Transcript:
Hello, Provo City. I am Superintendent Dau. Today is Monday, September 14th. We hope you had a fantastic weekend. We are ready for another great week here in Provo City School District.
We just want to highlight some of the great things that are taking place across our district. We want to congratulate Christy Giblon. She is a band teacher at Shoreline Middle School. She won a Service to Association Award from the Utah Education Association just because of her tireless efforts to support teachers and students and to really support funding for public education to make sure that it is adequately funded. So really appreciate all of her work and her willingness to work with us as district leadership.
I also got a chance to visit Edgemont Elementary last week, so thank you to Principal Kartchner. Also thank you to Dina Driggs and Christie Bowman. I was able to visit their classrooms and see reading and math lessons.
I also had the opportunity to go to Shoreline Middle School with Principal Hirschi and see Maria Valletta's English class, McKayla Zimmerman's sewing class, and Andrea Wright's sheltered language arts class for our multilingual learners. We have incredible teachers in our district and just really engaging lessons and just awesome students, and we know that's also because we have awesome parents.
So just some information, it is Bike to School Week, so we hope that some of you are choosing to help your kids bike to school or walk to school. It does really help us with the congestion at drop-off and pickup.
We also want to make you aware that we do have parent-teacher conferences for our middle schools on Wednesday, September 16th, and for high schools on Thursday, September 17th. Please reach out to your individual school for more information.
Our foundation will hold their annual golf tournament this Wednesday on September 16th. There will be breakfast at 7 AM. Golfing begins at 8 AM. If you would like to sponsor a team of 4, it is for a donation of $1,500. There is a link in the email for more information about that.
That money goes towards teacher grants to help facilitate literacy instruction, STEM instruction, as well as the arts in classrooms, and just really encouraging teachers to do really innovative things and to extend learning for students.
We also have a fantastic Parent Resource Night at Centennial Middle School on September 16th from 6 to 7:30 PM. If you're there for parent-teacher conferences, it would be great to also receive some resources that the district has, that our community has, or anyone can attend. It's for the entire district, but we did coordinate it with those parent-teacher conferences.
A summary of the September 8th board meeting can be found at a link in the email. You can also watch any board meeting on YouTube after the fact, and you can even put it on 1.5 speed so it goes really fast, and you can find the timestamps and go through topics that are of specific interest to you.
There was a motion made to change the name of our current Timpanogos Elementary once it switches to the Dixon site, as we're rebuilding that school on the Dixon site. They wanted to— there was a motion proposed to change the name to Dixon Elementary. That motion failed 2 to 5, and so the board is now making sure that if they choose to stick with the Timpanogos Elementary name, that we do have permission of the Timpanogos Nation. We don't have any documentation that we ever received that, and so want to be respectful of that, so we're working through that process.
The Board of Education also discussed DLI, the roles and responsibilities of the board, of district leaders, of the DLI Parent Committee. And there is a guiding document that kind of lays out all of those different issues and also the priorities attached with DLI, and it is linked in the email.
I've had several parents reach out to either board members or myself asking about the use of Gemini, which is an AI chatbot tool on Google. We want you to know that Gemini is not available on our Chromebooks for students, nor are any other chatbots. If you see anything like that, that seems problematic, make sure that you're reaching out to your principal or to the tech department.
We are also going to be working on a very robust policy providing guidelines and potential restrictions for technology use in the classroom based on recent legislation, as well as a very thorough policy on AI. So we have committees that are working on those assignments, and we'll keep you in the loop about that.
We hope all of you have a fantastic week, and we'll see you here again next Monday. Bye, everybody! Thank you.
