Because this is an extremely time-intensive activity (including changing course syllabi, writing parent and student explanations of grading procedures, setting up grade books, etc.), is the district providing sufficient paid time that is exclusively to be used for these tasks to implement the board policy before the beginning of the 2011-2012 school year? Has there been an "official" estimate as to how long it will take teachers to prepare for the change, based on the number of preps each teacher teaches?

Power standards are not new to FWPS, and we did not create them. In reality, these are the same standards that teachers have been using for the past two to eight years, depending on when the state revised the specific standards. While it is understandable that teachers will need to align their instruction more closely to the power standards -perhaps through curriculum mapping in August — we hope most teachers are familiar with these as they are the standards they’ve been teaching previously.