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GLPS Families,

We had a wonderful first full week of school this week, after three in a row with only four days, and it is great to see the learning routines and structures throughout our classrooms. It is safe to say that the 2026-2027 school year is now in full swing! I want to start this week with a reminder that a couple of weeks ago, I provided some engagement opportunities for you, and I would invite you to revisit them if you are interested. Here is the link for the Caregiver School Improvement Team, here is the one for the Wellness Committee, and here is the one for our Portrait of a Learner Input Sessions.

For today’s update, I want to spend some time further explaining the Portrait of a Learner philosophy and process that is a focus for us this year and moving into the future. We have been working with an organization called the Future of Learning Council for a couple of years to help guide our learning in this area. In fact, we hosted the group’s monthly meeting this week, and had nearly 300 innovative educators from around the state here at Sawdon, learning and collaborating around creating more student centered learning environments. We know that our students are heading out into a workforce and post secondary environment that requires a wide variety of skills, and we want to ensure that their time at GLPS is preparing them for that reality. Our work with the FLC is centered around developing learning systems that ensure our students have those skills, and that our pre K through 12th grade programming is setting kids up for success.

The foundation of that proposed successful pathway is the development of a Portrait of a Learner, which is a set of skills that are cultivated from the moment a student steps into our district until they graduate. By identifying these skills, and then ensuring students learn them, we can better align resources to ensure that all kids can thrive during their time at GLPS and then when they graduate. We have worked with our Caregiver School Improvement Team and district leadership teams to gather feedback and input on how to define those skills, and starting next month, we will expand that out to get additional input from staff, students, families, and the community. After gathering those thoughts and ideas, we will distill it all down into a reasonable set of competencies that we want all students to have, and then build the systems to ensure that all students demonstrate mastery of them. We plan to share the set of competencies in December, so stay tuned!

As we wrap up this week, I want to remind you to take a look at our 2026 bond page, and make sure you set aside September 29th and October 15th from 6-8 as we will host community open houses here at Sawdon to answer questions and discuss the projects in detail. In the meantime, I truly appreciate the opportunity that I have to learn and lead here in Comet Country. Thank you for your support, and as always, I am #proudtobeacomet!