Hello Haysboro Families!

WELCOME TO THE 2024-2025 SCHOOL YEAR!!!

We are very excited to welcome all of our returning families back and to meet all of our new ones! It was so great to see all of the smiles on our students (and staff’s) faces and hear enthusiasm for the upcoming school year!

We will do our best to send a message home roughly every week to share important information. We do our best to keep the information brief so that the emails aren’t too long, but with that said, hold on tight, this one has a lot in it.

New Staff

Many of you have had the chance to meet our new staff already but for those that missed earlier messages, here is an update:

Ms. Chen – Grade 3/4

Ms. Pettem – Education Assistant (Primarily Kindergarten)

Ms. Aguilar – Learning Commons Support

Lunchroom – Mr. Syed has returned to the world of IT over the summer. We are currently working to hire a lunchroom supervisor to fill this open position.

Street Safety

You may see a message from us on this topic frequently. With the support of School Council, we continue to try to bring awareness to street safety before and after school.

Please support student safety by:

·         Parking in appropriate locations (on the curb, outside of the bus zone) and facing the appropriate direction.

·         Using the crosswalk (we know it’s a long street but visibility can be a challenge and jay walking creates risks)

·         Using streets and alleys to change direction instead of a U-turn in the intersection in front of the school

Thank you in advance for modeling safe behaviour for our students and choosing safety and respect over convenience.

Communication

We will share information in several ways this year:

• Classes will work with their teachers weekly to highlight a few interesting items from their week and will share this in an email with you. These emails will also include important information relevant to your child’s specific class when needed (field trip info, special information on a project, etc).
• The school, school council and each classroom have Instagram accounts. We will share some images of things happening in the school/classrooms throughout the year because it’s always nice to be able to see the learning instead of just reading about it. However, please remember that this is not a two way communication space. Please see below for information on how to contact staff.
• If you have any questions about your child’s progress, please contact their teacher directly. You can find contact information on our website (some updates to this page are currently being finalized): https://haysboro.cbe.ab.ca/staff
• School Messages – As noted above, we will work to send home a message from the school as close to weekly as possible.

Gatherings and Assemblies

We are going to shift from previous process a little bit to offer opportunities for families to come in and be beside their children as they explain their learning (Celebrations of Learning) as well as times where we can gather around events (eg. Remembrance Day). While we will recognize many important dates and events throughout the year, we will generally focus on gathering with the community to celebrate the outstanding work that our students are doing.

Larger Events are coordinated with School Council and we are in the process of finalizing what this will look this this year. Last year, celebrating the work with our resident artist, Jeff Stockton was one such example. We have another resident scheduled to join us this year and we hope to find a way to gather to share some of this exciting work as well.

Elder Shirley

We are so fortunate to have Elder Shirley in our community. We are happy to share that she is scheduled to join our classrooms at multiple times throughout the 2024-2025 school year.

Open House

Thursday, September 26 from 5:30-7:00 pm. We would love to have your families in to meet our staff and see their child’s new classrooms. We would also invite you to see the amazing results of the garden committee’s work from last spring. If you haven’t seen the school garden yet this year, please pop by, it’s beautiful!

Forms, forms, forms

You will be receiving some forms and a cover letter over the next few days. Please read the cover letter carefully to see what needs to be returned and what you can keep for your own information. We also work in a digital way and many of our important forms are in your MyCBE account. Please remember to log in soon to ensure that you have completed the annual demographics verification (we need to verify that we have current contact information) and register for lunchroom supervision if your child stays with us during the lunch break. This is also where you will be able to see report cards when they are posted (2 times in a year). Please follow this link for more information: https://sis.cbe.ab.ca/public/home.html

Personal Mobile Devices

A letter was sent home on August 28 about the use of personal mobile devices and access to social media in schools in accordance with a Ministerial Order by the Government of Canada. CBE cares about the mental health and well-being of students. Restricting access to personal mobile devices and social media is expected to improve student achievement and learning outcomes. CBE strongly recommends students simply leave their devices at home, because in most cases, personal mobile devices are not needed to support student learning. Please refer to the CBE website for more information: https://www.cbe.ab.ca/news-centre/Pages/personal-mobile-devices-and-social-media-use-in-schools-2024.aspx

We want to express our deep gratitude to the school community for the warm welcomes and ongoing support of our exciting and inclusive community. As we both begin our second year at Haysboro, we are looking forward to working with our students, staff, families and school council to provide meaningful learning opportunities to every person in our school.

Important Dates:

Sept 2 - Labour Day - No School for Students

Sept 16 - Picture Day

Sept 26 - Open House 5:30-7:00pm

Sept 27 - Professional Learning Day - No School for Students

Sept 30 - National Day for Truth and Reconciliation - No School for Students

Have a wonderful long weekend!

Erin Bennett and Andrea Westine