​Dear Waters Community,

Many will celebrate Thanksgiving this week. I wanted to take a moment to say Thank You for your generosity to Waters.  Monday evening at our "Thanks for Giving" celebration it was announced that we exceeded our goal of $75,000! This is a testament to your commitment to Waters and the programs that we continue to offer. It is an honor to plan alongside parents and provide enriching academic and social emotional programming for all the children. 

Thank you for joining us at the Local School Council meeting this week. It was great to see so many of you as our Instructional Leadership Team(ILT) presented our instructional goals for the upcoming school year. Please be sure to check out our website for the presentation.  

In addition, thank you for joining staff last Wednesday for student, parent and teacher conferences. During our presentation to the LSC, one of the areas we shared was on our goals addressing Growth Mindset. Student ownership of their own education is vital in a child's journey to academic success. Students, along with their teacher, set individual growth goals. I hope you enjoyed hearing from your child as they shared their growth goal with you. Together, we will work toward these goals and ensure that each child is reaching their potential. I would ask that you join with us in this journey to assist your child in reaching their maximum potential.  

This week will be short but I encourage all of you to be in attendance. As you may be aware, one of the contributing factors to our Level 1+ rating lowering was due to attendance issues. While school is in session, it is the expectation that students are in herel. Be on the look out for incentives as we plan strategically to turn around the attendance concern.

In closing, it is my sincere hope that each of you have a blessed Thanksgiving.

Ms. Crespo  

Dear Waters Community:

This week is filled with many important activities.

On Monday evening, please join us at Artango as we celebrate our pledge drive with a "Thanks for Giving" party. It is a special gathering where parents and staff can enjoy great food, drink and talk about all the great learning experiences at Waters. 

On Tuesday morning, I will cohost a coffee at Amundsen with Principal Pavichevich at 8:45 a.m. This is a private tour of Amundsen High School for Waters families. It's a great chance to ask Principal P and her staff your questions. It's also an opportunity to be at school when classes are in session and see how an actual day at Amundsen looks. Middle School 6th, 7th, 8th grade students may attend with their parents and not be marked absent. This opportunity is open for parents from any grade level. Amundsen has great programs and is your neighborhood high school, you should check it out! Sign up.

On Tuesday, our LSC meeting will convene at 4:00 p.m. As a follow up to last week's message, please attend this meeting to hear how staff are addressing our recent SQRP results. They will address Curriculum, Data, Professional Development and Growth Mindset. In addition, you will get to hear from students as they have great school-wide ideas to promote SEL at Waters. If you are not familiar with these abbreviations, all the more reason to attend!

On Wednesday, our doors will be open for Student Parent Teacher Conferences. If you have not scheduled your appointment with your child's teacher, please be sure to reach out to them. It is our goal to see every family at SPTC.  

As the weather has gotten colder and we even had snow this past week, please be sure to send your child to school with the necessary attire. Hats, gloves and a coat are crucial when the weather is frigid. The students LOVE to go outside for recess but we must make sure they are appropriately dressed.   

Here's to a great week!

Dear Waters School Community:

I would like to introduce you to Ms. Nicole Tyrpak, our primary diverse learner teacher. I am so excited that Ms. Tyrpak has joined our Waters family! She has years of experience teaching a variety of grade levels K-12 both nationally and internationally. She has been working alongside staff this past week, familiarizing herself with the students and schedule.  

You may have heard by now that the SQRP ratings for CPS schools have been released. This is a rating system that our district uses to evaluate and assess each individual school. I have included some documents, one that shows Waters rating and some additional documents that explains the rating in detail and how the final score was assigned. Waters school rating for the school year 2016-2017 is a Level 1 which is "good standing” but is one level below our 1+ that we maintained for the past three years.   

We will continue to analyze the reasons why our school rating dropped and will report on them in greater detail at the next LSC meeting on November 14 at 4:00 p.m. For now, I want to focus on what we are doing to regain the Level 1+. Please know that while we recognize that test scores are not the only metric for success, we take this data seriously. We are working hard at both addressing this challenge and continuing to provide the wonderful sense of community that makes Waters so special. 

For example, our recent School Improvement Day on Friday, November 3, featured several important professional development opportunities as well as strategic planning about the SQRP.  This is the first day we have been all together since August and it was a great opportunity to remind ourselves about what makes Waters great and what we can do to keep improving it! The staff and I engaged in the following activities on Friday:  

We began our day learning about Encyclopedia Britannica and the free resources that are available to teachers and students for learning in the classroom. We then participated in an interactive webinar on myOn, a new electronic resource that was purchased for all classrooms. MyOn is an award-winning personalized literacy program that incorporates a state of the art learning platform, enhanced digital reading content, daily news articles written for students, a Lexile Framework for Reading, cutting edge literacy tools, and embedded metrics to monitor activity and growth. In addition, we learned about BrainPOP, a "playful" educator-focused, reflective and global learning tool, and, Flocabulary, a learning program for all grades that uses educational hip-hop music to engage students and increase achievement across the curriculum. These e-programs are available for teachers and all students (two of them include Spanish components) in and out of school.

Kindergarten, 2nd and 5th grade staff also participated in a Math Trailblazers professional development workshop on our current math curriculum. Given our staffing changes this year, we felt it was imperative that these specific grade-level teachers be properly trained on the implementation of the series.  

The afternoon was a collaborative journey addressing our recently released SQRP. The staff and I had meaningful conversations on curriculum, data, professional development and growth mindset. We moved into four groups where we discussed the four topics and collected everyone's thoughts and comments. As a culminating activity, we displayed all of the ideas captured during the breakout sessions. The staff and I have set a plan of action.

I invite you to attend our next LSC meeting, November 14, where staff will present this plan.