Vandalia Junior High School

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

Just a Reminder- There will be no school on Monday, September 7th in observance of Labor Day! Enjoy your weekend!

We are now reporting our internal COVID data at least weekly to the public. You can find the link here: http://bit.ly/vandalscovid Stay safe and enjoy the Labor Day weekend!

Parents/Guardians/Students, Good day everyone! We wanted to reach out to the families of our students to thank you for your support and efforts of your child's education. Parents, students, teachers, administrators, and support staff are all learning day by day about this new educational format and how to best serve our students. Parental involvement has always been an important component in student learning and growth. Right now, more than ever, we need to work together as a school and community to give our students the best education they can have in these challenging times. Please have daily conversations with your child about their learning and their school work that needs to be completed and submitted on remote days. As a reminder, students are accountable for all classwork completion and their grades will reflect their progress. Have them explain to you, as parents, Google classroom and what they are doing in these platforms. We understand it is hard for parents to know what all is going on in Google classroom because none of us learned the way the students are learning today. Every day that is on the school calendar is a school day whether or not the student is in attendance. Students are expected to participate in learning activities on these remote days. Yes, that means on Fridays too, which is a remote learning day for all students. If you have any questions, please contact the junior high at 283-5151. Respectfully, Brian Kern, Principal

Good news this evening to share! The USDA announced yesterday that the free meal program has been extended until December 31st. We are able to provide free meals to all students effective immediately.

We are currently having phone bandwidth issues. I am working on this issue, so sorry for the inconvenience this morning.

We will move forward with our hybrid learning model next week based on our updated metrics that I shared yesterday. This is being sent out in response to Fayette County hitting the COVID Warning level today. Thank you for your patience and understanding this week.

September Breakfast and Lunch Menu: https://5il.co/kd5i

Informational update- Our COVID-19 Mitigation Metrics have been updated to reflect the new IDPH COVID-19 County & School Metrics released this week.