|
|
|
Where learning is an adventure! |
|
|
|
Director's LetterApril 23, 2008 Dear Evergreen Families, I love my job. The history of Evergreen, the culture of Evergreen and the community of Evergreen are magnets for educators, children, parents and environmentally conscious community members. We are drawn in and find a beautiful blend of action, peace, harmony and diversity. The allure of Evergreen is not just at the surface – it runs deep and it runs strong, all the while being guided by our mission: Evergreen Community Charter School is a learning community committed to the pursuit of excellence in the holistic education of mind, body, and spirit. We prepare students for successful lifelong learning, environmental responsibility, and service. We value the voice of every member of our community. This mission is guiding us to exciting new ventures that I wish to share with you. The Board of Directors has committed to pursuing excellence in environmental education. We are already well known for our environmental focus (Yesterday’s Earth Day celebration and service said it all!) but we intend to maximize environmental education as the cohesive theme for all we do. The position of our Environmental Education Coordinator will broaden significantly to guide this pursuit of excellence. The Campus Vision Statement for our master plan also supports this pursuit: We are committed to creating a high performance campus that inspires and serves the Evergreen learning community and our environmental educational program. Please PLAN TO ATTEND the Master Plan Vision meeting tomorrow, April 24, at 6:00 pm in the downstairs lunch room. Jonathan Lucas (parent, board member, architect) and I will present the work-to-date of the Master Plan Task Force and ask for your input on the plan. What else is coming? Next year we will implement a CREW program that allows small groups of students to connect with one CREW Leader (teacher or administrator) on a regular basis to foster a school community honoring the practices and traditions that exemplify the values and culture of compassion, service, trust, empowerment, and personal and collaborative responsibility at our school. Through CREW, we will explore our challenges, communicate our concerns, reflect on our experiences, and celebrate our achievements. We will seek, through CREW, to discover our connections and responsibilities to ourselves, Evergreen, our families, our community, and our natural world. We will be hiring a full time guidance counselor to work as counselor in the middle school and to be a CREW Coordinator. This person will also be the Positive Discipline Coach for all grades. Also next year, the implementation of our Program for Advanced Learners will officially begin. PAL will provide teachers, students and families with the resources and support to serve the special academic needs of students who are especially motivated, intelligent and high performing. These services will be provided in the regular classroom through differentiation or through student/adult partnerships with the new PAL Coordinator, another teacher or a community member. Enrichment classes will be enhanced next year as well. Sue Ford, our fabulous music teacher, will move to full time; we will add a part time Spanish teacher for middle schoolers; we will have one technology teacher for grades 2-8; we will add a part time health teacher; and Laura Branch will have more time dedicated to librarian responsibilities. We are streamlining middle school enrichments and electives next year to provide more time for academic instruction while still offering non-core classes of interest to students. The approved budget for next year includes increases in teachers’ salaries, placing them at 100% of the state salary scale. This is a long-awaited milestone for our faculty. We depend on the Evergreen Fund and other fundraisers to help support our budget (approximately 74% of our budget goes to salaries and benefits). Your support allows us to compensate the heart and soul of Evergreen - the teachers - better than we could with just our state and local revenue. National Teacher Appreciation Week is May 4-10. Please consider supporting our Go Green Raffle for a solar hot water system by purchasing a raffle ticket (or more) in honor of your favorite teachers. Tickets are $25 each and all the details are on our website. You can even purchase tickets online! If you are receiving this letter electronically, all you need to do is click here. We’ve met an important milestone but we still need your help. Even at 100% of state scale our teachers are earning less than they could in surrounding public schools because those offer county or city supplements to the state scale. Why do they work for less? They do so because Evergreen’s allure runs deep and strong. As you can see, exciting adventures await us next year. We also have adventures right around the corner this year. I love my job.
—Susan Gottfried
|
