Eye on the Junior High



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October 2021 - Posts

Good afternoon,


I hope your homes have survived the recent stormy weather with little damage. I have seen quite a few tweets from districts near the south shore that have cancelled school today for the second day in a row. I am grateful that our little area west of Boston went pretty unscathed through the recent storms.


Today’s update includes several messages from people and groups outside of RJ Grey that I promised I would share in my weekly newsletter.


The first message is to highlight the request that came to you yesterday, from our Superintendent. If you didn’t see this message yet, please check your email from yesterday afternoon for a message from AB. The quick version of the request is that we anticipate needing to reduce the number of buses in our fleet by up to 7 buses in the next few weeks. In order to do this in an organized manner, we need to determine the exact number of riders we anticipate. Below is a portion of the letter from Mr. Light:


“We would like your help on a temporary basis while we work to hire additional staff and return to our normal routes.  If you are willing to opt out of bus transportation and drive your child to school, please complete the Bus Opt Out Form.  This will allow us to minimize our bus ride times as much as possible.  

  • Log in to your PowerSchool Parent Portal account here (or via our website under Families>Parent Portal). 

  • Follow the instructions here on how to complete the consent form for each one of your students.  If you need help completing the form, please reach out to your child’s teacher at the elementary or counselor at the junior high or high school.


We ask that you do this as soon as possible and no later than this Sunday, October 31.” 


Last week, I had the chance to meet with the two membership chairs of the Acton-Boxborough PTSO. The Parent-Teacher-Student Organization in grades 7 - 12 operates as a single organization, different from the elementary, where each school has its own PTSO. The PTSO has been generous to RJ Grey over the years: they help pay for our student planbooks every year, support our after school activities and dances, and have helped us financially with capital improvements including furniture in our cafeteria annex. I let Maria and Karen know that I would pass on information about their monthly meeting, as well as the request for donations. The PTSO asks for a $50 donation for the year. This avoids us asking anyone to sell wrapping paper, cookie dough or other fundraisers. My own daughters’ school PTO asked them to sell wrapping paper. The short story is that my wife and I will have wrapping paper for the next 5 years as a result. Please check out the PTSO site and support them financially, if you can, or attend a meeting if you’d like.


Finally, parents from our Project Graduation Committee reached out and hoped that I could share some information about how to become involved in this annual event. There is a blurb below about the event, but I wanted to share that as a former ABRHS teacher and assistant principal, I see the real value in this event and I hope you might consider giving some time to learn more and become involved. The high school is beautifully transformed into a fun, inclusive event space for students to be with each other safely on the night of their graduation. It takes an army of volunteers to pull this off - and it is quite magical when it happens! The event happens as a result of a ton of volunteers, generally the families of underclassmen (non-Seniors). Please read on and be in touch with the coordinators if you can play a role. Some kind, energetic souls will organize it when your students are graduating - if you’re able, they would appreciate your help now.


“RJ Grey Parents: we need you to JOIN PROJECT GRADUATION!

 

Project Graduation is an all-night, substance-free party for AB seniors on commencement night. As you may know, Project Graduation began in Maine over 30 years ago after one especially tragic commencement season in which 18 teenagers died in alcohol and drug-related incidents. It is a long-standing tradition in our school district, and since Acton-Boxborough’s first Project Graduation in 1989, well over 10,000 AB graduates have participated in the event and stayed safe on graduation night! 

 

After leading the charge for years, many of our current team will be graduating along with their children. We need new parent volunteers to keep this amazing, decades-long tradition going! Looking ahead, we are seeking new co-chairs as well as decoration and entertainment team leaders. Now is the time to join us and shadow current chairs. You'll have fun, and together we will continue to keep kids safe. Grab a friend or make a new one with Project Graduation. Please send us an email to learn more. We'll announce our kick-off meeting in November, and then have monthly meetings starting in January. We can't wait to welcome you to ABRHS and Project Graduation!”


Jennifer Mabardy & Jennifer Philion

AB Project Graduation 2022 Co-Chairs

[email protected]

https://www.abprojectgrad.org


Here are some upcoming dates at RJ Grey:

-Friday, October 29: Halloween Dress-up Day;

-Monday, November 1: School Picture Retake Day;

-Monday, November 1: Early Release at 1 pm;

-Tuesday, November 2: No School - Professional Learning Day

-Thursday, November 11: No School - Veterans’ Day

-Monday, November 15: Early Release at 1pm



That’s it for this week - I hope you have a safe and happy Halloween!


Take care,

Jim


Posted by jmarcotte  On Oct 28, 2021 at 2:52 PM
  

Good afternoon,


Today was our first Team Community Building Day at RJ Grey. Today was designed for the 8th graders; the 7th graders are tomorrow. This summer, when the admin team was crafting plans for the year, we put a few dates on the calendar that would focus on joy and community for our students. Each team (8 Blue, 8 Green, etc.) had classes up through lunch and then transitioned into a Zoom assembly followed by activities planned by their teachers. One team made 25 scarecrows, one team created sidewalk chalk designs that matched certain themes. Members of another team learned to play rugby! The beautiful weather helped support the outdoor activities. My overall thinking as I walked through many of the activities was, “I hope this is what they remember.” Kids were connecting with each other, with their teachers, and doing something different!  The seventh grade activities are set for tomorrow and I hope for the same joy and community feeling. We’ll repeat these days in January and March.


We are entering the season when 8th grade families may start to think about plans for next year. Most of our students will go to Acton-Boxborough Regional High School for the ninth grade. We’ll work to connect with families this spring for course selection and other items. There is no need to rush the transition to 9th grade! However, if your child might be interested in attending a technical high school, or a private school, we need to start connecting and sharing some resources.


Technical high schools: The Town of Acton belongs to the Minuteman Regional School District. Our 8th graders who live in Acton who wish to attend a technical school apply to Minuteman High School. Minuteman has a process for reviewing applications and will offer admission to students from member towns based on set criteria. In November, we’ll have a chance to take a bus of interested 8th graders (from both towns) to Minuteman for a tour. You’ll learn more about that in the next few weeks. 


The Town of Boxborough does not belong to the Minuteman Regional School District. Boxborough students who wish to apply to Minuteman apply as non-resident members. Students from Boxborough also have the choice to apply to Assabet Valley Technical High School (Marlborough) or Nashoba Technical High School (Westford). In all three cases, the students apply as residents of non-member towns. Our counselors are helpful in talking through options with you or your child. If your child lives in Boxborough and wants to learn more about technical school options, please click here to indicate that - a counselor will then be in touch with your child. 


Private Schools: Students in either grade may be considering attending a private school for next year. This is also a step that starts in the fall, so if you’ve considered applying to a private school, please click here to access our Electronic Form for Private School Application. 


Your child will often need recommendations from a counselor and several teachers. Below is a paragraph I’ve stolen from my predecessor, Mr. Shen, about seeking these recommendations: 


Our teachers and counselors are happy to support students in their applications, and take seriously the crafting of a recommendation.  With that in mind, we ask that families honor the request that teachers be approached about letters of recommendation at least 4 weeks in advance of when those letters are due.  In many situations, parents initially reach out to teachers on behalf of their child, which is perfectly fine.  It’s also important for the student to connect with their teachers first about their interest in private schools.  This is valuable for a few reasons.  First, hearing a bit more about the student’s interest in the schools to which they are applying gives the teacher a better sense of what might be useful to include in the letter.  Secondly, having a teacher find recommendation forms on her desk, or sent via email, without any prior explanation from a student or parent is never the ideal way to start the conversation about a recommendation. By no means are teachers and counselors expecting students to feel indebted to them for writing a letter, and forever genuflect whenever they enter the room. However, speaking directly to the teacher is, I think, central to showing an appropriate level of appreciation for this additional task the students are asking their teacher to complete on their behalf.  If you think your child may be a bit nervous with this task, you might encourage them to speak with the counselor, who can offer some tips and even help them practice.  Your child’s counselor is also, in general, a great resource for various aspects of the application process.


Finally, as we approach the end of October, I highlight that RJ Grey has traditionally hosted Halloween Dress Up Day (Friday, October 29th). This, too, fits with our work on community and joy this year. We usually have about half of our students dress up, and likely half of our staff, too. There is no requirement to dress up, but we support anyone who would like to! Costumes must be appropriate for school and may not include weapons or other dangerous items. Each team will put forward a best costume for the entire staff to then vote on. The costume winner will win a prize for their homeroom.


Here are some upcoming dates at RJ Grey:

-Monday, October 25: Last day of PE/Health Rotation #1;

-Friday, October 29: Halloween Dress-up Day;

-Monday, November 1: School Picture Retake Day;

-Monday, November 1: Early Release at 1 pm;

-Tuesday, November 2: No School - Professional Learning Day

-Thursday, November 11: No School - Veterans’ Day


Take care,

Jim Marcotte


Posted by jmarcotte  On Oct 21, 2021 at 4:58 PM
  

Good afternoon,


Tomorrow is Pajama Day at RJ Grey, so if your child leaves the house in their PJs, it is in fact okay! In the nine years I’ve been here, I’ve never dressed for Pajama Day. But I do think a long-sleeved t-shirt and sweatpants might feel good tomorrow...in the name of school spirit! 


Tomorrow is also a pivotal day for our main office staff. I had previously mentioned that Mrs. Frey is vacating our main office support position to move across the street for a new position. Tomorrow will be her last official day with us - though we’ll rely on her to train our new hire whenever that person comes on board. In the meantime, we are getting by with the help of a lot of important people - Anne Chandler, Lena Jarostchuk, Debbie Brookes, and Sandy Carter - all women who work very hard behind the scenes to keep us moving forward. I’m incredibly grateful for their commitment to us and making it seem like we’re operating at 100%! We’re in the process of reviewing applications and doing interviews for this position. When we have a resolution, we’ll share that info with our families.


We’re also losing another member of our team tomorrow. Mr. Anthony Zeese has been at RJ Grey for four years. Since mid-August, he has been acting as an Interim Assistant Principal for our 8th graders. When we hired Mr. Zeese for this short-term position, we knew we were getting a hardworking, intelligent, competent person who likes kids. It turns out that we hit the jackpot when we brought Anthony onto our admin team for these 8 weeks. He has a future in school leadership whenever he wants to take the plunge. Starting Monday, he’ll be back in his position as the 7 Red Social Studies teacher. I think he’s ready to rejoin the somewhat more predictable routine of being a teacher. Huge thanks to Anthony for being an excellent school leader this fall. We are very fortunate to welcome back Cathy Boege to the 8th grade AP position starting on Monday. Cathy has been away on maternity leave since June. She joined us on Tuesday to get caught up on our ongoing work - she’s excited to be joining us again and we’re happy to have her back with us!


Our district continues to look for applicants for positions in many areas, but specifically, Transportation and Food Services. The district has increased salaries and has offered retention bonuses, too for these departments. Please see the flyers linked above for details - also reach out to me if you’d like more information. If you are interested, or if you know someone who is, please share these resources with them. We’re eager to increase our staffing in these two specific departments in the near future!


Our photo packages from our school picture days have arrived. If your family ordered prints, your student will be bringing home any purchased photo packages this week. Our photo retake day is scheduled for the morning of November 1. Throughout the morning, we’ll call down students to have their pics re-taken, or taken for the first time if they didn’t have a picture taken in September. Contact info and ordering info can be found on this flyer from Lifetouch.


Here are some upcoming dates at RJ Grey:

-Friday, October 15: Pajama Day;

-Monday, October 18: Early Release at 1 pm;

-Monday, October 25: Last day of PE/Health Rotation #1;

-Friday, October 29: Halloween Dress-up Day;

-Monday, November 1: School Picture Retake Day;

-Monday, November 1: Early Release at 1 pm;

-Tuesday, November 2: No School - Professional Learning Day

-Thursday, November 11: No School - Veterans’ Day


Have a great night,

Jim Marcotte


Posted by jmarcotte  On Oct 14, 2021 at 5:07 PM
  

Good afternoon,


In college, I was a Resident Assistant (RA) for a few years. When I tell people who know me that fact, they usually respond by saying, “yeah, obviously!” If you attended a college in the US, you’ll recognize the term as the person who gets a reduced-rate for housing in order to keep the shenanigans under control in the residence halls. You’ll remember that I was an assistant principal for 13 years. Being an assistant principal and an RA are pretty similar! An RA is also the person who promotes community in the residence hall and brings people together, too. That’s kind of what I’m trying to do in this new role. As an RA and a college student, we were always told to divide our year into short chunks...thinking about making it to Thanksgiving or the end of the semester was sometimes daunting. Making it from late August to Columbus Day was a much more realistic milestone to arrive at! The same holds true for educators - we’ve made it to (what we now call) Indigenous Peoples Day. While there have been other days off this fall, this one is always a marker for me that the year is proceeding. From our point of view, it’s proceeding well. I hope your experience thus far indicates the same. 


Since we’re now into the hard work of the year, I wanted to point out a resource that you may or may not be aware of. Each of our teams maintains a homework document, outlining the nightly homework, assessments, and when appropriate, the longer-term projects. You can find your child’s team homework doc by checking out our website (grade 7 / grade 8). You might choose to bookmark the specific doc for your child’s team. This doc will help you have a handle on two things: 1 - were they telling you the truth when they said there was no homework? And 2 - you can have a general sense of what might be happening in class when the answer to your question “what did you learn about today?” is “nothing.” 


Next Friday, October 15th, is the due date for our teachers to submit “interim reports.” We’ll then collate those reports and email them to families the following week. At RJ Grey, not every student will get an interim. Interims will come to families as a heads up for a few reasons: low grades, poor homework completion, classroom behavior, or other reasons that our teachers want to make you aware of. Receiving an interim is not the end of the world. All it should do is alert a family and student that something could be going differently before our trimester ends in late November. We ask our teachers to include a narrative as part of the interim and we hope they are able to offer suggestions to improve whatever the situation might be. Whenever you have a question about what’s on an interim report, or if you want to check in about something specific, I ask you to reach out directly to the teacher.


Switching gears, but still focusing on communication, I hope some of us will connect over the Apple TV show, Ted Lasso. Tomorrow, the final episode of season 2 comes out - I’m hoping for some resolution to a few plot points! (the picture on the right is of the sign in my office). I’ve been talking about this show since last year when I sent this message to our staff as part of a weekly update: If you have access to Apple TV, watch Ted Lasso. It’s a great show about a football coach who ends up coaching soccer in the Premier League in England. He’s a happy guy with a quick wit, who has a tagline that I started to pick up on: “I appreciate you.” He uses it a ton to random people he encounters, but when you get to know him, you know he means it. I mean it - I appreciate you and I hope you have a good weekend.”


Last year I was writing that particular message (in March) to our hardworking staff who were making the best of a really challenging year. We’ve carried our own internal momentum into this year and I’m not quite sure if I’d say this year is any easier than last year. If I could pass on a request to you, it would be to reach out to some of your child’s teachers telling them that you appreciate them. It may not be now, and it doesn’t have to be a long message, but if you appreciate your child’s teachers this year...they’d love to hear it. 


Here is a preview of things to come at RJ Grey:


-Monday, October 11: No School - Indigenous Peoples Day;

-Friday, October 15: Pajama Day;

-Monday, October 18: Early Release at 1 pm;

-Monday, October 25: Last day of PE/Health Rotation #1;

-Friday, October 29: Halloween Dress-up Day;

-Monday, November 1: School Picture Re-take Day;

-Monday, November 1: Early Release at 1 pm;

-Tuesday, November 2: No School - Professional Learning Day


As we head into this milestone-worthy long weekend, I hope you get a chance to relax with your friends and families. 


Take care,
Jim Marcotte

Posted by jmarcotte  On Oct 07, 2021 at 5:06 PM
  

Good afternoon,


A few weeks ago, as one of our daily community questions (via the morning announcements), I asked students what their favorite month was. I stopped into the ASC that day to learn that many students love October! Some loved it for Halloween or because it was a birthday month for one of them. I have to agree that October is pretty great. My wife is an English teacher and a lover of anything related to Anne of Green Gables. A famous quote by the author of those stories (L.M. Montgomery) speaks to this well, “I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.” I tend to agree with Ms. Montgomery. If you are like me, you are extremely grateful that the humidity of this past summer and fall are behind us until next year. Bring on October!


As the weather turns a bit cooler, I did want to point out that we will still allow students to eat outside for much of this month. Rain does keep us indoors, but I’m hoping that not much else will keep us inside this month! This week the bees were a bit of a problem, but we’ll keep an eye on that. So please encourage your children to dress for the weather - including outdoor lunch. It might also tend to get a bit brisk in our classrooms at times until the heat is turned on later this fall. One of our Covid mitigation strategies is to have as much ventilation as possible. So even when it’s chilly outside, we’ll have our windows cracked to allow for greater airflow. Asking your student if they have a sweatshirt or another layer before they leave the house in the morning would be helpful for us all.


Thank you to everyone who participated in our School Council election last week. I am grateful to the parents and guardians who put their name out there to be considered for a place on the council. We ended up electing some great new members. This year’s parent reps on the School Council will be Cathy Brooks (grade 8 returning), Kate Nelson (grade 8 new), Brian Andrew Smith (grade 7 new) and Kerry Lewis (grade 7 new). While these are members who will show up each meeting, I want to invite any interested parent or guardian to join our School Council meetings. We’ll start the year by meeting via Zoom, and as things progress this year, we may move to in-person meetings. The planned dates for our School Council meetings are below (all at 7pm), and I will be updating our RJG website with this info as well:

Monday, October 4, 2021

Monday, November 15, 2021

Monday, January 3, 2022

Monday, February 7, 2022

Monday, March 14, 2022

Monday, April 11, 2022

Monday, May 16, 2022


Zoom address: https://abschools.zoom.us/j/6927495552


If you receive our daily announcements (and I hope you do), you’ll have noticed that many of our clubs have started up over the past two weeks. We have updated our list of clubs and activities on our school website. If your child is looking for some way to become involved at RJ Grey, I’d recommend taking a look at this link for some ideas.


Lastly, I shared with our staff today that Mrs. Frey, who works in our main office, is moving on to a position in the central office this month. If you know Katy Frey, you know that she is a breath of fresh air and a huge asset to our school and admin team. We wish Katy the best of luck in her new position, but we will temporarily grieve her loss! We will be looking to replace Mrs. Frey in the main office soon. The position interacts a ton with students, with families, and with teachers. If you know someone who likes kids, is calm and patient under pressure, can communicate clearly, and can be a pleasure to work with, please encourage them to consider applying. The posting will be available on our
district site soon.


Here is a preview of things to come at RJ Grey:


-Monday, October 4: 8th graders will have a virtual visit from the staff at Minuteman High School to explain the Minuteman offerings and admissions process;

-Monday, October 11: No School - Indigenous Peoples’ Day;

-Monday, October 18: Early Release at 1 pm;

-Friday, October 29: Halloween Dress-up Day;

-Tuesday, November 2: No School - Professional Learning Day and Election Day


Take care,

Jim Marcotte


Posted by jmarcotte  On Oct 01, 2021 at 5:35 AM
  
 
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