End of School 2025
—June 13, 2025—
Well, the school year is over!
One of the things that always amazes me is what putting things away at the end of the year looks like. It isn't just taking down decorations and setting the out-of-office email, it is also going through the files and putting them where they belong.
Unlike many classroom teachers, I've worked with some of my students from Pre-K into middle school, and this has meant I tend to keep things from one year to the next. I don't, however, want to get bogged down in their 3rd grade files as we start high school.
I remember when packing up meant collecting all of the worksheets, drawings, and projects into individual filing folders. The folders kids who were graduating or moving to different school districts would get boxed up and put into district storage, or prepped to be mailed to whomever the new teacher was. It almost felt ritualistic, in a way.
Now, instead, I click into my Google Drive and see two folders: one marked "past years" and one simply marked "2024-2025." I select "2024-2025" and then make a copy of it, and then drag the original into the "past years" folder. I rename the copy "2025-2026" and open it up. Inside are folders with the name of each district, within those are the names of all the schools in each district, and then ones for each student.
I delete the folders for each student who is leaving, then in my continuing students' folders I clear out the information in the "Projects" and "Goals" folders, leaving just the last progress note at the top of the Google Sheet, and the explanation of the goals on each IEP page. Information documents will be updated next year when I have the names of all of their teachers.
After closing the laptop, there's a sigh. As a compromise with myself, I send my summer newsletter to the printer, along with a few coloring and diary sheets for the elementary school kids. I fold them up and stick them in envelopes for the office to mail out, because the physical paper is nice every once and a while.
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Summer Plans? Just Me, Frontline, the CCSS, and A Day In Our Shoes
—June 12, 2025—
What are you doing this summer?
Me? I’m going to spend some time working on getting my students’ IEP goals ready for the coming year. I’d like to have them all ready to plug into Frontline, a system that tracks absences, PD, IEPs and everything else in the education world. I’ve had a new login to use at every different district, but it is otherwise very convenient.
Now, normally I know what I want them to learn to do, but as there are no exams or assessments normed for DHH kiddos, and the CCSS are all written in a way that is clearly geared toward hearing students, what is it that I am going to be able to do differently?
I’m going to play with the Literacy standards page, where I can read all of them by grade. Then I open the IEP Goal Bank page created by A Day In Our Shoes where there are lists of IEP goals for everything from Reading Comprehension to Vocabulary to Self-Advocacy. It is absolutely amazing. None of the goals are exactly copy-paste-able, given that different states and districts have preferences for how they are written, but taking this as an example:
One of the Self-Advocacy goal ideas is: “Demonstrate an understanding of what their…disability is and communicate to others what he/she needs to learn successfully.”
Looking over at the literacy standards for “speaking and listening” (which is a often not applicable at all for some of my students) I found CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.SL.4 which reads “Present information, findings, and supporting evidence such that listeners can follow the line of reasoning and the organization, development, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.” It’s an anchor standard, so it’ll be applicable to any student.
My goal then becomes:
During the 2025-2026 school year, using study materials and access to research, [student] will demonstrate an understanding of their disability with 80% accuracy as measured by teacher data collection
They will create and give a presentation in which they are assessed on a 25 point scale
* identify 5 parts of ear anatomy
* explain 5 facts about hearing loss including showing an image of an audiogram and identify both sensorineural and conductive loss)
* expand upon 5 ways of getting auditory information (hearing aid, BaHa, cochlear implant, captioning, and ASL interpreter)
* discuss 5 important ideas about Deaf culture
* share 5 of their own interests or experiences