Thursday, April 27, 2023 Volume 17 Issue 28
We are in the third and final trimester of the school year! This is the time of year when we are working hard to be sure that we have a strong finish to the year, while also working on our planning for next year. This week I wanted to update you in a few areas you may find of interest.
Levy Goals: Last month our school budget for the 23-24 school year was completed. While budget cuts were deep, we managed to mitigate the impact to our school by using all of our Levy funds. We receive these funds from the city based on school improvement actions we have pledged to take. As we meet goals we have set, we earn additional performance pay to help us continue to provide additional programming to our students in the future. We have been making strong progress towards our goals and both the work and the Levy funds make a difference to student outcomes.
One important part of our Levy work is engaging families through Academic Parent Teacher Teams. We have our 3rd and final meeting of the year one week from today on May 4th. Last week, we sent home a link for you to RSVP to let us know if you will be able to make it. Please be sure to let us know if you are coming and do come if you can! The Levy reviews our APTT attendance as one indicator of our success at engaging families, so you are helping us out when you come. Of course, the MOST important reason to attend is to build connections with your child’s teacher and other families in the class and to learn how you can work with your child at home to build strong academic skills while having fun. I hope to see you there!
May is Bike and Walk to School Month! In the Pup Press this week, you will find a chart for your child to track times they biked or walked to school. Mr. PJ will be talking to students about this in PE classes this week. We know many TM students live outside of the neighborhood. If this is the case for your child but they want to participate, we can be creative! If you typically drive your child, park a few blocks away and walk the remainder of the way to or from school. If your child is a bus rider, they can choose to walk laps of the playground at recess. 2-3 laps of the field are similar to walking a few blocks to school. On Thursday, May 11, Commute Seattle will be set up in Sam Smith Park (behind TM) at 3:30 PM with fun giveaways. They will be joined by partners including Outdoors for All, SDOT, Sound Transit, and others.
Hiring Updates: We have a few positions to fill for next year And I wanted to let you know our progress so far. Ms. Katie Egolf has been hired to teacher 1st grade. Ms. Tayler Mathis has been hired to teach in our Developmental Preschool Program (Teacher Natalie will be moving to Israel at the end of this school year). This week, we are interviewing for Focus Special Education Teacher (Ms. Marisa is also moving at the end of the school year). We are also interviewing for two instructional assistants for our Preschool and Distinct programs. I will keep you posted as we fill these positions and close to the end of the school year, I will let you know our full staffing line-up. Disclaimer: This can change as our enrollment fluctuates, so we do not do class assignments until just before the start of the school year. While we do not take teacher requests, if you have strong feelings about the type of setting your child learns best in, feel free to email Tana at tpleybold@seattleschools.org with a description of the type of classroom environment that would work best for your child by June 1.
Enrollment Updates: TM current has 460 students enrolled from K – 5th grade. Next year, we were projected to have 463 students. We currently have 439 students enrolled for next year. At this time, we only have 27 kindergarten students enrolled. This number tends to grow over the summer, but it is so helpful to us if we know how many kindergarten students we will have as early as possible. If you know of families who will be joining us for K next year, please encourage them to register with the district as soon as possible!
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