All Olympia School District schools will be closed for Winter Break from Monday, December 21 through Friday, January 1. Schools will reopen on Monday, January 4, 2021.
During Winter Break, staff working in the Knox 111 Administrative Center and other support buildings may be reached via email or phone December 21 and 22, and again from December 28-30. All support buildings will resume service on Monday, January 4.
Everyday Heroes is a regular feature in this staff blog. Remember to submit names of employees districtwide who have done something deserving of encouragement and praise. Give a shout-out to one of your colleagues at your school or support building and watch for it to appear in an upcoming Everyday Heroes blog post.
Here are our newest honorees:
Everyday Hero
Callie Jones, Special Education Resource Room Teacher, and Behavior Teacher on Special Assignment (TOSA), Roosevelt Elementary School
I can’t tell you how much I appreciate and admire the support you lend to the Roosevelt community. You are a ROCK STAR! This year, during a pandemic, you have led the family support team in our building with grace and compassion. From visiting families at their houses to ensure that they had what they needed for learning, to organizing the materials team to distribute supplies at the school, you have never wavered in your commitment to the families in our community. This year, when our school desperately needed a special education teacher, you took that role on as well. The work you are doing with the students in our resource room is transforming the way that students are able to perform in the classroom. You are a close listener, a quick learner, and hard worker whose attention to detail ensures the job gets done correctly the first time.
Callie, we are so lucky to have you working in our school community. Thank you for always being there for our students and families.
Submitted by Sean Shaughnessy, Principal, Roosevelt ES
Everyday Hero
Carrie Blackwell, Supervisor, Student Information Systems
Carrie is the new Student Information Supervisor. In the 2020 school year, she was responsible for the Skyward COVID grading, new attendance taking and getting all students and families connected to Family Access. It was a very busy year! Then came the 2021 school year; online enrollment, wellness screenings for staff and students, new grading setups… the list can really go on, because everything with Skyward has changed!
Carrie is a go-getter and has brought to the District her smile, her knowledge, compassion and non-stop dedication to keeping our students, staff and families connected.
We are so lucky to have her with us.
Submitted by Donna Lamont, Data Management Analyst, SIS
How to nominate an Everyday Hero
All submissions will be posted in this blog on a weekly basis and archived each week.
If you are within one to five years of retirement, register now for a pre-retirement Zoom webinar from 5-7:30 p.m. on Thursday, February 18, 2021.
The webinar, sponsored by the Washington State School Retirees Association, will feature presentations from the following agencies:
To register, email tara@wssra.org. An agenda with Zoom instructions will be sent before the event to those who have registered.
A variety of Tech PD workshops are still available for registration. Workshops continue through January 2021, and more will be scheduled in the new year.
View asynchronous and synchronous workshop options. These workshops are also posted in the Distance Learning Toolkit in the OSD staff portal.
Every year in December, the Olympia School Board elects officers for the coming year during its annual reorganization.
At its December 10 meeting, the board elected Scott Clifthorne as this year’s board president and Maria Flores as vice president.
Board members are also appointed annually to serve as liaisons with various community groups and state agencies. Directors will continue with their same appointed positions from this past year:
The Communications and Community Relations Department is offering additional Zoom workshops on creating accessible documents and videos. Learn how to incorporate accessibility into your workflow and efficiently create accessible content to share online. Staff are also welcome to bring their existing documents and brainstorm on how to create accessible versions for the web.
Creating Accessible Content
This one-hour course offers a broad overview of the components of accessibility, as well as how to create accessible documents to share online. Authoring tools covered include Microsoft Word, Google Documents, Microsoft PowerPoint, Google Slides and more.
Enhancing the Accuracy of Automatically-Generated Captions
Interested in creating accessible videos to share with our community? Attendees of this workshop will learn how to leverage YouTube’s speech recognition software to efficiently create captions. Tips include increasing the accuracy of the automatic captioning, how to edit the captions for grammar and spelling and how to correctly format captions for sounds or music.
If you have additional accessibility tips or questions, please reach out to Robert Hardy, the district’s website accessibility specialist.
Recognition of outstanding OSD colleagues continues with a new Everyday Hero this week. Everyday Heroes is a regular feature in this staff blog. Remember to submit names of employees districtwide who have done something deserving of encouragement and praise. Give a shout-out to one of your colleagues at your school or support building and watch for it to appear in an upcoming Everyday Heroes blog post.
Here is our newest honoree:
Everyday Hero
Jeff Munsen, Bus Driver, Transportation Department
I want to highlight a very special moment that happened for some of our in-person English Learner students on their bus ride to a school. Students were glowing that their bus driver, Jeff Munsen, asked each student their name upon climbing the steps of the bus.
Here is what students were exclaiming about and proud of when sharing this with their families and teachers: “He told us he wanted to say our name right because it was important to do that. He kept practicing until he got it right. Then he remembered!” Seems like a simple concept, right? But in the lives of many of our English Learners, their self-identity and value shifts a bit when some people struggle to say their name accurately — if they even try. Because of this, sometimes they give the child a nickname, or just say, “Oh, that’s too hard!”, and then say the name how it might sound in English. Since names are our most basic building blocks of our identity, Jeff Munsen made the effort to acknowledge and show value in students’ names. He took the time to learn the name, and respectfully welcome each student aboard by addressing each student by their given name.
Thank you, Jeff Munsen. It seems so simple of a moment for some, but this simple act of respect and cultural responsiveness made an impact on the social-emotional levels of these students that day, and most likely, for a very long time.
Submitted by Heather Randolph, EL Coordinator
How to nominate an Everyday Hero
All submissions will be posted in this blog on a weekly basis and archived each week.
The Touch Up Reading Order (TURO) Tool allows users to apply/edit tags in a document and modify the document’s reading order. It is the primary tool used in PDF remediation.
To access it, go to Tools > Accessibility > Touch Up Reading Order. Note: If the Accessibility menu doesn’t display, go to View > Tools > Accessibility.
When you open the TURO tool, your view will change. If your PDF is tagged, grey content area boxes will appear with numbers in the top left. These numbers signify the read order on that page. Users may instead analyze the tag types by selecting Structure Types rather than Page Content Order.
For more complex documents, such as complex forms or documents containing tables, ensure “Display like elements in a single box” is unchecked.
If no content areas appear, your document is likely untagged. Tags can be manually added using the TURO tool, or added automatically using the Add Tags to Document tool from within the Accessibility Toolkit. Documents tagged using the automatic tool should be checked for accuracy using the Tags Pane and TURO tool afterwards.
To tag an item using the TURO tool:
The TURO tool offers an option to tag an element as ‘background.’ This tag type effectively hides the element from the Tags Panel, and thus renders it inaccessible to screen reader users. This type of tag may be used for decorative elements, or for sections of blank lines.
When considering if an element is decorative, ask yourself if additional information is included with the element, or if its removal will have any impact upon the content of the message.
If you have any questions regarding using Acrobat Pro or other accessibility concerns, please reach out to Robert Hardy in the Communications and Community Relations Department.
Previous posts in the Acrobat Pro Accessibility series:
Congratulations to Marshall Middle School Paraeducator Nadine Owen and OSD Child Nutrition Services Supervisor Paul Flock for being named this year’s Classified School Employees of the Year. The annual award recognizes employees who consistently demonstrate outstanding work performance, professional leadership and collaboration.
Both Owen and Flock learned of their recognitions last week during surprise announcements accompanied by applause from their colleagues. Both will be recognized at the next Board of Directors meeting at 6:30 p.m. Dec. 10 on Zoom. The Zoom meeting link will be posted on the district website.
Owen has been a paraeducator at Marshall for the past five years, and Flock has been the supervisor in Child Nutrition Services for 31 years. Both were selected for this honor following a nomination process that included many outstanding submissions from throughout the district.
If you haven’t done so already, we want to remind and encourage all employees districtwide to complete a survey to share their thoughts about the effectiveness of the current remote learning model. We also ask that you answer questions that relate to general topics such as school/work climate, and cultural awareness and action. Survey responses will be anonymous. Data gathered will be used to inform planning going forward during the Pandemic response and gather baseline data to use as we strive to improve all workplaces in Olympia.
The deadline to complete this staff survey is 8 p.m. tonight, Friday, December 4.
Here's The Scoop 
You must be logged in to post a comment.