September Principal's Message

September Principal's Message

Dear FSE Families

I hope the school year has gotten off to a fantastic start for everyone.  At FSE we have been working hard to establish relationships, set classroom procedures and plan personalized learning for all our students over the past month.  As we dig into another school year I wanted to share our curriculum and school-wide goals for this school year.

Goal 1 Curriculum:

• Math continues to be an area of focus for us at Flagstone.  We value students understanding of the process of solving a problem and focus our discussions and instruction on different ways to solve problems rather focusing on finding the right answer.  We believe it is much more important for our students to dissect different ways to solve a problem and then be able to explain their thinking.  We teach our students to focus on a growth mindset and to persevere through difficult problems in order to push their mathematical thinking.  
• Reading instruction is also an area where we continue to develop our expertise.  Through the support of our community, we were able to purchase over 1500 new titles of books to use specifically for guided reading instruction.  Our teachers continue to target their reading instruction to the specific reading skills of each child in their classroom using these guided reading texts.

Goal 2 Communication:

• As a school, we pride ourselves in effectively communicating with our families around student progress.  This year all parents will receive a mid-September progress report that will include current progress of each student in addition to collaborative goals that the students have set with their teachers.  Every month you will receive updated progress reports on your child.  Part of this communication is through our student-led conferences.  We believe that our number one job is to create self-reflective learners that are collaborators with their teacher in their learning.  With this in mind, your child will share their progress with you at our student-led conferences in November and April.  We encourage you to support your child in this oral presentation.

Goal 3 Social Emotional Learning:

• As a Douglas County High School feeder school, we are participating in the implementation of Second Step in collaboration with all the schools in our feeder.  This program emphasizes social-emotional development, problem-solving with peers, and the safety and well being of our students.
• ROCKS: Responsible,  Open Minded, Citizen, Kind, Safe and Friendly: We continue to teach to these character traits in our class meetings and in our school-wide positive behavior support systems.  We believe teaching character development skills just as important as teaching academics.

2018 FSE CMAS Results

We are so excited to share that not only do we continue to score in the state performance category, meaning that we are meeting our achievement expectations by the state but we went from a School Performance Framework of 65% in 2017 to 88.1% in 2018!  More importantly, we EXCEEDED growth expectations in ALL grade levels in reading and in math.  This means that we grew more than our district and our state in all these areas.  As a staff, we are so proud of the hard work of our students and teachers in exceeding these state expectations.  Please come to our upcoming SAC meeting to see our results in more detail.

BOND/MLO Information

Please see the below flier and facts regarding FSE and the Bond/MLO Proposal

Dear Parents and Community Members,

Welcome to the 2018-2019 school year!  Our School Accountability Committee (SAC) has 3 voting member positions open this year to be filled by October 1st.  

What is SAC?
We are an advisory committee (not a governing body) that collaborates with all of our stakeholders including our school's administrative team, teaching staff, support staff, students, community, and parents.  

What does SAC do?
As an advisory committee, we are proud to take an active role in our school regarding the following:

• Input for the Unified Improvement Plan (UIP)
• Review of FSE budget priorities based on community input.
• Review safety protocols throughout the year.
• Assist with the implementation of the district’s parent engagement policy.

Some examples of our past SAC work have included:

• Being an integral part of the 1st SAC Feeder School meeting in 2017-2018
• Supported the staff and the community in the adoption of  a new math program (Envision) based on community input.
• Collaborate with the school on a community survey.

How can I join?
If you'd like to become a voting member, we'd love to have you join us at our September 17th meeting to learn more.  

What is the time commitment?
SAC is required to meet quarterly, but additional meetings can be called if necessary. The time and dates of the meetings will be decided by the SAC in order to accommodate the schedules of our community to ensure the greatest opportunity to attend.

I'm interested but I have more questions…

Please join us on September 17th.  FSE Learning Commons at 4:15 pm. We'll be happy to offer more information and answer your questions.  In the meantime, you can learn more by browsing through the SAC handbook, just CLICK HERE.

Please visit  Flagstone SAC link for  our Sept. 17th Agenda

Hope to see you there!

Sincerely,
Your 2017 - 2018 Flagstone School Accountability Committee (FSAC)

Please see our Thursday Links HERE

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