Week 32: We Have MAYed It

Happy Friday!

Besides the ending of April and the last full month of the 2022-2023 school year, this week also brought us closer to the end of our ACT Aspire testing window. The hay is nearly in the barn, as they say, and we will see how much impact we made on our students this year sometime in late June or early July. Thank you for all of the work you did leading up to this testing time and please continue to concentrate on this year’s District Goals using every bit of the time we have to ensure our students’ success.

End-of-the-Year Celebration

May 24th is the last contract day for most employees and it will be a day to celebrate accomplishments and milestones. Christ’s Community Fellowship has graciously offered to cook us lunch again and this year we will have some corporate sponsors to pay for our meal.

This event will take place at the Performing Arts Center (PAC) at Mena High School. Before the meal, we will recognize the years of service to the district and retirements. It will be a little different this year as we will not have everyone come down front individually. For the sake of time, we will announce the names and years of service, along with other pertinent facts about the people. Afterward, all who were mentioned will come down front to receive their mementos and have a picture taken.

To make sure we do not miss anyone, we ask that you use this form to notify us if this is your 5th, 10th, 15th, 20th, 25th, or 30th year at Mena Public Schools or if you achieved major accomplishments this year such as an advanced degree or credential. We also want to recognize accomplishments in your classrooms related to our district goals.

New Operations Hero

Operations Hero is replacing SchoolDude around the state as the method for requesting maintenance. You use your school email account to sign in with Google and the link to the form to make a request is in the top-right corner. The form is much less daunting than the one in SchoolDude. The complete migration from SchoolDude to Operations Hero is taking place right now and all use of SchoolDude will end this month and it will no longer be available in June. Here is a document with several sets of training videos on how to use it.

Our transportation system uses SchoolDude for trip requests so we are working on another solution for next year.

Legislation and Policy

Our legislative session may be over but the wave of change in education continues. Our school administrators association has put together this list of educational acts that have now been signed by the Governor. This is the longest list of such acts that I can recall. There are a total of 131 new laws to be enacted. This also means that there will be new policies written for schools to accomplish the goals of these laws. This will take a lot of time for the legal team at the Arkansas School Boards Association, which provides the model policy service that all public schools subscribe to.

Speaking of rules, there is a new website dedicated to LEARNS and it contains a lot of information about the new law and its impact. Some of the information includes updates on the rules-making process and the committees that will be putting the rules together. If you applied to participate, the website is a good way to keep up with the information.

Closing

We had a wonderful performance given by our choirs last night. Big thanks go out to all the singers and our Choir Director, Mrs. Tilley, for making that happen. Make sure to see our Bearcat Band spring performance in the PAC tomorrow night.

We had a great group of Mena Middle School students compete in STEM Challenge today at Iron Mountain. This event is coordinated and sponsored by the DeQueen-Mena Educational Cooperative. It involves several science-based competitions in problem-solving and engineering. We had several winners and those announcements should be on social media soon.

Ladycat Softball qualified for the regional tournament this week and continues to play for a conference tournament championship today. Ladycat Soccer continues its postseason successfully and has already qualified for the state tournament. This is the first state-qualifying girls’ soccer team at Mena in nine years! Bearcat Soccer has finished its season with its first winning season in several years. We also know that we have several track athletes who have qualified for the state meet next week.

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It was a really good week at Mena Public Schools!!

At Mena Public Schools our students are prepared, our staff is supported, and our community is confident.

Have a great weekend!!