School and Community Winter 2023

MSTA Presents Podcast Last summer, MSTA launched MSTA Presents, a new weekly podcast with episodes ranging from book recommendations to legislative updates, teacher tips to information on programs and resources available to Missouri teachers. You can subscribe anywhere you get your podcasts, and the 20-30 minute episodes are the perfect length to fit in to your routine. Here are some of the highlights:

Episode 4: MSTA’s Legal Services MSTA Senior Staff Attorney

they might be headed. “The four-day school week is not part of people’s vision for where they want education to go. It’s a symptom of other things. Just stomping out the four-day week is not going to resolve the problems that have caused this.”

Kyle Farmer shares some of the resources and support available through MSTA’s Legal Services

department. MSTA members are able to directly contact members of the MSTA legal staff with any employment law questions, avoiding a potentially costly relationship with an outside attorney. “I think that people don’t recognize is attorneys are pretty specialized. Jane (O’Toole), Scott (Smith) and I have worked in education law for a very long time and it’s a specialized part of the law that most attorneys haven’t been around. It’s funny how many times we have had members who have gone out and just gotten their own attorney, and then that attorney will call us and say, ‘OK, I understand the basics, but I need to know the specifics about this world,’ because there are some specific things in education that you’re just not getting elsewhere.” -Kyle Farmer

- Jon Turner

Episode 10: MOREnet MOREnet Project Manager Andy King shared some of the resources available to Missouri teachers, including a new Open Educational Resources

Hub and resources for teaching Cybersecurity. “The idea is to provide some equity to some of those district that don’t have the funds to buy these high-end educational resources. So districts are building lessons and resources, loading them into the OER commons, and they’re completely free.”

- Andy King on the Open Educational Resources Hub

Episode 5: Four-Day School Week Jon Turner, an associate professor at Missouri State, has researched the history of Missouri’s four-day school

Episode 12: RootEd Kara Tinklepaugh and Tracey Blaue share information about the RootEd Initiative. The RootEd Alliance was founded in 2018 as a way to narrow the

week. In this episode, he discusses the inception of the four-day week in Missouri, some misconceptions about four-day weeks, where four-day weeks are now and where

opportunity gap for students in Missouri’s schools. Rural schools educate 1/3 of our high school students, and 80%

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