The PAC Mission:
To serve as the front line of communication facilitating cooperative efforts between home mentors, the school, and the RVA School Board with the intention to give a voice to families.
Well, first of all, what is the PAC? The state of Wisconsin will tell you that the PAC is the Parent Advisory Council, a mandate that every charter school have available for you as parents. So if there is an issue you have someone to go to.
Here at the RVA that would be me, The Parent Advisory Council President, Charlone Nikolaus. I will run any concerns up the ladder and get to the bottom of every question for you. You can reach me at nikolaus@ruralvirual.org or 920-255-6665.
You can expect the PAC at the RVA to create change for you as parents. This is how the Mentor Series came to be. We heard from one of our RVA moms with a desire to learn and grow as a home mentor and the Mentor Series was created!
You can voice your opinion too!
I will be holding four open forum discussions, not recorded. Where you as parents can discuss how you are doing, how you are implementing what you learned from the most recent Mentor Series or just pick my brain about the last Board Meeting. These sessions are all you. Just RVA parents having time to talk.
I will also be sending out four newsletters for the year updating you on what is going on within the RVA. I will be including any updates from the Board Meeting, Mentor Series or things from other parents.
If you have any questions or concerns please feel free to contact me; The RVA’s PAC President, Charlone Nikolaus at 920.255.6665 or nikolaus@ruralvirtual.org.
Field Trips
***Very important notice for anyone going on RVA field trips.***
Back in person!
Well, at last! Let's change the scenery, get out of the house and see some friendly faces up close. We are holding field trips in person!
That said, we have had some issues with behavior at these events. We need to all make sure we are on our best behavior at all RVA events. The venues work with us to make sure we can attend these events. Things like sliding on banisters, taking our masks off at venues that require them, or just being disrespectful in general can have these venues deny our requests in the future. Even just one or two bad examples can ruin it for everyone.
Caution - Be aware that if you are found to not be following the venue's guidelines you may be asked to leave.
All of us are so very excited to get back out and see each other again! We all need to make sure that we are not jeopardizing any future events in the RVA.
Take a look at the ruralvirtual.org Group Events calendar if you want to see what is going on in the school and keep updated on events. You can plan your schedule, find our zoom room links and any other information regarding a specific event. If you find you would like to inspire an event idea, please send it to your local coordinator, or to me and we would be happy to look into it for you.
We are looking forward to seeing you at the next RVA Event!
Scanning in Your Students Work
There are a lot of different ways you can submit your students' homework to their teacher and any road you take will get you there. I am so happy to tell you that recently I found out about an app (from my RVA teacher) called CamScanner. I LOVE IT, and I would love to share this information with you now.
A short run down, - It is free if you follow the directions below. You can take all the pictures of your work at once, it saves all of them on the app and sends all the pages as one PDF file so they are not saved to your phone pictures. From here I will just let the email I got from the RVA teacher do the work of explaining more. Work with it and see if it works for you, as we know not everyone thing works for all people, and if you have any other questions on it please feel free to contact me.
Download CamScanner from the App store on your smartphone. The basic version is free.
Once you open the app, a screen will show up describing the app - swipe left to move through these until you get to a screen offering a choice of upgraded "plans"
Just click "skip" on the lower right of this screen to continue on with the basic free version.
Then, you will get a screen that gives you a choice of signing in, or registering an account - which you can do, but if you'd rather not create an account, click on the (smaller!) print that says "Use now".
This will take you right to where you can start taking pictures of your documents.
Click on the camera icon - it may ask about allowing notifications and allowing the app to use your camera, and then you should be set to go.
Before clicking the camera icon to take the first picture, however, select "batch" instead of "single" so that you can take pictures of multiple documents and then save them into one .pdf format file. This will allow you to upload ONE file into the Google Drive shared folder instead of multiple, one by one (when you are submitting a week's work assignments).
Go ahead and take pictures one by one of the pages.
Click "finish"
Now you will see icons and options to "share," "email," or click the three dots for "more" which allows you to upload to a variety of online services including Google Drive.
From there you can email it to yourself and then save the document before uploading, or upload it directly into the Google Drive folder I've shared with you.
That's it! Pretty quick and painless once you have learned how to use it. The only other suggestion I would add is to have all of the homework pages arranged in some sort of order in a pile before you start, for example, the language arts weekly schedule, followed by the lang arts activity pages, then the science schedule and activity pages, the history schedule and then lastly math worksheet pages and finally any handwriting, Explode the Code, spelling, grammar, etc. worksheets.
The CamScanner app works with Google drive, and emailing your students work to your teacher in a PDF format. Which means you can use it whether you are in live courses or doing bookwork at home.
There are some more advanced features even with the free version that you might want to play with, but knowing just the basics that I outlined above, will do the job.
Reminder - Internet Reimbursement
Internet reimbursements are sent quarterly!
The new policy states that you don’t need to send in your internet bill for reimbursement, you just need to have an active student in the RVA to get the funds. The email will be sent to you on your RVA email asking if you would like to accept the allotted funds every semester. You will have the ability to decline the funds if you would want to do that as well.
This change was made starting this year. So remember to not send in your internet bill anymore, and respond to the email that gets sent if you would like to receive the funds.
If you have any specific questions the policy can be found in your student handbook, or reach out to me at any time!
The RVA has a program for you, our home mentors, called the Mentor Series. This is informational and educational to help make your experience of being a home mentor easier and better for your children. These will be announced by email invite and listed on the RVA calendar prior to airing in the Zoom Room.
You can view all the current scheduled topics, dates and times on the events calendar. If you have missed previous Mentor Series webinars feel free to visit our Mentor Series Library. Here you will find great resources to better your practices as a home mentor.
PAC Meeting
Our next PAC Meeting will be held on
Thursday, November 18th at 2 pm
Open Forum Parent Discussion
This meeting will be an open discussion, after the Mentor Network meeting at 1:15pm. If you have any questions or would like to be there to answer questions for other parents, please come. We hope to see you there!