Vandalia Junior High School

Happy (almost) November! This month Sideline Store is offering 15% off your purchase! The promotion is good for the entire month of November. https://sideline.bsnsports.com/schools/illinois/vandalia/vandalia-high-school

NEW - Wall decals are here! These wall decals are made of advanced material you can apply right to your wall. No tape! No staples! They are specially designed for durability and are safe for any interior wall. These will dress up any room and help bring some school pride to your space. To help spread the word about these new items we are offering 15% off ALL wall decals until 11/30. https://sideline.bsnsports.com/schools/illinois/vandalia/vandalia-high-school

NEW Flash Sale! Starts Saturday! We are offering a 48 hour flash sale starting 10/24 through 10/25. This promotion is good for 20% off EVERYTHING, no minimum purchase required. https://sideline.bsnsports.com/schools/illinois/vandalia/vandalia-high-school

Vandalia School District #203 Reminder of Upcoming Events: - Early Dismissal, Thursday, Oct. 22. Grades K-4: 2:00pm; Grades 5-12: 2:15pm; - No School, Friday, Oct. 23 (No in-person or remote classes) - Parent/Teacher Conference Times: Thursday, October 22 3:00pm - 6:00pm Friday, October 23 8:00am - 12:00pm To enter a Vandalia School District Building you must fill out the COVID Symptom Self-Certification and wear a mask.

ATTENTION: Anyone that signed up for StangArts.....There will NOT be pick up on Thursday. You will pick up your child's project at Parent/Teacher conferences. If you cannot make it to conferences, the project will be sent home with your child next week. Thank you!

The District COVID Planning Team is examining more in person learning. We will focus on the how first and then the when. Please complete the Return to 100% Feedback Request by Thursday, October 22nd at noon. Survey link: https://forms.gle/9s1zV34hoDGZ8fcQA

HEY VANDAL FANS! Stock up on your favorite Vandal Gear! BSNSports is offering a 48 hour flash sale starting 10/14 through 10/15. This promotion is good for 20% off EVERYTHING, no min. purchase. https://sideline.bsnsports.com/schools/illinois/vandalia/vandalia-high-school

There will be no in-person or remote learning classes on Friday, October 9th for our Teacher's Inservice and Monday, October 12th in observance of Columbus Day. School will resume our Hybrid Schedule for ALL BUILDINGS on Tuesday, October 13th.

Phone lines appear to be back online. All CUSD 203 phonelines should be back up from the service outage.

IMPORTANT: There is a service outage with Newwave communications. This effects all CUSD 203 phonelines which are down due to the outage. We will keep you up to date when our phone lines appear active again.

Students that are in all-remote learning may return to hybrid in-person learning beginning second quarter. You have until Friday, 10/9 to notify your child's school if you intend to return. Have a great weekend Vandals!

VJHS after-school program will begin Monday, October 5 from 3:30pm-5pm. Registration forms are available in the junior high office or can be printed from the announcements in Teacherease. Please call the junior high with any questions.

Dear Parents/Guardians, VCUSD #203 will be giving remote only students the option to return to attending in the hybrid schedule for the second quarter. Families will have a window of time between 10/5 and 10/9 to notify us of their intention to return to in-person learning for the second quarter. Please contact your child’s school or notify their remote teacher, Mrs. Meyers, if you intend to return to in-person learning by 3:00pm Friday, October 9. If you know that you will be sending your child to attend school prior to the week of 10/5-10/9, please let us know as it will give us ample time to create schedules for returning students. If your child will need transportation upon returning to in-person learning, please complete the following form by Friday, October 9: https://forms.gle/o79k2N2RGhEVo1FLA To address the number of students struggling to complete school work on remote days, both in-person students and all -in remote students, we have come up with a plan to encourage better success. Any student that has a failing grade after the first quarter, 10/16, in a core subject (math, literature, language arts, science, or social studies) will be required to attend school on Fridays from 8am-11am beginning on October 30. Students will receive academic support during this time to promote academic success. Students will be transported to and from school if needed. Academic grade checks will be done every three weeks to determine if students will be added or removed from attending school on Fridays. Students that maintain an accumulative passing grade will not attend school on Friday. School on Friday is required for those students not maintaining a passing average grade. We will communicate to those parents/students that will be required to attend prior to 10/30. Students that attend on Fridays can bring a water bottle and a snack if they choose. If your child will need transportation to attend school on Friday of each week, please complete the following form by Friday, October 23: https://forms.gle/e9tAMEQ6dE7v5kGQ9 Please continue to encourage your student to complete assignments on remote learning days. It is our observation that those who are struggling are not engaging or not completing school work on days they are not in school. If you have any questions, please contact me via email at bkern@vandals203.org or by phone at 618-283-5151. Respectfully, Brian Kern, Principal

ATTENTION ALL HONOR CHORUS MEMBERS FROM LAST YEAR: T-shirt pick up will be at VES circle drive Wednesday, September 30th from 3:30-4:00pm. Please drive-thru and pick up your shirt! Thanks! Lisa, Nancy & Billie

Please see our COVID-19 update. Enjoy the weekend!

We have been approved for free lunch and breakfast for all students attending through December 31st. Signup is the same as when we started school this year. If you have questions contact your student's school.

Good afternoon. Please see the letter regarding our COVID-19 updates.

Mr. Jones demonstrating Bernoulli's principle and discussing scaling to larger objects in 7th grade science.

We will continue to update you as we have new positive COVID-19 cases. Please read the letter for our update today.

Information about Common Goal/Teacherease below: Mobile App Updates 9/8/2020 Over the past few weeks we released updates to our mobile apps. We made a number of nice changes, and wanted to make customers aware of them. New Parent/Student Mobile App We recently released a complete rewrite of the parent/student mobile app. It looks more like a mobile app, and less like a mobile web-page -- similar to the teacher/admin app. We hope you like the updated user interface. Android Parent App The parent app is now available on Android. This gives parents access to mobile apps on both of the major platforms: iOS and Android. We think this is meaningful as schools can direct parents to use the mobile app, and it will work regardless of their choice of device. Instead of creating a separate app, we added parents to the existing TeacherEase app. The Android app now works for teachers, admins, AND parents/guardians (but not students yet). https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.teacherease.mobile.android Unfortunately, students cannot yet use the mobile app on Android. We need to do more work to comply with Google’s Family Policy, which currently prevents us from using “Sign-In with Google” and some other functionality we need. Once resolved, we’ll release a separate app for students. Notifications on Android We also implemented notifications on Android, which were a gap in the previous teacher/admin release. Parents can receive notifications when their student is absent, grades were entered, homework assigned, etc. Teachers can receive notifications too, when they receive a parent message, students turn in work, etc. With the exception of student support, Android is now at feature parity with iOS. All features available in iOS are in the Android app too. Improved Control of Notifications Since enabling notifications in mobile apps, we redesigned the communications flow from school to students and parents. The first improvement is to allow recipients to control how they receive messages. When a message is sent, they can choose to receive it as email, mobile app notification, or both. Some users want real-time results and prefer their phone to buzz whenever there’s an update. Others would rather messages silently queue, to be checked later. This is configured in “Notification Settings.” When admins/teachers send a message to parents/students, they don’t need to be concerned with recipients’ notification preferences. They just send a message, and it will be delivered using the recipient's preference (email, mobile app, or both). TeacherEase uses the right format based upon the recipient’s notification settings. If an admin/teacher sends a message, and the recipient has chosen to receive it as a mobile app notification (and not email), then they receive a notification. The first thing the recipient sees is the notification (it will show in their news feed too). If the user clicks on the notification (or news feed item), they are taken to a TeacherEase page to view the full message on their device. As usual, messages are logged and can be viewed later. If users don’t install the app, or enable notifications on their device, they can’t choose app notifications in the TeacherEase settings. We’d encourage users to enable notifications. We hope you like the new mobile functionality. The Common Goal Team