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NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2024

Director's Corner

Happy December Everyone!

I hope you all enjoyed a relaxing Thanksgiving Break with family and friends. Taking time away from work responsibilities is essential to maintaining a healthy work-life balance and practicing self-care. Speaking of self-care, The National Institute of Mental Health offers a few strategies for this. Remember, even small acts of self-care can have a big impact. During this busy time of year, I challenge you to choose one area to focus on and see what a difference it makes.

STRATEGIES FOR POSITIVE MENTAL HEALTH- NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF MENTAL HEALTH

Get regular exercise.
Eat healthy, regular meals, and stay hydrated.
Make sleep a priority and establish a regular sleep schedule.
Try a relaxing activity such as a breathing exercise, meditation, etc.
Set goals and priorities by determining what must get done now and what can wait. Learn to say “no” to new tasks if it is too much.
Practice gratitude daily, whether by reminding yourself what you are thankful for or keeping a Gratitude Journal.
Focus on positivity. There are always more “blessings” vs. “stressings”.
Stay connected to friends and family who can provide emotional support.

WHAT TO REMEMBER AND WHAT'S NEW

REMEMBER: These extended holiday breaks are a great time to collect regression data to determine the potential need for ESY. If you have any questions, please contact Paxton, Sara, me, or your School Psychologist.
NEW: You should have received two emails regarding our “12 Days of IEP Compliance”. We genuinely appreciate Paxton’s work on this and encourage you to participate. You may be one of the lucky winners.
NEW: Our ECKCE Team has a new mileage spreadsheet for submitting mileage reimbursement. This spreadsheet has dropdown boxes for ease of completion. Please plan to download and attach the completed spreadsheet to your requisition at the end of each month. If you are using something else, you will need to begin using this spreadsheet to ensure consistency and provide the required documentation for our auditors. Thank you, and as always, don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions.

Have a Wonderful Week!

Lee

Reminder

As discussed above, use this mileage spreadsheet for submitting mileage reimbursement.

Design our Professional Development Plan

How often have you attended PD and found it completely irrelevant to your needs? Or thought, "that's nice!" but you didn't learn anything that is practical or leads you to do anything different as an educator? Your time is valuable, and we want to provide professional development that truly supports your needs and helps you better serve the students in our schools.

To make that possible, we need your input. By sharing your thoughts through our brief Professional Development Survey, you will shape the training opportunities we offer in coming years.

The survey is designed to be quick and straightforward—it should take about 10 minutes. What you provide will guide us in creating a long-term roadmap for professional development that aligns with YOUR priorities.

Don’t miss this chance to help us tailor PD relevant to you.

Take the Survey Now!

Resource of the Month

As discussed in the October newsletter, we are working to increase your access to digital resources, with the intent that this reduces the time and effort you spend searching for or creating things so you can focus more on supporting students. Some resources can't be made available on a public website, so just go to the Tools and Resources page, click the access toolkits link, and just enter our Interlocal number 614 to gain access.

If you didn't check out last month's featured resource, the "all in one" behavior graph is ready to track frequency, duration or intensity data, or analyze interval data. Save it to your own drive, then you can easily edit it with the names of behaviors you're tracking and as you plug in your data it will automatically graph it.

This month's resource to check out is in the digital library, accessed from the same page and using the same access code to get the link to the library. Once there, check out in the adaptive educator support section the Motivating Struggling Learners text. It's concise, practical, and has some good ideas for each of 10 ways the author proposes to energize kids.

The Kansans Can Competency Framework K–12 Conflict Management Curriculum is available FREE for Kansas educators. Download lessons containing 76 instructional activities. Lesson Sets contain links to student workbooks, assessments, educational videos, posters, and other teaching resources.

Want more? Explore the instructional activities with peers in six-week online courses that start January 27th (optional graduate credit from KU). Or signup for free webinars which orient you to conflict management strategies.

Need additional information? The website, www.cccframework.org, provides additional details and research synopses, such as a one-page infographic on why it’s important to teach conflict management to all students.

In case you missed it…Free downloads for self-efficacy and assertiveness K-12 curricula are also available.