In preparing classrooms for in-person students, remember that students must maintain a minimum of three feet of physical distance at all times. Last week, we shared this resource with school leaders, which provides specific guidance regarding classroom layouts, class sizes and social-distancing requirements. While your school leader will be overseeing the classroom set up across your school, we know that many teachers have had questions about how to safely and effectively set up classrooms and we wanted to make sure you had direct access to this information as well. Included in this document are:

If you find that your expected number of students exceeds the maximum occupancy of your classroom, please reach out to your school leader to explore building-wide solutions such as swapping rooms to ensure that the largest classes are in the largest rooms. You can also reach out to the Enrollment and Campus Planning team for additional help thinking through solutions.

Tamara and Mike

There have been a couple of updates to the training materials based on our latest health guardrails. Specifically:

As a reminder, this training will prepare you with the health and safety protocols needed to be in person with students. It is critical for anyone who is returning to a school building for in-person learning to complete this training prior to being in the building. If you were not automatically registered for the training, you may access it here. Please note, after you register for the course, you will see a button in Learning Space that says "Launch." Please click that button, and it will automatically direct you to Schoology; if prompted, use your DPS gmail account to sign in. The Schoology course contains a video to watch, the link to the PowerPoint deck and a quiz that you must successfully pass with a score of 80 to show you have completed the training.

As we shared in Our DPS Weekly, we continue to monitor health data in partnership with the Denver Department of Public Health and Environment and Denver Health. Our COVID Conditions dashboard currently has two indicators in the red zone, so we want to share more information with you directly from our health partners. Please watch this video with Dr. Bill Burman, Director of Public Health for Denver Health and Medical Officer for the City and County of Denver.  

Dr. Burman has shared that the increase in COVID in Denver is almost entirely attributable to increases at colleges and universities in Denver. Based on this, here is where we are with our return-to-school plans. Read more in Our DPS Weekly.

We are now accepting applications for the 2020-21 Aspiring Teacher Leader of Color Cohort. This cohort experience is designed to support teachers of color to develop both adaptive and technical skills aligned to the Senior / Team Lead role. The cohort will focus on cultivating leaders for equity. This five-month cohort experience comes with an $800 annual stipend and an opportunity to build your network. To learn more about this opportunity, click here.

This Friday, Oct. 2 is the last day to nominate those who've gone above and beyond during the 2019-20 school year. If you work with a person or team who inspires you, please take this opportunity to celebrate and recognize them for one of these awards:

If you have any questions, please email Our_DPSValues@dpsk12.org.

Every year, DPS is required to report on teacher qualifications to the CDE and whether a teacher is “in-field” or “out-of-field.” Click here for information on qualifications and in-field requirements; these vary based on content area. If found to be out-of-field, HR will contact you and your school leader prior to the submission in February 2021. While only some content area teachers are required by the state (SPED), DPS (ECE and Gifted & Talented), and a Denver Mill Levy (arts) to be in-field, DPS highly encourages all teachers to work towards in-field status for each content area that they teach. We believe it is in the best interest of all students to have subject matter experts in their classroom. Contact HRCompliance@dpsk12.org with questions.

Would you like the opportunity to collaborate with Pathways teachers from across the DPS? Please consider participating in the Pathways Curriculum Development PDU. The current Pathways pacing guides were developed before the Capstone process was implemented, and are not designed to effectively build toward Capstone tasks. The Literacy Team has partnered with ProComp to allow teachers to complete the work of thoughtfully revising these guides while receiving PDU credit.

Please refer to this document for more details about the content and schedule of the PDU. If you would like to learn more, please complete this form or reach out to Jacqueline Smilack before Oct. 9.

Denver Public Schools sends all district newsletters and critical employee communications through Constant Contact. Please do not unsubscribe your dpsk12.org email address from any message; if you unsubscribe from one newsletter or one communication, you will be removed from all other district-managed email lists in Constant Contact. If you have any questions, please email newsletters@dpsk12.org.