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Prospective Parent Orientation 2021

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Principal Pfefferlen giving an orientation to prospective parents interested in enrolling their child for the 2021/22 school year.

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Hello and welcome to the prospective parent orientation for the Charter School of Morgan Hill. My name is Susan Pfefferlen. I am the principal here and I'm going to be walking you through this presentation it's little bit unconventional this year. Normally, we would be welcoming you to our gym and this program would be interactive, however, with our limitations due to Covid, we have to look for other options to educate you about our school and I'm hoping you come away with a better understanding of what makes us unique and special. With that said, let's forge ahead.  I'm not going to be reading every slide to you but basically I'm going to be walking you through the presentation and since we will not have an opportunity for live questions, we have come up with a FAQ to help answer some of your questions. I'd like to start by introducing key people that help our Administrative Office run first of all Paige Cisewski is our executive director and she was also founder of the school she has been involved since the onset. Nancy DePalma is our administrative assistant who sits in the very front office. She answers the phone, she is the knower of all and if you haven't spoken to Nancy yet you probably will very soon. Vivianne Brager works in our back office on HR and payroll and Ms Paula is another admin and she works in the front office she also runs the health office so the students get to know her very soon and Diana Gill is our school engagement coordinator and she is really a liaison between the school and the community and our families and she helps our culture grow and just remain rich and strong. Goals for this orientation are for you to have a basic understanding of Charter Schools, a chance for us to articulate our mission and vision for you to get a glimpse let me move my stuff out of the way here and to our finances and our govern our governance structure and also to clarify the lottery, upcoming dates and to as I said address the many questions that you may have about our school So first off, what is a charter school? Charter schools are tuition-free public schools with unparalleled innovation and flexibility. The whole purpose of charter schools coming about was to be able to encourage this innovation and then once these best practices were formed for these schools to be able to share out with neighboring schools and districts that they exist in.  By forming a strong partnership among parents, students and teachers, charter schools are able to create an environment that's specially tailored for the students who attend. Parents are encouraged to be involved, teachers have the freedom to innovate and students have the chance to learn. California has the highest number of charter schools of any state as you can see here over 660,000 students were served last year in Charter Schools and Charter School Morgan Hill is nonsectarian and its programs admission policies Employment Practices and other operations we are tuition free public education non-discriminatory non-discriminatory and we shall admit all peoples who wish to attend subject to available space.  Next let's move on to our mission and vision the Charter School Morgan Hill uses project-based learning strong family involvement in community interactions to develop lifelong learners prepared to be successful and innovative participants in the global community. We have developed what's called our school outcomes. Every student that comes through our doors should hopefully exit exhibiting these. We want our students to be academic achievers, effective communicators, critical thinkers and to be both personally and socially responsible.  We do teach the California Common Core State Standards. We do not have a set or scripted curriculum, our teachers pull from a variety of different resources to create what they feel is the ideal curriculum for students.  We do have enrichment opportunities, again the slides that I am showing you were from last year's program and this is all pre covid we have had to make some modifications getting us through this challenging time of the pandemic but pre pandemic our K through 2 and 3rd through 6th graders have PE and Spanish three times a week.  K through 6th graders had art and music.  Ag science was taught K 5th and also in 6th grade.  They those students received Ag science and nutrition classes all year On to our middle school program, we have a rigorous academic program and high behavior standards set for our students. We have Spanish taught as a core subject every day as well as PE. taught everyday and pre pandemic our students participated in enrichment and elective classes. We have some special field trip opportunities for our middle school students in 6th grade they attend a week at science camp and 7th graders have a day trip that is planned in San Francisco 8th graders pre covid attend Washington DC each year for a week long trip. We also have after-school sports and leadership. As mentioned in our mission and vision parents are an integral part of the school.  Parent participation is part of our mission and the parent student school family agreement is a critical aspect. Parents support their child getting involved in their daily work and monitoring homework and keeping the teachers involved of student needs being in that constant communication cycle parents also help the school in a myriad of ways by helping in the classroom when possible doing at home jobs helping with other responsibilities that help the school we ask the parents come to back to school night each year that they are involved in parent-teacher conferences and there are just so many other ways that families can get involved in our school through committees, fundraising, coming to school to speak on areas of expertise and attending school sponsored activities. Another part of our mission is community involvement and each grade level is involved in some sort of service learning project these projects are aligned with standards. Again sometimes they are incorporated into projects. Projects are chosen based on an authentic need and are student driven. As I mentioned our school culture is something that we're really proud of and consistently work to strengthen one key aspect is what's called Project Cornerstone and the developmental assets and this is a program that trains parents and community members to come into the classes and read specially selected books to the students once a month and lead discussions and again students are thus able to develop these assets to help them throughout their life. We also have what's called the habits of mind those are listed below I'm not going to read them all to you but those are incorporated into the teaching and projects that go on at Charter School of Morgan Hill and we also pride ourselves in knowing each child and family. As far as school culture many classes run class meetings, we have conflict resolution training things like cross grade levels buddies and other support services set up to assist students including academic help and we also have counselors on campus. This slide is a little bit of just background and general information in that picture that is Paige and myself and we have just submitted as you can see fall 2020 we began the charter renewal process and that is us getting ready to submit our latest Charter renewal. In terms of our class sizes and configuration each grade level K6 have 3 classes of 24 students each. When students enter Middle School, they follow a more traditional Middle School schedule where they visit a variety of teachers that each of those classes still remains at 24 or lower. A few facts about our CSMH teachers, they are all California credentialed teachers, they are at will employees, we have a performance pay compensation salary program rather than tenure and they are empowered decision makers in the area of instruction and curriculum. Grade levels work as a team so there is a great deal of collaboration that takes place and they are consistently undergoing professional development. In terms of accountability, we participate in the state testing the smarter balanced testing reporting occurs to the public via print and online media and we have our own CSMH board of directors who meets monthly. We have an annual audit that's done by an independent auditor.  We are also overseen by the Morgan Hill Unified School District they are our overseers and there are a myriad of reports filed annually with the state including financial reports and attendance reports. In terms of the enrollment process, normally our school tours are conducted by our middle school students and this year as I said things are looking a little bit different so you will notice a similar video that has been done to take you through a school tour by a few of our middle schoolers and we are right in the middle of open enrollment as we speak it is going to extend from January 25th to March 5th the lottery will be held for those grades with more applicants than places to offer and that will take place on March 24th. That is going to conclude our slideshow let me move myself out of the way here a little bit as said I know you probably have additional questions but since we can't answer those all in person I'm going to ask you to look at the the FAQ that we created and if you continue to have additional questions you may feel free to reachout you can send us an email or give Nancy a call in the office. Again I want to thank you for watching and I look forward to hopefully meeting some of you very soon, take care

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Prospective Parent Orientation 2021

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