A Message From Our Principal

Hello Families,

Between snow, managing a move to share space at Rose City Park School with the ACCESS program and a work stoppage scheduled to take place on February 20th, your teaching staff and administrators have been busy!   While the latter two of these issues have weighed heavily on our minds, we have managed to have a successful third grade musical production, start our statewide testing, complete the eighth graders' legacy gift of art, attend theatrical productions with Run-for-the-Arts money and welcome back Mr. Short after his four month Fulbright exchange in India.  There have been no dull moments at Beverly Cleary School!

This past Tuesday, several of you met with several of us to look at which grade levels will be moving to Rose City Park School next year.  The purpose of that meeting was to hear input from both groups about which grade levels to relocate to a third campus.  We looked at feedback from the cards collected at the two community meetings in January and input from teachers and parents, who were representative of K, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 6th and 7th grades.  After much thought and discussion with teachers, parents and my two administrative colleagues, I made the decision to move first and third grades to what will become a third campus of BCS.  It will be BCS@RCP (Beverly Cleary School at Rose City Park).  

Due to the fact that both BCS and RCP have limitations on which classrooms can house K, 1st or 2nd graders we could not move two of these three grade levels to either BCF or RCP.  That meant  either K or 1st would have to move because we need the availability of a fifth classroom at BCH,  to make available a fifth classroom in case we need it to lower the class size in K for next school year and  to garner cafeteria space since we have none now.    The decision to move first grade to RCP was based on the fact that those students were going to be moving anyway because we had to move one grade level out of BCH.   The decision to also move third grade was based on the fact that one of the considerations parents asked us to make was looking at the number of families with students in both of the potential grades.  While there were close to the same numbers of families with students in both first and fourth there were a few more families with students in first and third.  Hopefully, this will ease some stress on those families since they won’t have to drop children off at two different campuses.  So, for the 14-15 school year BCS will consist of BCH (K), BCSRCP (1^st and 3^rd) and BCF (2, and 4^th-8^th). 

Our next steps will be to meet as a work group again to discuss more of the logistical aspects of a three-campus school.  Examples of those logistics are start/end times, transportation, childcare, professional development times for staff and many other specifics.  The parents, who are serving on the work group, welcome your input.  They will bring it to our next meeting.  Please make sure you contact, Sadie Rogers, Lara Raban, Heather Leek, Kieren Porter, Jon Coney Villasinee Edgar, James Robertson or Dawn Panissidi with questions or other ideas so that we may consider it as we work on this transition.  We will be meeting again sometime soon.  I will keep you updated on our progress. 

Please see an important message from PPS in this issue.  It contains critical information on the possibility of a work stoppage, scheduled to begin next Thursday 2/20.  Please join us in hoping for a negotiated settlement.