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