Dear Parents,

There is much attention currently on the social and emotional supports that we provide our community members. As we see more need to address the mental health of our students and families throughout the state of Utah, there are more resources available to us.

During one of my recent meetings with superintendents, Primary Children’s Hospital addressed us about their experiences with mental health and children over the past two years. These incredible professionals have seen an exponential increase in children dealing with mental health issues. This increase has resulted in the development of more extensive outreach initiative to help parents and children in their own home. This initiative, the Stabilization and Mobile Response (SMR), is supported by the Utah Department of Human Services. It is an additional layer of support for students and families in crisis. Our district student support team or any family can access this service by calling 833-SAFE-FAM, 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Professionals will then help to triage the circumstance to better direct services. There is no cost to families.

If you find that you have a student concern, please use SafeUT or reach out directly to your school counselor or principal. In addition to this information, I encourage you to check out the Suicide Prevention Playbook sponsored by the Utah Suicide Prevention Coalition. Together, we can make sure we are doing our part to care for each other.

USBE staff are recruiting stakeholders from all educational areas to participate in a focus group considering a redesign of Utah’s graduation requirements for K-12 education. The focus groups’ participants will engage in a series of discussions to better understand how Utah students can achieve the knowledge, skills, and dispositions of Utah’s Portrait of a Graduate through the learning experiences they engage in leading to high school graduation. Participants will spend time considering different characteristics of innovate graduation models and identifying the ways in which Utah might apply them. Participants will explore and make observations about those models and share ideas that those models generate. The insights elicited from the focus groups will then drive a graduation working group in developing potential models for future consideration. The focus groups will be provided with a choice of face-to-face or virtual engagement to provide access to all who want to participate. They are scheduled at various times to allow for different stakeholders to be able to participate, too. The focus group sessions will be held in October and November and will each be two hours long.  To register, please submit the information HERE by October 21, 2022.

The Utah Full Day Kindergarten Now website is a great place to find resources on FDK. 

This past month, we recognized our school custodians and our talented members of our technology department. I just need to give a shout out to those employees that serve our school communities in these areas of our school community. We do not take for granted their quality work, dedication, and abilities.

Keep checking the calendar and social media posts from your child’s school to keep up with upcoming activities. Fall Break for students is coming up on October 13^th, 14^th and 17^th. 



Take care,
Nan