The EduGATOR!
Week of January 13, 2025!
Weekly Update
Monday, January 13-Regular School Day
Tuesday, January 14-Regular School Day
Wednesday, January 15-Regular School Day
Thursday, January 16-Regular School Day
First day for elementary coaching from TNTP If you signed up (Deanna will be in touch!)
Friday, January 17-Wear jeans and your Gator Gear!
FYI: Postings coming soon
You may know that we have two significant retirements in the Central Office at the end of this year.
Stephanie Fisk has been employed by Gateway Regional for 36 years. She has had various roles in the district including central office positions, coach for athletic teams, eventually leading to her appointment as the Assistant Superintendent for the district. Her knowledge of school finances and budgeting is highly sought after from her colleagues and professional organizations from across the state.
Deb Kuhn has served the district for 29 years as the district Treasurer. Her skills and knowledge allowed her position to grow to include many different responsibilities including onboarding staff, supporting staff with retirement and benefits, payroll, facilitating insurance needs, being the district representative on a number of boards, calculating salary and shifts, and much, much more.
The district has been extremely fortunate to have both Steph and Deb as facilitators of our finances and personnel matters. Obviously these two positions are going to be important to fill with extremely highly qualified candidates to continue with the incredible work done by these two committed women.
Because of this, I will be posting two positions in the upcoming week or so to begin the challenging process of filling these shoes. The positions will shift to be the following--the Assistant Superintendent will become a School Business Administrator position. The Treasurer position will become a Human Resource Director position. The job descriptions are linked here and the posting will go out both internally and externally soon.
If you have someone in mind that would be a good fit for these roles, please let them know to apply. I will have a hiring committee consisting of representatives from school committee members, admin, and union members to fill these positions. If you are interested in being on a hiring committee, please let me know. Thank you!
JANUARY Instructional Vision Challenge! (Yes, there are still fabulous prizes!)
We will continue into January with inviting staff to share how YOU are implementing a part of our instructional vision.
This month's focus are the third two bullets in the instructional vision are:
- Gateway students will work together to support each other as members of the learning community.
- Gateway staff will push every student to grow as a learner and as a community member.
Staff are invited to fill out a brief (2-3 sentences!) summary of how you are implementing this part of our vision. It can be specific or general, and it should clearly describe how your actions are moving this part of our instructional vision forward.
Here is the link to share!
https://padlet.com/ksmidy1/january-instructional-vision-challenge-qhfhko8arphwpo3j
To add to the board, click the plus sign in the bottom right corner and write in your submission. Finally, hit Publish and voila! You're done!
Staff who share how they are implementing or supporting implementation of December's focus area of the instructional vision by January 31 will be entered to win a $50 gift card to one of the following locations: Carms, Common Table, Moltenbreys, Amazon, Big Y, Dunkin or at a place of your choice that I can get a gift card with relative ease 😂
PowerSchool Data Breach
On Tuesday, Jan 7th,2025, we were notified by PowerSchool, the student information system used by our District and many others across the country, of a cybersecurity incident affecting their systems. PowerSchool has informed us that this incident involves unauthorized access to their data systems nationwide.
We want to share what we know, given the potential significance and reach of this incident. At this
time, PowerSchool has indicated this is a nationwide issue, and as Chris indicated in his message on Friday, there is some local impact. Thankfully we don't store social security numbers in PowerSchool as some other districts do, so the information obtained was not as impactful as other districts. PowerSchool has assured its customers that the incident has been contained, and there is no evidence of continued unauthorized activity.
Please remain vigilant in the monitoring of all emails, texts and phone calls. If something suspicious comes your way please let us know as soon as possible so that we can help determine the validity of the communication.
We understand the concern this may cause and appreciate your patience and understanding as we navigate this situation. Please know that we take the security of staff, student and family data very seriously and will do everything we can to keep you informed. If you have questions, please do reach out to the technology department.
District Data for your review
I am going to try to share some data with you each week that may be of interest to you.
I know I have written about rural school aid in past EduGATORs. This is an essential component to our budget. Unfortunately, we received notification from DESE that our total amount of Rural School Aid will be reduced by over $70k due to an error on their part. Here is their email and the link to the updated information.
I want to alert you that we adjusted the FY25 Rural School Aid awards for priority group 1 districts after re-evaluating the income eligibility of two districts that were not previously included, Williamsburg and Martha’s Vineyard. Adding these districts prompted us to reallocate the funding available to priority group 1, resulting in lower aid amounts for districts that were part of the original distribution.
You can view the updated FY25 Rural School Aid distribution on our website.
So, for reference, our original allocated amount that we budgeted for was $1,041,541.
Now it’s reduced to $971,316 or $-70,225.
Booo.
