Network Outage Edition

Team, 

Ms. Corozzo's 5th Grade Artists
Can you believe it?!  We are online, on email, all up in Google Classroom, and TEAMS / Google chattin' our way back into technology integration!  What a wild few weeks.  Thanks for your patience, flexibility, #OneTeam spirit, and concierge-mentality that helped us navigate our way through tenuous challenging days.

In all seriousness, cyber incidents have hit public school systems hard over the last five years and our experience represents a concerning trend.  Providence, RI, Scranton, PA and Highline, WA - districts similarly sized to us - all experienced an attack in the last month, yet if you were to read the headlines from those locales you'd notice how much faster we've progressed through a truly trying time.  Kudos to our technology team is well-deserved and we navigate getting back to full restoration (more on that below).

Updates this week:

  1. New Jersey Charter Renewal:  On Tuesday, 9/24 we hosted a ten-person delegation from NJDOE, Camden County, and CCSD at Molina and Mastery HS Of Camden for our Charter Renewal.  In NJ, we are viewed as one LEA (or school) and are on a 10-year renewal cycle.  This visit represents the culmination of a months-long process to submit appropriate paperwork, artifacts, data, etc. to the state.  Our schools shined during the visit, particularly our school leaders and buildings - it was a proud moment for Mastery!  A special shout out to Lisa Walsh and Heather D'Antonio for supporting the MLL and SPED facets of the renewal, as well as ensuring the programming the state observed truly represented our sky-high bar! 

    (Shout out to our fifth grade artists and Ms. Corozza at Molina for letting me showcase their work - pictured above).

  2. Network Outage: Workday is officially back up!  Next up for systems to come back online will be eSchool - fingers crossed for next week.  Peter has assured us that we will be all-set for report cards and grades at the end of the report period.  Analytics will be delayed (more on that below, re: TAS and Analytics). 

    In the meantime, please take steps to complete the Microsoft Multi-Factor Authentication from Peter's email on Wednesday, 10/2 at 10:10PM.

  3. Analytics: The TAS timeline has been adjusted to reflect the network outage (targeted observations by 10/18, formals by 11/25).  So too, has Data Day.  Kudos to Molly Getz for training APIs this week on using NWEA, CDTs, and Illuminate to access their raw data to triangulate and respond to unfinished learning in RP2.

  4. Common Foundation Visits:  We will be reactivating Common Foundation program visits next week with a deadline of end of the report period for completion (10/25).  Please prioritize reaching out to APs to reschedule, if you haven't already.  Lauren will circulate an update as to where we are at with completion next week.

Alright, it's Friday and I just finished supporting Pickett's dismal today so time to head into the weekend.  We've got some football, soccer, church, and doctoral work on the docket but also some much needed R&R for this working mama (binging autumnal TV, some wine, and bodypump). 

Finally, a very good year to those of you celebrating Rosh Hashanah!!

See you next week!

JV

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