Mtg. 7pm
5-28 Holiday
5-31 Art Night 6-8pm
6-11 PTO Mtg. 3pm (Budget Mtg.)
6-15 Field Day
6-18 5th Grade Send Off?
6-19 Last Day for Students