From the Director

​What I am excited about…
 
Expanding Services! As everyone becomes more proficient with our health and safety protocols, we plan to slowly open up opportunities outside of our normal academic and ASA programs. This will include some PTA events, student social events, and some small invitational athletic events. These will be kept small and will be subject to all our usual health and safety protocols. You can read about some of them in this week’s Leopard’s Tale. As always, we will regularly reevaluate our practices and adjust accordingly. We sincerely hope to continue opening up; however, we will only do so to the extent that we can continue to be confident in our health and safety measures.
 
ASA’s Off to a Good Start! Many thanks to our coaches and students for a great start to our ASA program. Everyone is doing a great job of managing masks and distancing while helping our students to build important skills in their activities. We recognize that this is a smaller slate of offerings than we have become accustomed to. There are three main reasons for this:

• First, and foremost, is our need to keep the student numbers down in each activity so that we can accommodate the necessary distancing and supervision.
• Second, teachers have been so tied up managing our three learning paths amid the added challenges of our health and safety protocols that we excused them from offering ASA’s this term. This has given them some of the much-needed time and headspace they need to keep offering a high-quality academic program, but it has meant that we have fewer non-sports activities on offer.
• Finally, we have not offered any externally-coordinated ASA’s (e.g. gymnastics, judo, Drone Academy) to give us time to institutionalize our health and safety protocols with our own coaches before we begin to work with external ones.

 
Please continue to be patient and flexible as we take a careful, measured approach to returning to “normal.” We cannot afford to rush our reopening and potentially expose our community to added risk.
 
MAP Growth Testing! MAP Growth testing will be taking place in Grades 3-10 across the next few weeks. These online measures of math and literacy skills are used around the world. The results help us to monitor each student’s growth over time and provide guidance to teachers on how they can differentiate their instruction to meet individual needs.  We normally hold these tests twice per year but, due to the pandemic, we did not hold the last session, which would have been in May.
 
Verbal Jam Website – Please Visit! We now have almost 100 users on our new Verbal Jam webpage. Verbal Jam is designed to be an exclusive AISL online environment where thoughts, opinions, news, and advice all come together. We invite all AISL students, parents, and staff to use this tool to share, motivate, and educate! Please take a few moments to explore the site and please post messages on the Thrive Message Board. The Verbal Jam password is the same as the one we use for the Parent Portal.