CRE Weekly Newsletter March 14

Dear Coyote Ridge Community,

We have a lot of exciting events planned for March and April at CRE. In addition to our book fair and conferences this week and next, read ahead about some upcoming ways to get involved here at CRE.

Thursday, 3/20

The district has designated next Thursday, March 20th as a teacher work day due to high teacher absences across the district. We will still have our parent teacher conferences and Mwebaza art fundraiser that evening, we look forward to welcoming you in!

 

Golden Paw winners for January + February

Congratulations to Kaitlin Grenning (OT), Marie Mickelson (1st grade), Shannon Stewart (para-extraordinaire) and Malia Toyama (5th grade) for winning our Golden Paw contest for the months of January and February! As always, a big thanks to our fabulous PTO for funding two $25 Amazon gift cards for our winners each month!

      

 

Friday, March 21st (Mwebaza Day + World Down Syndrome Day)

Next Friday, March 21st will be an exciting day at Coyote Ridge! We will be celebrating World Down Syndrome Day and Mwebaza Day! For World Down Syndrome Day, our student leadership has organized a sock drive and students are also encouraged to wear mismatched socks on this day to show support and bring awareness to the down syndrome community. For Mwebaza Day, parents are invited to join their child’s class here at Coyote Ridge from 8am- 9am to participate in our whole school zoom with our sister school, the St. Paul School, in Uganda. Our Mwebaza club has organized a wonderful program and we are all so excited to connect with our friends in Uganda next week.

Coyote Ridge Mwebaza Video Call.pdf 

 

Boosterthon

Our Boosterthon fundraiser will kick off on Thursday, March 20th and will continue until Friday, March 28th. Our Fun Run will take place on Friday, March 28th right here at CRE on our field. We will be raising money this year to fund some exciting ways that we differentiate learning at CRE. This year the Boosterthon will fund our schoolwide IXL subscription and Depth and Complexity training for the entire staff!

Run Times:

• 9 AM – Kinder-2nd

• 10:10 AM – 3rd-5th

Back Up Plan (in case of inclement weather): 

Glow Run (gym)

• 8:55 AM – 5th

• 9:45 AM – 4th

• 10:35 AM – 3rd

• 12:05 PM – K

• 12:55 PM – 1st

• 1:45 PM – 2nd

 

Festival of Nations

Make your calendars, our annual Festival of Nations celebration will take place on Thursday, April 17th from 5:30pm- 7pm. This is always such an exciting community event and we would love to see you there. Please see the attached newsletter about ways your family can participate. You can also reach out to Deena Pries if you have any specific questions about the event.

Festival of Nations.jpg 

 

Panorama Survey Results

We met as a staff this week to go over our school specific data from the Panorama survey and we had a lot to celebrate. We are above (many well above) the district average in every category on the staff and family survey. We wanted to highlight 3 areas that were points of pride and 3 areas of growth on the staff and family survey.

Professional Learning around SEL: This school year we jumped 27 points in this category and are 30 points higher than the district average! This is a HUGE point of pride for us at Coyote Ridge. Abbey Young, our SEL, has worked hard this school year to tailor professional learning in SEL around current school needs and this has been such an impactful school year for our staff in regards to implementation of SEL strategies in the classroom. Way to go, Abbey!

Professional Learning in General: This school year we jumped 21 points in staff satisfaction around professional learning, also 21 points higher than the district average! Staff comments on the survey were very positive regarding professional learning. Many of the comments very positively praised our professional learning around Building Thinking Classrooms and how exciting and impactful it has been to implement this school wide. Shout out to our instructional coach, Katie Dutro-Trigero for all of her work as she identifies needs within the school and plans our professional development!

School Climate: We jumped 8 points to a 95% satisfaction rate regarding staff satisfaction with school climate at Coyote Ridge, which is 22 points higher than the district average of 73% of staff members feeling positive about the culture in their building. I have always believed that when teachers are happy and feel supported this translates into students feeling confident and safe to take risks and naturally extend their learning. Coyote Ridge is such a special place to work and learn and our data reflects a very happy staff.

We also dug into our data to recognize three areas where we can focus some more attention. Here are three areas where we would like to improve:

Providing more opportunities for students to engage in activities that match their interests: Only 52% of our family respondents responded favorably to the question: “How well do the activities at your child’s school match his/her interests? This is an area that we are looking to continue to expand upon here at CRE. Last school year, we had one student led club and we now have 7 student led clubs, which is very exciting. However, if only half of our families who responded to the survey feel that their child’s needs are being met in this area, then we have room to improve. I will collaborate with our ILT (instructional leadership team) to brainstorm ways to support our staff and community in increasing the ways that we can provide more interest based opportunities for our students.

Parent engagement at school: Only 37% of our families responded “yes” that they had “helped out at their child’s school” in the past year. This is up 5 points from last year, but is still not a number that we feel comfortable with. As a working parent, I understand that it is not always an option to be able to engage with your child's school as much as you would like, this is just a reality. However, we would like to begin to brainstorm ways that we can diversify the ways that families can engage with the school. This school year, we changed the model of our School Accountability Committee. Historically, this had been a meeting where school data was shared in a formal meeting structure. This year, we changed this to be an active group that visits classrooms to observe evidence of our school major improvement strategies. It has been a nice way to liven up an existing structure, but obviously has to happen during the school day so that observations can happen. We recognize that this meeting time is not accessible to everyone. I am going to bring this topic to the SAC during our next meeting so that we can work together to brainstorm ways to foster more family engagement at CRE.

Better lesson engagement: 70% of our families responded favorably to the question- “How motivating are the classroom lessons at your child’s school?” Of course, we want this to be 100%. At Coyote Ridge, we have a very diverse learning community, which is what makes our community so special. As an instructional leadership team, we have taken a lot of time to evaluate the best ways to increase engagement in the classroom. I am excited to announce that our entire staff will be trained in implementing “Depth and Complexity” programming on our April 14th professional development day. This will be the first of many training and learning opportunities for our staff regarding implementation of the “Depth and Complexity” framework to our existing curriculum and structures. Additionally, PTO has graciously offered to fund this programming and it will be one of the items that Boosterhon funds will go towards! So, please donate and support our upcoming Boosterthon Fun Run! Depth and Complexity is an incredible framework that will truly enhance the critical thinking and extension opportunities for ALL students at CRE.

Lastly, on our school website, under the resources tab, there is a form that parents can fill out if their child has extenuating circumstances that they would like for us to consider as we build class lists for the 2025- 2026 school year.

 

In partnership,

Carolyn Webb, Coyote Ridge Principal

 

A note from Mrs. Harris

If you are interested in having your student audition for the Colorado Children's Chorale, please see this flyer.
Children's Chorale.jpg