Good day, Atlanta Public Schools!
I’m Dr. Lisa Herring, Superintendent. Welcome back to “The Week” where we provide you with a video summary of the news and information you need most from Atlanta Public Schools.
Students, teachers, and staff in our district returned to teaching and learning on Monday, August 24. And I am encouraged by the levels of participation I have personally seen over the past two weeks. We actually have first week data about our efforts to ensure 100% of our students are learning virtually.
After the first week of school, we collectively achieved a district-wide student login rate of 90.2%. This represents a significant increase of 20.6% over our average login rate of 69.6% last spring. This data comes from a number of instructional and technology tools and platforms that track student login and activity. These platforms include Active Directory, Google Classroom, Google Drive, Google Console, Cylance, MyBackpack, Seesaw, and Securly.
Among the highlights, we saw:
- All of our traditional schools exceeded 70% login rates.
- All grade levels 3 to 12 exceeded 90% login rates.
- Except for the first day of school, when we experienced the nationwide “Zoom outage,” our daily student login rate hovered around 80%.
On another matter, I want to encourage everyone in the APS community to complete their Census forms if they haven’t done so already. The 2020 Census is much more than a U.S. population count every decade. This massive date collection provides critical information that determines representation in government, distribution of government dollars, and financial support for our schools. It helps determine how some $675 billion in federal funds will be spent in our schools, states, and communities.
It serves APS and other school districts well knowing how many people live in our cities, states, and nation.
The deadline has been extended to September 30, so Get Counted and Shape Your Future!
Finally, I also need our families and school-based staffs to get involved in our GO Team elections, which start on Tuesday, September 8th. We had planned to hold these elections last Spring but had to delay them until now because of the pandemic.
To summarize: GO Teams are nine-member governance teams at every school that work in collaborative fashion with the school principal. GO Teams are comprised of parents, teachers, and members of our community to help with school improvement efforts. They create their own strategic plans for their schools and actually help approve their schools’ budgets.
Now here are the Top Five things to know about GO Teams:
No. 1 – Parents, Guardians and School Staff are vying for seats at 66 schools. Voting runs from Tuesday, September 8th, through Sunday, September 20th.
No. 2 – Our parents will receive their household’s unique voting link in two of the following ways: email, text, and/or mail. Our school staff members will receive their personal voting links in their APS emails. Voting credentials will start to arrive in mailboxes this week; emails and text messages will be sent on Tuesday, September 8. Watch for the delivery of your link!
No. 3 – The link enables you to vote on your computer or mobile device. But you can only vote once!
No. 4 – You have questions? We have answers. Please e-mail goteam@apsk12.org or call 404-802-2885. For assistance in Spanish, call 404-802-7580.
No. 5 – Your Vote Matters! Learn more about GO Teams and about the candidates at www.apsstrongschools.com. And then VOTE!
That’s “The Week” for this week! Thanks for the engagement and support. Remember, we’ve given you a little bit of homework this week. Take the Census. Vote for Go Teams. Please BE WELL!
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