As we head into the last week of school before Thanksgiving Break, I wanted to wish you and your family a restful and happy Thanksgiving Break! We look forward to seeing students back at school on Tuesday, November 29th!

I also wanted to thank everyone in the 27J Schools community who supported the the district's mill levy override proposal, 5B, on Tuesday, November 8th.

This approval will infuse about $17.7 million to support critical needs like school safety, improved teacher/support staff compensation, and staffing our high schools’ new STEM and Career and Technical Education Centers.

We know, as a parent, student, staff member or community member, your biggest questions are:

• How will this money impact my child’s school?

• When will we begin to see the benefits of increased funding?

What does this mean for our school?

The passage of 5B for our school means:

• Having a professionally trained safety officer dedicated to our school. This is a critical need as our school currently lacks a school resource officer or trained security professional.

• Our teachers and support staff will receive increased compensation. Our teachers and support staff will receive better pay so we can hire and keep the best staff. This not only gives our district the opportunity to better compete with surrounding school districts in hiring and retaining quality teachers but also in hiring staff for hard-to-fill positions such as learning assistants, nutrition services staff and other critical roles.

• Our district will not need to consider cuts to services such as transportation, sports and extracurricular activities.

What happens now?

The funds from the property tax supporting the new mill levy override won’t be available to our schools or district right away. The new tax will be incorporated into homeowners’ tax rate and those funds are typically collected in January. The district will, however, finalize its plans for implementing the programs approved by voters. The new programs will launch at the beginning of the school district’s new fiscal year which starts July 1, 2023.

The next eight months will give the district and schools time to finalize plans to ensure a smooth launch of the new programs. We encourage you to follow the progress of this planning at ibelievein27j.com/

Mill Levy Override Accountability Committee

One of the most important first steps that will be taken is the formation of a Mill Levy Override Accountability Committee comprised of community members representing various portions of the district. The Board of Education will appoint the members of that committee much like it did for the 2021 Bond Oversight Committee. That group will be responsible for monitoring how the district is putting into action, the plan it promised voters. The committee will work with district staff, which will report on the rollout of the plan and the financial resources being used to operate the programs. The committee’s role is to ensure the funds are being used for their stated purposes.

To create the committee, the Board will solicit names of community members interested in serving on the accountability committee for this specific mill levy override. Please complete this form if you’re interested in learning more about the committee and serving on it. The Board will announce more details about the selection process and deadlines in the coming weeks.

This is an exciting time for the students, families and staff of our school and the 27J Schools community. Thank you for believing in 27J Schools!

Safety Information:

This week we practiced an Evacuation Drill during our 4th and 5th grade lunches. This was a perfect time for us to practice this drill as we have many students transitioning from multiple parts of the building and multiple teachers out of the building with subs and lunch etc. Our students and staff continued to impress despite these obstacles as we were able to clear the building in under two and a half minutes (two minutes remains our goal). Once we were all evacuated, we were able to account for all students and staff in under ten minutes despite missing many classroom teachers (ten minutes remains our goal).

There are no additional drills scheduled for this week. As always, please let us know if you would like to participate or observe any of our emergency drills we practice here at Padilla!

Guardians on Guard:

Through our community survey, we are aware of the desire for our community to be involved more in an everyday setting! With that, we would like to invite all that are interested to help ensure the safety of our students before school, after school or during lunch recess. We are always looking for more adult supervision during these unstructured times in our daily schedule and would welcome anyone that has time to help! If you are interested in volunteering your time at any point during the school day for Guardians on Guard, please reach out to Josh Hawkins at your convenience!

3rd Grade Community Event!

Third grade teachers would like to invite all of their families and community members to their grade level community event on Wednesday, December 21st from 1:30-3:00. Students will be presenting their heritage project to students and teachers and would love to have their families here as well to be a part of these important projects! Flyers will be sent out soon!

Arctic Award Assemblies

These two assemblies for second quarter award winners will be held on Friday December 16th in the morning (9:00am) for Am Pre-School, Kindergarten, First and Second Grade and in the afternoon (2:15) for PM Preschool, 3rd, 4th and 5th Grades. We will inform families the week before as to which students will be receiving awards that day in case any family members would like to join us for the assemblies!

A.M. Bus Lane Reminders:

In the morning please use the bus lanes to drop off your students only if the buses are not in the lane at the time of your drop off. We do want you to use this lane as a drop off because of the stress it alleviates in our parking lot especially on colder mornings but please remember that the buses will always have the right away. They are pretty consistent about times and seem to depart our school every morning by 7:35ish. Thank you for your help with this!!

• Student Council Canned Food Drive - November 1st through November 16th
  
• Thanksgiving Lunch - Thursday, November 17th
• Hot Chocolate and Popcorn for $1 - Friday, November 18th
• Thanksgiving Break - November 21st through November 25th
• Winter Break - December 24th through December 9th

We are incredibly lucky to have partnerships in our community who help support Padilla! Three businesses have programs set up to helps us! Please be sure to check the links below for details about how to support Padilla through these businesses!

King Soopers Community Rewards - Link your rewards card to Padilla and a portion of every purchase will be donated to Padilla!

American Furniture Warehouse Partnership - Mention Padilla Elementary School when shopping at AFW and they will donate 2-4% of the purchase to Padilla!

Please note that, due to product availability shortages, there may be last minute substitutions to nutrition services menus from time to time.