Paperless Classrooms?

"Alberta Education informed school districts earlier this month the learning resources centre, an Edmonton warehouse that distributes printed textbooks and resources, will stop taking orders on Aug. 30."

Click here for more.

CAPSC June Newsletter

Safe wishes
The CAPSC team is sending wishes of safety and strength to all our members during the recovery from the flooding in our city.  We hope you and your family are safe, and would like to extend our heartfelt wishes for speedy clean up for those of you who have been affected by the flooding.  For the latest in what is happening at our schools, please see the CBE website.
If your school council has any flood-related concerns, please be sure to contact us and we will support you as best we can.




 
CAPSC May 2013 Meeting Follow up
At our May meeting we had several members of the CBE administration in attendance to provide us with a budget presentation.    Please click here for our summary of that meeting, which will refer to this document from the CBE.  They have also posted the information and comments from our meeting feedback forms on their website.



Report Cards
There has been a lot of talk about the upcoming changes to report cards, and the CAPSC executive has been following the issue very closely.  Our president Jeff Bowes wrote an article for the Globe and Mail, which states our position on the new reporting.  Chief Superintendent Naomi Johnson has met with our president to discuss our concerns and has assured us that there will be ongoing parent engagement.

We heard from many of our parents who had concerns and questions, and we will continue to solicit your opinions as issues like these arise.  If you would be interested in being named as a parent contact when we get media inquiries, please let us know and we will add you to our list that we forward on to the news organizations when they are requesting parent feedback.

Here's what the CBE is saying.

To make it easy for you to stay in the loop with what we are saying, we have added a new page to our website.  Please check it out regularly for the latest in our ongoing involvement in education-related items.

                                    Advocacy Steps

At CAPSC we are always open to hearing about the issues you are having at schools, and will do our best to help you or advocate for you.  Please feel free to contact us with your concerns.
There are also other steps you can take to help resolve your issues and CAPSC vice president Robert







2013 Trustee Elections
As part of the 2013 municipal elections, CAPSC, along with CivicCamp, will be co-hosting three trustee forums at various locations throughout the city.  We will have more details to follow as we move closer to the elections, but we need volunteers now to coordinate the forums.  If you would like volunteer please contact us at info@capsc.ca.





 We would like to say a huge “thank you” to all of our school and community members who have joined us
through meetings, emails and e-newsletter sign-ups.  We would also like to extend our appreciation to all of the guest speakers we had throughout the school year.
Hurdman has written an article that can help you get started.  His post can be found on our website as part of our resource section.

In May we had our last public meeting of the 2012-2013 school year, but we are already looking ahead to next year.  We have selected the third Wednesday of every month to hold our regular meetings, so you will see us back for our first meeting of the 2013/2014 school year on Wednesday September 18th 2013.  We have already committed that time to the CBE, who will be presenting topics related to the personalization of learning, report cards and IRIS.  Please mark your calendars, you don't want to miss it!
Our executive will continue to meet over the next several months to plan our upcoming year and we ask that you continue to join us online for the most up to date information. We are always looking for meeting topic ideas, comments or feedback, so please make sure to send those along on behalf of yourself or your school council.  In particular right now we would love to hear some of your fundraising success stories.  Please feel free to send them on so that we can incorporate them into an upcoming meeting!
Have a great summer and we look forward to seeing you again in September!

Membership
It's never too early to join CAPSC!  As the 2012-2013 school year winds down, we are already planning for next year, and now you can too!  Purchase next year's membership now and stay ahead of the game.  CAPSC is already busy lining up great guest speakers and topics for next year and you don't want to miss out!  Please see our web page for membership information, or contact our Communications Coordinator for more information on how we can support you and your school council.

No More Grades on Report Cards?

A pilot project will be introduced in some Calgary schools next year eliminating numerical grades on report cards.  “Evident,” “emerging” or “support required” would replace "1 - 5" on reports to parents. There would be fewer (and maybe no) personal teacher's comments about our kids and reports would only be done twice per school year.

There hasn't been much, if any, public input about the project and even the trustees say they haven't been fully informed: click here.

Frank Bruseker, the ATA president has suggested that this would be a welcome change because teacher's wouldn't need to spend as much time on reporting student's progress. An interview with CBC can be heard here. David Grey at Calgary Eye Opener asks: "Are these changes about finding better ways to give parents feedback about how their kids are performing in school or are these changes about cutting down the workload for teachers"?

CAPC would like some help with parental response to this project. Please see this web page if you'd like to provide a voice.


From my point of view, teachers are going to spend a whole lot more time explaining to parents what 'emerging' means than if they just wrote down a 3.

CBE Parent Survey... Speak Up!

The CBE Parent Communication Survey is open until June 14.

Click here to complete it.

Online Option to Pay School Fees

For the 2013-2014 school year, payment options for most CBE school fees will be available online.

To register for online payment, go to www.cbe.ab.ca and click on the "Online Fee Payment" option.