McMillen Minute
September 19-23
Lions Lunch Duty Schedule
Shout Outs
District News
Good morning PISD staff. I wanted to take this opportunity to remind all of you that we are quickly approaching the 6-month mark since we changed our network passwords.
Once your password reaches 6 months of age it will automatically expire and you will need to change it to something new. The password expiration is based on the date and time that you last changed your password. So if you changed your password at 12:30pm last time that is when it will expire this time. It is possible that you may be able to login to the network in the morning and then when you get back from lunch your password could be expired and you may not be able to login to TEAMS, etc. until you reset it. As always you can change your password at any time, even if it has not currently expired, by using CTRL-ALT-DEL on your PISD Windows computer, or by visiting https://password.pisd.edu in most browsers from most devices.
I have included the message I sent out in the spring below for your reference on password requirements.
Once your network password expires you will have to change it immediately or you will be unable to login to the network or any other systems that rely upon your network login. This includes various systems such as TEAMS, Outlook, Google, My Learning Plan, etc. Some of these systems may be incapable of displaying a “password expired” prompt and may simply give you a failed login message if you attempt to access them once your password has expired. Each of you are encouraged to change your network password as soon as your PC prompts you to do so. As a convenience you may also change your network password at any time from any desktop computer and from most mobile devices by visiting https://password.pisd.edu in your browser. This website is accessible both inside and outside of PISD.
Please note that once you change your password it will synchronize to various other systems such as Office 365, Google, TEAMS, etc.
Some things to remember about password requirements:
· Your password must be a minimum of 8 characters, longer passwords are more secure than shorter passwords
· Must include at least one numeric character, one upper case character, one lowercase character, and one special character (such as !, #, *).
· You cannot reuse any password that you have used in the past.
As always if you have any questions or trouble please contact your CTA for assistance. If your CTA is unavailable or your location doesn’t have a CTA the Help Desk will be able to assist you by calling x28767.
Campus News
Student Work Load: Let's Not Forget
I'm writing you right now as an extremely stressed out parent more than a teacher. I just picked up my son (it's 10:20 pm), who has been at school and/or involved with school events since 6:45 this morning. He spent all 72 minutes of his lions lunch yesterday and today working trying to keep up in preparation for a long day today. And yet, he has a TONS of work due tomorrow. Some of it was assigned Wed, but couldn't be done in one evening, and now I hear he has an English essay to write that was assigned today and due tomorrow. I don't know when the heck he's supposed to do all of this. When the band kids appealed, they were told they need to "balance." My freshmen are so stressed out, I've extended my own deadlines on things repeatedly to try to ease up on them. I'm witnessing first hand the workload of these kids, and they choose it with high level classes, but some allowance has got to be made for band kids, football, etc. There are not enough hours in the day, and these assignments should at least be due Monday so they can play catch up on the weekend. Thank you for listening. I've just never seen a kid work so hard to struggle to keep up. He's getting very discouraged and is thinking he wants to drop the challenging classes I know he can do. It's sad to watch.
Let's be mindful that students have six other classes outside of your classroom. Our counseling department is seeing more and more students come to them stressing over this very issue. Let's be mindful and maybe show a little bit of grace during a very busy time of the year for over 40 percent of our student population.