Greetings Swift Families!
At our recent PTA meeting, questions around next year’s budget and school staffing came up. As you are likely aware, districts across the state of Oregon are having to make large budget cuts due to a lack of state funding. In addition, our Title 1 funding has been reduced and schools are no longer able to use parent fundraising dollars to hire staff. Overall, we will be ok next year. We are keeping all of our classroom staff, with the exception of the kindergarten class that was added after the school year started, and we are keeping our licensed support staff (reading specialist, school climate specialist, social worker, SPED teachers, ESL teacher and instructional coach). However, we are having to reduce or cut some of our EA positions due to a lack of funding. This news led to many questions at the meeting basically wondering, What can we do? One of the most important things that parents can dois advocating at the state level for adequate funding for the Quality Education Model. PPS has put together an advocacy toolkit for anyone wanting to get involved. And if you’re new(ish) to Oregon and want to understand why our school funding is so unstable, this graphic does a great job of explaining how we got here.
This last week before spring break was one for the Chapman history books! It was wonderful to see so many of you at our Family Literacy Night. I hope you had as much fun as I did! A huge thank you goes to Bradi Burns, our instructional coach, for organizing and coordinating all of the activities of the evening, including inviting several therapy dogs to come and visit so that children could read to them! The evening was a huge success thanks to her hard work and vision. Also, thank you to Stacy Rosoff, our reading specialist, for putting together the Masked Reader activities throughout the month and working with MudPuddles Toys & Books to secure raffle prizes. Finally I want to thank Mellissa Juska, our librarian, and Jen Kane from the PTA. Melissa helped plan out the books we read over the month as well as the puzzle key activity, and Jen put together all the s’mores and campfire decorations for the camp out parties classes held today. All of the events this month have been so much fun and I hope that students are inspired to continue reading!
