Breaking News

Features

Effective Family And Community Engagement, A Priority At JPS

"Our main focus at Bush Elementary School is to have family engagement rather than just involvement," said Bush Elementary School fourth grade teacher and Family & Community Engagement team member, Amy Vezina. "We have great families at Bush School and have always had good involvement in activities like Family Movie Night and Halloween Fun Fair, but now we want our families to have an opportunity to be truly engaged with their child's learning. Parents have learning goals and dreams for their children, but we, as educators, haven't always provided tangible ways to allow parents to be ...

JPS Staff Learns How Family Engagement Is Different From Family Involvement

"The biggest takeaway from the Family and Community Engagement summer workshops is that there is a difference between engagement and involvement," Persell Middle School teacher, Lisa Stahlman-Colby, explained to the school's Family & Community Engagement (FaCE) Team. "In the past we have always involved families in our school but family and community engagement asks us to partner with our families and community to positively engage in the learning of our children so that they can be more successful in school."Mrs. Stahlman-Colby was introducing the Persell's FaCE Team to the shift in ...

JPS Asking Parents For Input On Family Engagement

Hanover Research will soon be assisting with the district's parent engagement efforts by conducting in-depth interviews with JPS parents over the phone. The goal of the interviews is to gain insight into parents' perceptions of, attitudes towards, and experiences with the district and the school(s) their children attend. The district hopes that by using Hanover Research, an objective third party, parents will be completely comfortable expressing candid thoughts, opinions and experiences. All phone interviews will be completely anonymous and the district will not know how individual ...

Let It Go

A side note before getting to this week's piece from the Bullpen ... special thanks to my sister, Sandy, and brother, Tom, for Facebook sharing a couple memories of our growing up which I included in last week's narrative. The piece was about someone very special to our family who recently passed away, and their memories were definitely a big piece of last week's story. Thanks guys!Now, on to today ...In 2013, Disney came out with a new movie, which, like most if not all Disney movies, was extremely popular, evidenced by the number of costumes from the film sold at Halloween time, and ...

Musings From The Hill — A Lenten Glory

Anticipating more moss, I circle the house and am pleased to find the hellebores growing vigorously. Whatever prompted me to invest in three of these plants fifteen years ago, I know now it was as smart as anything I've done (yardwise, at least).Forty dollars for three was a lot to pay back then - especially now realizing how few of those purchased ever amounted to a hill of beans - or the flower I'd anticipated, for that matter.Perhaps better known as the Christmas or Lenten Rose, these provide almost year-round delight as I continue to be pleased by their pink blossoms (i.e., mine; I ...

View From Hickory Heights: Hand-Me-Downs

Most of the young people today have no concept of hand-me-downs because we live in a throwaway society. They do not think about preserving things and passing them on to someone else. Oh, they may go through their closet and decide to give something away when it is Goodwill Day at a local store, but other than that they do not think in terms of reusing something.I lived with hand-me-downs, in fact, that was even how I got some of my clothes. A relative who always had the latest and the best in fashions sent me things when she no longer cared for them or when she outgrew them. I was ...