Dragon Tales

What a great first week. I'm sure your students are as tired as the adults in the building and ready for a 3-day weekend. However, that exhaustion is the sign of a great first week. It has been so fun watching our 6th graders get acclimated to the building, their schedules and transitions of middle school. It was so uplifting to see the smiles on the faces of our returning students as they connected with peers they had not seen all summer. Our amazing teaching staff was hard at work this week establishing community, routines and norms for their classrooms. The student excitement for Pizza Day on Thursday reassured me that school, certainly, has begun.

It looks like it will be warm next week. Please send your kiddo with a water bottle and encourage them to wear clothing that will keep them cool. Our building is old and doesn't cool well. We have a variety of methods to help cool the building, but when it doesn't cool down at night it gets hard to mitigate the warm temperatures.

Lastly, this weekend we encourage you to take time to check out your student's planner and ask them what they did in class. Please also ensure that they get plenty of rest. The academics will surely start to ramp up in the coming days, so being well rested will be one key to success.

So grateful to serve your students,

Mr. Roosevelt

Unfortunately, we are still awaiting the return of ~60 chromebooks that needed repair over the summer. Instead of passing out chromebooks to some students, but not all, we have decided to wait until computers are available to all students.

At this time, we believe they will arrive during the middle of next week. Once they arrive, we will get them coded and assigned to students. At this time we are expecting students to get their computers on September 6th or September 9th.

Additionally, as stated in previous newsletters, we had over 100 chargers not returned. As such, we will only be distributing chargers to students who do not have a USB-C charger at home. The USB-C charger (pictured here) is a fairly common charger, which many families likely have. If you are able to make a donation to help us purchase more chargers, please click here.

Chromebook Reminders To Share With Your Student:

• Charge your chromebook every night

• Care for your chromebook. If damaged, you may have to pay to replace it!

• Bring it every day

We encourage all families dropping students to off to try and avoid doing so in front of the building. NE Everett Street is very narrow and gets very crowded. Please set a drop off and pick up location with your students. Many use the area by the soccer field. Others drop off on 24th or on NE Flanders St.

Additionally, we STRONGLY encourage families to avoid driving west on NE Everett St. Generally speaking, when driving past the school please drive towards the higher street numbers (Ex: From NE 24th towards NE 28th). This helps avoid traffic jams and back ups.

I’ve previously shared that cell phones and other electronics are to be kept “Off And Away In Lockers All Day.”

We have had reports this week of students using their phones in the restroom. We will be increasing our bathroom sweeps this week. Using phones in the restroom is incredibly unsafe. If we find a student using their phone in the restroom we will confiscate it and ask a parent to come pick it up from the office.

Canvas is the middle and high school digital learning platform used by PPS. Teachers will post assignments, grade assignments, and often calendar out what the upcoming learning looks like in their classroom.

There are two ways you can do this. You can follow these directions to pair yourself with your student's Canvas page OR you can sit down with your student and ask your student to show you their Canvas page. When working with my own middle school student, I have found the second option often leads to more robust conversations.

ParentVUE is a secure website and mobile app for parents and guardians. This is a great one-stop shop type of tool which offers parents and guardians real time access to:

• Name Pronunciation
• School Messages
• Calendar
• Attendance
• Grades
• Class Schedule
• Course History
• Grade Book
• School Information

Additionally, parent/guardians can complete their yearly verification of student data through ParentVUE

If your student is more than 15-minutes late to school, please make sure they check in at the main office. If they arrive less than 15-minutes late, encourage them to go straight to class.

Picture day is September 13th. If you'd like to order photos you can do so on mylifetouch.com. You will use your student's ID number when you place an order. Student ID cards will be issued once we get them back from our photographers.

These slides provide useful health information about illness prevention and how the school responds to contagious diseases.

Please take a moment to read through them to help keep our kiddos healthy.