SRCS October Updates: Strategic Plan Survey; New Trustee; Parents for Racial Equity Workshop; Know Your Classmates & More

Message from the Superintendent

Dear San Rafael City Schools Community,  A document that has been incredibly valuable to me in my first several months at SRCS is the District's Together 2024 plan. It is even more meaningful knowing that so many in our SRCS community are actively contributing to and helping us work toward the goals and priorities in the strategic plan.   Our District has much to be proud of as we look at all that has been accomplished since the current strategic plan was first created several years ago. It is now time to update and refresh this plan, which we will be doing together throughout this school year.  To inform the planning process, we are starting by asking each member of our SRCS community to take a few minutes to complete a brief survey regarding what you value most about our schools and share ideas that will help to inform our next plan.  Take the strategic plan survey in English Take the strategic plan survey in Spanish In addition, I will be meeting with groups throughout our District starting this month and hosting listening sessions at several of our schools to meet our community and learn more about your insight and ideas to inform the future of our schools and District. Please stay tuned for details! Thank you for all that you do for our students and greater SRCS community. Sincerely, Carmen Diaz Ghysels Superintendent

Welcome to our New Trustee, Mo de Nieva-Marsh We are pleased to announce that Maureen (Mo) de Nieva-Marsh was appointed to the SRCS Board of Education on Oct. 9. Trustee de Nieva-Marsh fills the open seat for Trustee Area 3 vacated by former Trustee Linda Jackson for the remainder of the term, though 2024.  Mo is a fervent proponent of civic engagement among underrepresented groups and communities with a personal goal of diversifying the leadership landscape throughout her career. She believes Filipin(o/a/x) representation matters. She serves as the Director of Whole Family and Community Services at Community Action Marin. Mo helps connect families to resources to help move them from crisis to thriving in Marin. She has over 20 years of experience working with government agencies and nonprofits fulfilling the following missions with an equity and accessibility (A11y) lens. Mo previously served as a Deputy Public Information Officer for the County of Marin during emergency response and was the strategist and advisor for the launch of the Marin County Office of Equity, award-winning RxSafe Marin (now OD Free Marin), and youth-empowered Marin 9 to 25 initiative. She is a passionate non-profit board member of Asian American Alliance of Marin and YWCA Golden Gate Silicon Valley. Learn more.

Reminder: Parents for Racial Equity Workshop Series SRCS is partnering with Dr. Lori Watson for a series of workshops for parents on racial equity. For some parents, talking about race to a child can be unnerving. For others, it's a natural and necessary conversation from the beginning. Dr. Watson's workshops help parents deepen their own personal knowledge about race and develop the skills to engage with their children, as well as others, in an effective way. The remaining workshops are Nov. 1, Dec. 6 and Jan. 17. All workshops take place at the Davidson Middle School Library from 5 - 6:30 pm. All SRCS families are welcome. Spanish interpretation will be available.  Interested parents should plan to attend all sessions. The first session has already occurred; we can share resources for those who weren't able to attend but are interested in participating in the remaining sessions. Please contact communications@srcs.org for background and materials from the first session.  Download the flyer to learn more.

Family Leadership Development Program

At the end of September, our Community Liaisons and Community Schools teams participated in a three-day series of train-the-trainer workshops to enhance their knowledge and provide them with more tools and resources to run high-impact family engagement and leadership sessions at their own schools.  It was a joy to watch these valuable staff members develop their own leadership capacity - we're inspired by their passion, strength and humanity. We can't wait to see the work amplify throughout our District!   The project is led by the California Association for Bilingual Education (CABE). SRCS aligns with their belief that families, schools and communities working together can create meaningful partnerships that ultimately lead to significant gains in student achievement across the board.

Davidson Event Celebrates Identity and Encourages Connection

This afternoon during lunch, Davidson Middle School held a school-wide "Know Your Classmates" celebration to help students connect and learn about one another. Celebrated by over 1,000 schools throughout the country on Oct. 13, Know Your Classmates is a back-to-school program created by Beyond Differences that breaks down barriers around culture, and identity and cultivates belonging at school. As part of the activities today, Davidson student leaders supported their peers with prompts from the Know Your Classmates curriculum to help them learn something about students they didn't know. They wrote one thing they learned about the other student on the colorful hand and they'll create a large mural with all the hands that will remind the school community that we all have things in common and we should embrace our differences. Davidson has a long history with Beyond Differences; the nonprofit piloted No One Eats Alone Day at Davidson in 2012 and has celebrated it with our students many years after its launch.

Thank You: Data Confirmation

We want to recognize and thank all our families who completed the District's back-to-school forms and process in the Aeries Parent Portal (also known as "data confirmation")! Thanks to you completing the process, the District and your child's school has the most up-to-date contact information, medical information and more. It helped us collect crucial information about families' income to ensure our District and schools continue to be eligible for significant funding opportunities, such as increased federal and state funding for staffing, supplies and programs. Families also acknowledged the required District authorizations and policies; we also want to re-share the updated 2023-24 Annual Notice to Parents/Guardians [English | Spanish].   Moving ahead, we encourage families to login to the Parent Portal [TK-8 portal login | 9-12 portal login] throughout the school year to view your child’s digital school records, attendance, state testing reports and more.

Public Health Advisory: Local Spike in Fentanyl Use and Overdoses

Marin County Public Health has sent an alert regarding the increase in opioid overdose risk. The potential increase is based on the detection of a doubling in the concentration of a fentanyl marker in Marin wastewater. Read the advisory [ English | Spanish].  Below are helpful resources: Let’s Talk: Virtual community discussions throughout the school year OD Free Marin: A comprehensive website with local information and resources. The New Drug Talk: Connect to Protect: A first-of-its-kind educational web platform designed to equip California families to educate themselves about the widespread availability of fentanyl-laced pharmaceutical pills (“fentapills”), the dangers of self-medication and experimentation and how to have meaningful, high-impact conversations about the rapidly changing drug landscape. Standards Based Learning for Middle and High School Teachers On the Staff Development day on Oct. 9, we were thrilled to bring all middle and high school teachers and counselors together for a day of learning and conversations about Standards Based Learning. The session was led by Tammy Heflebower of Marzano Research; she is a highly sought-after school leader and consultant with vast experience in districts nationally and internationally. As someone who "wrote the book" on Standards Based Learning, she was a valuable resource in sharing her expertise and deep knowledge about how standards-based learning works at the secondary level. During the training, participants reviewed the "why" of standards-based learning; discussed proficiency scales in more depth; talked about how academic vocabulary within the scales can support our multilingual learners; and how assessments can be fair, valid and reliable. We look forward to partnering with our teachers to see how this work will grow in our District! Learn more about Standards Based Learning in SRCS.  Resilient Families: Navigating Substance Use Through the Teen Years SRCS Wellness has partnered with Priscilla Miranda, M.A., Director of Marin Programs at Huckleberry Youth Programs, to put on this unique opportunity to gather together and engage in discussion about teens, drugs, and alcohol. Our goal is to provide families, parents, and caregivers with useful resources that they are able to implement with the teens in their lives while also addressing topics such as harm reduction, resiliency and communication.  Two sessions will be offered: Tuesday, Oct. 17 in Spanish and Thursday, Oct. 19 in English. Both sessions will be hosted in person at the San Rafael High School Library at 6:30 pm. Thank you to all the elementary school families and staff for attending and partnering with us for parent-teacher conferences this week! We believe that a strong partnership between home and school significantly contributes to the achievement of students, and our conferences help reinforce this work.

San Rafael City Schools www.srcs.org  |  communications@srcs.org 310 Nova Albion Way, San Rafael, CA 9490