Parent involvement can accelerate student achievement and enhance school programs. Our staff encourages parents to share their energy and talents to enrich our curriculum and programs. Dedicated parent volunteers continue to help provide opportunities for students to learn new skills and develop positive feelings of self-worth. Please contact individual teachers if you are interested in offering assistance. In addition to volunteer work, three organized groups provide tremendous assistance to our school. If you would like to become a member of the School Site Council (SSC), Parent Teacher Organization (PTO), or English Learner Advisory Committee (ELAC) please call the school for more information. Please check with the office for the district requirements to be a school volunteer or volunteer driver.
All visitors must sign in at the office during school hours.
School starts at 8:00 a.m. and is out at 2:23 p.m. on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. On Wednesdays, school still starts at 8:00 a.m. and gets out at 12:56 p.m. Students can arrive after 7:30 a.m. and be picked up promptly after the final bell; please do not go into a classroom prior to the final bell for the day. School office hours are from 7:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
If you need to leave a message for your student please call the office at (707) 472-5550 before noon to allow adequate time to deliver the message.
Good attendance helps children do well in school and eventually in the workplace. Good attendance matters for school success, starting as early as prekindergarten and throughout elementary school, and helps students stay on the path to academic success. By middle and high school, poor attendance is a leading indicator of dropout. Absences represent lost opportunities to learn in the classroom.
Student absences will be excused for personal illness, medical services, bereavement due to a death in the immediate family (one day of services held in California and three days for services held out of state), and religious holidays. Excessive excused absences may result in a referral to the district’s School Attendance Review Board (SARB). If a student is suspended, the suspension day(s) is considered an unexcused absence.
All other absences are unexcused, including but not limited to missed the bus, parent or sibling illness, power failure, overslept, car trouble, hair cuts, flat tire, personal family business, babysitting, etc. Excessive unexcused absences may result in a referral to SARB. If a student is suspended, the suspension day(s) is considered an unexcused absence.
Please remember that if your child is sick, please keep them home. We will be referring to the UUSD Health and Safety protocols to determine when it is appropriate for your student to return to school.
Keep your student at home if they have a temperature higher than 100.4 degrees even after taking medicine, throwing up or have diarrhea, or their eyes are pink and crusty.
Call the doctor if they have a temperature higher than 100.4 degrees for more than two days, throwing up or diarrhea for more than two days, had the sniffles for more than a week, and they aren’t getting better, or have asthma symptoms after using asthma medicine. (call 911 if they are having trouble breathing after using an inhaler).
State law requires a note or phone call from a parent/guardian for every school absence. Parents/guardians are asked to call the school by 9 a.m. at (707) 472-5550 if their child will be absent from school for any reason. If a parent chooses not to call, the student must bring a note to the office, signed by the parent/guardian upon returning to school.
Your note should include the following:
Students who are absent for three (3) days or more may have their parent/guardian call the office to request work. Homework requested for absences will be available at the end of the following day.
Requests for Independent Study must be received at least ten days prior to the planned dates of absence and must be for a minimum of three school days. It is the student’s responsibility to pick up assignments from each teacher prior to beginning the independent study. On the day of the student’s return to school, all completed assignments are to be turned in to teachers. Independent study is approved at the school site administrator’s discretion. Past unfilled independent study contracts may result in the current request being declined.
Please notify the school immediately of any change in a student’s address or telephone number so that parents or other designated adults can be notified in case of an emergency. The district ALL CALL system relies on our computer records for accuracy, when calling with important announcements for snow days or other events, both for the district and for our school. This can be done in the Ukiah Unified School District Parent Portal: https://aeriesgrading.uusd.net/parentportal/
Students may be excused from P.E. for a maximum of three consecutive days with a note from their parents. A note from a doctor is required for excusing a longer period of time. Any student excused from P.E. will also be expected to sit out during recess time and after-school sports.
Students, who exhibit unacceptable behavior, including behavior on the bus, poor attendance, or poor academic performance, may be denied the privilege of participating in special activities, sports, field trips, etc.
At Nokomis, we use a positive behavior intervention system (PBIS). Our school has three expectations to be: Ready, Responsible, and Respectful. Below are examples of the expectations for students on campus.
All staff will explicitly teach the behavior expectations. Students will be recognized with “ I-Cans ( I cooperate at Nokomis ),” an incentive in which they will be able to collect and use them on school and classroom rewards/celebrations when they demonstrate Ready, Responsible, and Respectful behavior. Please be sure to ask your child and their teacher about our “ I-Cans” and our three school expectations.
Nokomis staff use Restorative Practices to help students meet their expectations. Students can receive Student Behavior Referrals based on infractions of these three school expectations; “Be Ready, Responsible and Respectful. Each Student Behavioral Referral may be sent home, and parents may be asked to sign and return the slip to school the following day. These Student Behavioral Reports could result in the following:
After three Student Behavioral Referrals, the student may be sent to the principal’s office. Based on the referrals, the parent will receive a phone call home, and the student may be given a service task. The service task will be based on the behavior of the citations. This could be cleaning up in the cafeteria if they were throwing food or being unkind and having to help kindergarten students.
All rules and regulations at Nokomis follow the guidelines of the Education Code of the State of California, local laws, and Discipline Policy as set forth by the Ukiah Unified Board of Trustees.
Bullying is an act of repeated aggressive behavior in order to intentionally hurt another person, physically or mentally. Bullying is characterized by an individual behaving in a certain way to gain power over another person. Bullying can also be defined as when a person is "exposed, repeatedly and over time, to negative actions on the part of one or more other persons." A negative action is defined as "when a person intentionally inflicts injury or discomfort upon another person, through physical contact, through words or in other ways".
The U.S. National Center for Education Statistics suggests that bullying can be classified into two categories:
Direct Bullying: Direct bullying is a repeated act that involves a great deal of physical aggression, such as shoving and poking, throwing things, slapping, choking, punching, and kicking, beating, stabbing, pulling hair, scratching, biting, scraping, and pinching. Direct bullying can also be threatening, challenging, or calling someone names directly to their face.
Indirect Bullying: Indirect bullying is characterized by attempting to isolate the victim socially. This isolation is achieved through a wide variety of techniques, including spreading gossip, refusing to socialize with the victim, bullying other people who wish to socialize with the victim, and criticizing the victim’s manner of dress and other socially significant markers (including the victim’s race, religion, disability, sex, or sexual preference, etc.) Other forms of indirect bullying are more subtle and more likely to be verbal, such as name-calling, the silent treatment, arguing others into submission, manipulation, gossip/false gossip, lies, rumors, false rumors, staring, giggling, laughing at the victim, saying certain words that trigger a reaction from a past event, and mocking.
Bullying is exposing a person to abusive actions repeatedly over time and becomes a concern when hurtful or aggressive behavior toward an individual or group appears to be unprovoked, intentional, and (usually) repeated.
Bullying is a form of violence that involves a real or perceived imbalance of power, with the more powerful child or group attacking those who are less powerful. Bullying may be physical (hitting, kicking, spitting, pushing), verbal (taunting, malicious teasing, name-calling, threatening), or emotional (spreading rumors, manipulating social relationships, extorting, or intimidating).
Bullying can include any severe or pervasive physical or verbal act or conduct, including: communications made in writing or by means of an electronic act, directed toward one or more students that have or can reasonably be predicted to have the effect of placing a reasonable student in fear of harm to himself/herself or his/her property; cause the student to experience a substantially detrimental effect on his/her physical or mental health; or cause the student to experience substantial interferences with his/her academic performance or ability to participate in or benefit from the services, activities, or privileges provided by a school.
Bullying also includes one or more acts by a pupil or group of pupils directed against another pupil that constitutes sexual harassment, hate violence, or severe or pervasive intentional harassment, threats, or intimidation that is disruptive, causes disorder, and invades the rights of others by creating an intimidating or hostile educational environment, and includes acts that are committed personally or by means of an electronic act, as defined, that has any of the effects described above on a reasonable student.
Electronic act means the transmission of a communication, including, but not limited to, a message, text, sound, image, or post on a social network Internet website, by means of an electronic device, including, but not limited to, a telephone, wireless telephone, or other wireless communication devices, computer, or pager. A post on a social network Internet website shall include but is not limited to, the posting or creation of a burn page or the creation of a credible impersonation or false profile for the purpose of causing a reasonable student any of the effects of bullying described above.
Reasonable student means a student, including, but not limited to, a student who has been identified as a student with a disability, who exercises average care, skill, and judgment in conduct for a person of his/her age, or for a person of his/her age with his/her disability.
For the school to determine if an action will be defined as bullying, the action must have four elements:
NOTE: Even if the act is not determined to be bullying if it is a negative act, it will still be dealt with by the school as a discipline issue.
Not liking someone - It is very natural that people do not like everyone around them, and, as unpleasant as it may be to know someone does not like you, verbal and non-verbal messages of "I don't like you" are not acts of bullying.
Being excluded - Again, it is very natural for people to gather around a group of friends, and we cannot be friends with everyone, so it is acceptable that when kids have a party or play a game, they will include their friends and exclude others. It is very important to remind kids they do the same thing sometimes, too, and, although exclusion is unpleasant, it is not an act of bullying.
Accidentally bumping into someone - When people bump into others, the reaction depends mostly on the bumped person's mood. If they have had a bad day, they think it was an act of aggressive behavior, but if they are in the good mood, they smile back and attract an apology. This is also relevant for playing a sport, like when kids throw the ball at each other and hit someone on the head. It is very important for teachers and parents to explain that some accidents happen without any bad intention and it is important not to create a big conflict because it was not an act of bullying.
Making other kids play things a certain way - Again, this is a very natural behavior. Wanting things to be done our way is normal and is not an act of bullying. To make sure kids do not fall into considering it as an aggressive or "bossy" behavior, we need to teach them assertiveness. If your kids come home and complain that Jane is very bossy and she always wants things to be done her way, you can show them that they want it too and that Jane is miserable because she is not flexible enough and she will suffer in life for insisting that things be done her way. Again, although it is not fun or pleasant, this is not bullying.
A single act of telling a joke about someone - Making fun of other people is not fun for them, but the difference between having a sense of humor and making fun of someone is very fine. It is important to teach kids (and grownups) that things they say as jokes should also be amusing for others. If not, they should stop. Unless it happens over and over again and is done deliberately to hurt someone, telling jokes about people is not bullying.
Arguments - Arguments are just heated disagreements between two (or more) people (or groups). It is natural that people have different interests and disagree on many things. Think about it, most of us have disagreements with ourselves, so it is very understandable to have disagreements with others. The argument itself is not a form of bullying, although some people turn arguments into bullying because they want to win the argument so much. They use every means to get what they want and find a weakness in the other person, abuse knowledge or trust they have gained and use it against the other person. It is very important to distinguish between natural disagreements and bullying during an argument.
Expression of unpleasant thoughts or feelings regarding others - Again, communication requires at least two players. Although it may be unpleasant to hear what someone thinks about you, it is not a form of bullying but a very natural thing. In every communication, there are disagreements and some form of judgment about each other's attitude and behavior. If someone says to you, "I think this was not a nice gesture" or "You insulted me when you said this", this is not bullying but an expression of thoughts and feelings.
Isolated acts of harassment, aggressive behavior, intimidation, or meanness - The definition of bullying states that there is repetition in the behavior. Bullying is a conscious, repeated, hostile, aggressive behavior of an individual or a group abusing their position with the intention to harm others or gain real or perceived power. Therefore, anything that happens once is not an act of bullying. All the behaviors above are unpleasant and may need to be addressed, but they are not treated as bullying.
Now that we know that Bullying is a “repeated aggressive behavior that takes place over time”, what actions should you and your child take if it is happening to them?
Tell a parent - Too many times, students are taught to handle things themselves. Being bullied may be a new experience for your child. You, as a parent, have more life experience to help your child deal with it. As a parent, it is important to pay attention to what your kids are telling you and find out if things are happening more than once. If you, as a parent, have a concern, please contact the school administration as soon as possible.
Tell a trusted adult at school (counselor, teacher, administrator) - The number one reason bullying occurs at school is that the school does not know about it. If the school does not know about it, they cannot stop it. Work with your school – Remember your school wants to stop bullying as much as you do. Work with them as a team and devise solutions together. Standing up for yourself is not snitching!
We appreciate your support of our school expectations, which helps our school staff provide a safe and productive learning environment for your child.
Maintaining a safe school environment requires that all students use good judgment and display appropriate behavior. All students are expected to act in a manner that will not harm themselves or others. Students are also expected to refrain from disturbing classroom activities. Any behavior that may interfere with a teacher’s instruction or others’ learning is unacceptable. All school rules and regulations apply to the after-school program and activities held off-campus.
All students should be familiar with the following basic rules:
The staff believes that student attire should be respectful and show that the students are at school to do their best and learn. Attire must be safe and appropriate for PE and recess. Nokomis is a uniform school. The uniforms are burgundy or white (sleeved T-shirts are permissible) with khaki, blue, or Jean pants, shorts, or skirts. As per California Education Code, parents may opt out of uniform requirements by signing a waiver. The Nokomis dress code applies to students every day that school is in session, including holidays and spirit days.
The following uniform guidelines should be followed:
Personal toys, electronics, games, etc., are to be left at home. Such items leading to distraction in classes or on campus will be confiscated, and/or parents will be called to come and take them home.
The district or school assumes no obligation for lost, stolen, or damaged items left unattended. It is recommended that coats, hats, jackets, shoes, baseball gloves, etc., be labeled with permanent markers to cut down on the incidence of lost articles.
Multiple violations may result in increased disciplinary action, including, but not limited to, suspension.