Colleagues, I hope that you had a good summer break and enjoyed it with family and friends. As we welcome you back to the new school year, we also want to inform you about some salient issues and about our ongoing efforts on your behalf. - Less testing and no more SLOs. We’re not done yet but we are very close to reaching agreement with the District on a re-negotiated Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR) for the 2018-19 school year.The new pact would eliminate  the need for individual Student Learning Objectives (SLOs) for more than 90% of teachers and substantially reduce the amount of student testing - such as pre-tests and post-tests. Instead of individual SLOs, the District will set, with our involvement, a single target for student performance. More than 90% of school districts in New York State are already using group targets for APPR.  While we continue our efforts to entirely get rid of the junk science that is APPR, we are doing all we can to diminish its harmful...