Note From Principal Atkins

Families,

I want to thank everyone for participating in our survey about next year's calendar. As we talk about the results with our leadership team, I wanted to share more about the WHY. I truly believe our community's voice is important, and it is our goal to make sure you are always informed.

Teaching children involves so much more than time and instruction in a classroom - we know teachers pour hours and hours into their lesson planning to make sure they are fulfilling District and State requirements and meeting grade level standards. Curriculum and standards by grade level can be hundreds of pages long, all of which have to be followed and utilized by our teachers in their day-to-day instruction. On top of this, we know our teachers serve in many other capacities meeting social-emotional, physical, and mental health needs throughout the school day and very often outside of school hours as well. Adding in grading, collaborative meetings, parent engagement, and more, you can see how quickly time fills up.

The profession of teaching has many demands upon it, much of which is not public-facing. It is because of this that teachers require dedicated planning time to not only be as prepared as possible for their students, but to continue to grow in their craft.

Schools often build this time in in various ways. For instance, schools such as Odyssey and Denver Language School nearby have Early Release Fridays every week for planning and professional development. The other traditional, district-run dual language schools (McMeen, Sandoval, and Swansea) all utilize one additional full PD (i.e. no-contact) day per month for their work. In addition, when teachers are required to meet outside of contractual hours for things like parent-teacher conferences, schools have to provide a "comp" day to abide by contractual agreements. All of these can be confusing for parents when they don't see the work behind the scenes.

For many years, Stedman has built this planning/professional development time into our calendar through irregular Early Release dates to minimize disruption to families while still carving out the important time for our teachers. We also know these days are not ideal for working families, and we have always provided these dates months ahead of the school year so families can prepare. In wanting to best serve our families, we're exploring other options to see if something else will better suit our community.

For those curious about our instructional hours/days, please know that we believe the time our students have in instruction is of highest importance. We go above and beyond State requirements and will continue to do so to best serve our children.
  • CDE (Colorado Department of Education) requires a minimum of 160 "contact days" (i.e. days that your child is in contact with his/her school)
  • Currently, Stedman will have roughly 172 contact days with students this year minus the 2 Snow Days called by DPS.
  • CDE & DPS require 990 hours of instructional time per school year
  • Currently, Stedman is on track to provide roughly 1042 Instructional Hours (which includes the subtraction of Early Release days)

We are working hard at Stedman to provide a challenging academic environment that sets ALL of our students up for success, and this involves the continued development and growth of our teachers. Thank you for your input as we collaboratively plan our calendar for next year with our senior leadership team which includes both admin and teaching staff.

Please be sure to read through the entire newsletter to stay up to date on all the happenings at Stedman!

As a reminder, please do not drop students off at school before 8:40am unless they are signed up for Discovery Link. We do not have supervision available until 8:40am and on chilly days we cannot let students in the building earlier than this.

Have a wonderful weekend, see you all on Monday.

Michael Atkins