R.J. Grey Junior High School

Good afternoon,

We are just a half day away from February vacation. If you have travel plans as a family, I hope they allow you to end up somewhere warm. And if your family is sticking close to home this coming week, like mine, I hope we have a few more days that felt as great as today.

I want to make sure and thank some people that have helped us out in significant ways recently. Firstly, we wrapped up our Ski and Board Club this week. Over the last 7 weeks (we canceled one week), about 100 students boarded buses to Wachusett Mountain to ski and board with their friends and classmates. This club was historically organized and chaperoned by RJG staff members. For lots of reasons, we started over this year with a lot of new adults, including our Advisor Ernie Camposano. As this was his first time taking on the club, our main office did a lot of organizing and leg work ahead of time, which we are pretty good at…that was the easy part. The hard part then came when we had real kids with real equipment on real buses! Ernie did a great job of leading and making sure kids were safe and had a great time. I want to thank our staff chaperones: Kat Contini, Karen Dudziak, Anastasia Koulopoulos, Katie Mammola, Lisa Piandes, and Gina Saxena. And we benefited from a committed group of parent chaperones: Amy and Matt Arnett, Josh Bregman, Melissa Clayton, Cydney Cotter, Mike Plate, Jennine Redmond, and Dan Stouch. I am grateful that these parents gave up their Tuesday afternoons and evenings to make an enjoyable experience for many of our kids!

We’ve also been doing a good amount of collecting and donating here at school. If you see our daily announcements email, you’ll know that students and staff on 7 Blue have been collecting Pennies for Pets for donation t

o the Lowell Humane Society. They’ve made great progress - they have collected over $700! And our Student Council has been hard at work with collecting canned goods for the Acton Food Pantry. The picture to the right was taken yesterday…after I moved several bags and boxes out of the main hallway. The table area was literally overflowing with generosity. If your pantry cabinets contributed to our collection, we thank you! These two drives are just one way that students get to experience the joy of giving and contributing to their community. We’re proud of the student initiative these past few weeks.

If you joined me last night at the Chorus Concert, I hope you were also pleased with the performances. It was a short show, but Mr. Charig mentioned that it’s a lot of work to sing in masks! I was very proud of our students for committing to singing through the Pandemic. Last night was our first evening Chorus Concert in quite a while. It felt good to be a part of!

Here are some upcoming dates to be aware of:

-Friday, Feb 18: Blue and Gold Day!

-Friday, Feb 18: RJ Grey Early Release, 11:10 am

-Monday, Feb 21 - Friday, Feb 25: School Closed for February Vacation

-Monday, Feb 28: School Reopens

-Monday, March 7: Early Release at 1 pm

-Monday, March 7: Youth Risk Behavior Survey for 8th graders

-Friday, March 11: Sports Jersey Day

-Friday, March 11: End of Trimester 2

Take care, and happy vacation!

Jim Marcotte

Good evening,

I’m not sure what has been different about the sun over the past few days - but maybe the fact that it has been present is a good start…and it feels brighter! I’m sure any 7th grader could give me a lesson or two on this topic based on their science studies this year, but it just feels different this week. Maybe we’re emerging from our winter dark period. Whatever we call it, it works for me!

We are heading into the last week before February vacation! On Friday, February 18th, we’ll have Blue and Gold Day at RJ Grey. This is a fun day where students dress in their blue and gold to show their school spirit. In a more typical year, we would have an assembly featuring several student groups. We made the call about a month ago to skip the assembly this year. At the time, bringing together two full grades, or even one, seemed to go against the Covid norms we were enforcing. We seem to be coming down from those high case counts, which is great for all of us. So while we’ll skip the assembly on Friday, we’ll still ask students and staff to dress in their blue and gold. And as we’ve shared before, RJ Grey will also have an early release (11:10 am) on Friday, February 18th. 

You might have seen the news out of DESE on Wednesday where the Commissioner announced he is not going to renew the mask mandate in schools, effective February 28th. We’ll share more info next week about what that looks like, but it is important to us to find a way to make sure that anyone who wants to continue wearing a mask feels comfortable doing so. I’ve thought about my own mask-wearing post February vacation. I think I’ll likely still wear one while supervising lunch, but maybe not when I’m visiting a class? The point is, this will be a personal and family decision and we’ll support students with those decisions. More will come out next week on this most recent change.

On Tuesday, our students watched a brief video that we prepared, highlighting our new Incident Reporting Form. This can be an anonymous way for students or families to report to us something important. The video we made for them highlights that they can use this form if they’ve already considered how to handle this with one of their trusted adults at home or at school. Our ideal situation is when a student comes directly to a staff member to talk about an issue. This lets us respond immediately, offer support, and make sure the student is feeling okay. Receiving an electronic report makes it less personal, but it may make students feel a bit more safe, so we welcome it. While the form does allow for anonymous submissions, we do encourage students to share their own names so that we can follow-up, ask additional questions, and when possible, provide resolutions. If you have a child struggling with something, and they’re not ready to approach someone at school, please remind them of this option, which also resides on our school homepage.

Here are some upcoming dates to be aware of:

-Tuesday, Feb 15: ABRHS Curriculum Night, 6 pm, on Zoom

-Wednesday, Feb 16: RJ Grey Chorus Concert, 7 pm

-Friday, Feb 18: Blue and Gold Day!

-Friday, Feb 18: RJ Grey Early Release, 11:10 am

That’s it for now. Take care,

Jim Marcotte

Good afternoon,

I hope you’re doing well. Happy Lunar New Year to those who celebrate. During Tuesday’s morning announcements, I wished this over the PA to our students. Immediately after that, as I stood in the hall for passing time, a student approached me and asked why we didn’t recognize Black History Month that morning. The student was right that we hadn’t mentioned it that morning. I thanked her for calling us out and I explained that we wanted to highlight the New Year and that we’d be following up to recognize Black History Month. Over the past two days, we’ve shared quotes about black history month and we’ll continue to recognize it each day this month. Just this afternoon I received an email from a student asking if she could share with me a list of important people in black history, and could I share those one morning next week? I responded with a Yes - of course!

As our communities continue to wrestle with topics of race, bias, and discrimination, we continue to think about how to create opportunities to talk with your children. We have some staff leaders who are working to get a few student affinity groups up and running. We are also working on a parent group who will be able to offer feedback and experiences from their perspectives. We are excited to take next steps in this important work and we’re hopeful that being open and direct about some of these topics, we’ll create a space where students can be as comfortable as they can be, at all times. We all have a lot to work on and we’re excited to learn more.

There is one operational topic that I wanted to write about briefly. Actually, maybe two! The first involves the afternoons at RJ Grey. We are very pleased to be able to offer a lot more after school activities than we could last year. Last year, after school was a breeze because we didn’t have any in-person clubs, activities, athletics, or even in-person extra help! Supervision was easy - but it wasn't ideal for kids! Because we have that variety of items back in place this year, we regularly work with students to understand the expectations for being in the building after 2:36 pm. The basics include: Students who stay after for a club, sport, extra help, etc. can do so! We staff our library until 4:30 every day and we have a staff member present in the building until 5 pm. We expect students to be in the library quietly working while waiting for a ride or the late bus. What we’ve been experiencing recently is students leaving school, heading to Starbucks, CVS, or Sorrento's, and heading back to school to hang out and socialize. While we love that they enjoy being in school, we’re not built to be a hangout location. I ask for your help in reinforcing that message. Being at RJ Grey after school is a privilege and we do have some expectations that all students need to uphold if they need to stay. Thanks for your help with this.

The other operational item is that we’ve noticed the number of tardies to school is growing recently. School starts at 8:00 every day. Seventh graders start with a 3-minute homeroom, and eighth graders have a 6-minute homeroom. Both of those short periods are opportunities for students to get themselves ready, hear the announcements, and breathe for a minute before the first period starts. Each day we have students entering after 8:00. Those kids need to sign-in at the main office (since they missed attendance in homeroom), and I know for many, it sets their day off on the wrong foot. So my request is that if you drive your child to school, and I know traffic near the school campus  can be a challenge, potentially leaving a bit earlier is something that needs to become part of the routine. I know this is a challenge. Just this morning, my own 8 year old realized she forgot her snow gear when I dropped her off at her before-school daycare. Of course, I drove home to get it, making me 20 minutes later to school than I normally am. I was still ready and executed my 7:30 traffic duty on time! But it started me off on the wrong foot. If getting out of the house is a challenge early enough to be here prior to 8:00, please reach out to us and we can help you and your child brainstorm some solutions. 

Here are some upcoming dates to be aware of:

-Monday, Feb 7: Early Release (1pm)

-Monday, Feb 7: RJG School Council, 7pm

-Thursday, Feb 10: NAEP assessment for selected 8th graders

-Tuesday, Feb 15: ABRHS Curriculum Night, 6 pm, on Zoom: (new date and time)

-Wednesday, Feb 16: RJ Grey Chorus Concert, 7 pm

-Friday, Feb 18: Blue and Gold Day!

-Friday, Feb 18: RJ Grey Early Release, 11:10 am (new)

That’s it for now. I hope we all fare well with tomorrow’s ice and snow. Take care,

Jim Marcotte