October 2016

Good morning, Parents.

I hope you are all aware of the change we are making to provide access to your child’s report card via Infinite Campus instead of sending home a copy of the report card in the mail or with your child.  Bryce DeRoos sent a letter to each family last week outlining this change and with the procedures necessary to locate the report cards on Infinite Campus.  If you need any assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us at the high school and we will assist you as necessary.  If you need a hard copy of your child’s report card, we will provide that as well.  The first quarter report cards will be posted to the Infinite Campus parent portal by the end of the day on Monday, November 14th.

I also want to share another change we are implementing this year that I am really excited about personally.  We would have normally held Parent/Teacher Conferences shortly after the first quarter ended, but for some time we have contemplate how we could make these meetings more valuable for students and parents, and thus, dramatically increase attendance.  This year we plan to have the Parent/Teacher Conferences for Freshmen, Sophomores and Seniors (and their parents) on February 6th and 7th, shortly after the semester.  Our approach will also be dramatically different in that we plan to implement student-led conferences.  These conferences will have a “script” that students will follow to sharing with their parents their career goals, researching and presenting the requirements they will have to meet to be ready for the next phase of their lives, and discussing their current performance at school, and their ACT/Aspire scores, in the context of their career goals.  Our purpose in moving to student-led conferences is for students to take even greater ownership in their present level of work, goals, and future plans in the hopes of insuring they are well prepared for their futures by the time they graduate OHS.

Our general plan is to have each of our faculty members working with 10-12 students to prepare for the student-led conferences with a week of homeroom periods just after the semester. The student will gather information and answer the questions on the guide form in preparation to share with their parents about their career goals and current progress toward those goals. Each teacher will also schedule a 15-20 minute meetings with each of those 10-12 students and their parents in the evenings of Feb. 6th and 7th, and they will also facilitate the meeting as necessary and support each student as they present to their parents. It is our hope that the information from this meeting will be a great springboard for high school students and their parents to have more discussions about their futures and their current preparations toward their goals. We also hope this process is a very intentional means of helping students take ownership of their current work as students and to think more deeply about their futures. Additionally, we hope this process really helps students to see that their high school classes represent a critical phase of their preparation for the future, and that what they are learning right now is important and necessary for future success.

We sincerely hope that this new approach of student-led conferences will be more meaningful for our students, and you as their parents. We hope the conferences are simply a starting point or take off point for some really important discussions between all students and their parents.

If you have any questions or suggestions related to either of these changes, please give me a call at 920-564-2346 x4001.

Have a great week,
Scott