Good morning, RJ Grey Families:
You're receiving a morning edition of Eye on the Junior High this week as I sit in my quiet office and some snow is slowly falling outside my window. My wife's district, along with my kids' school district also decided to play it safe and close for today. Thus, it was in my best interest to come to school for a bit to get some work done! Good luck to anyone who needs to travel later this afternoon. In case your child asks, tomorrow (Friday) will be a Day 4 as laid out on our What Day Is It Calendar.
For those tracking the last day of school (me, and every teacher), today's snow day moves our final day of school to Friday, June 20th. Additional snow days will extend our final day into the following week. Fingers crossed for Mother Nature's cooperation. If you aren't aware, the School Committee recently approved the calendar for the 25-26 school year. In the spirit of continuously trying to improve our student attendance, please take note of the calendar as you plan any late-summer trips or vacations for next year. The first day of school for most students is Wednesday, August 27th. The first day for 8th graders and students in grades 10-12 is Thursday, August 28th.
Our RJ Grey students and families continue to step up when they're asked. You know that we held a recent food drive through our Advisory program. The Acton Food Pantry reports that we collected 860 pounds of food! Our Advisories competed to guess the correct number of items donated, and we are happy to report that Ms. Manto's Advisory won this month's challenge. They correctly guessed that we collected 817 individual items. They will keep the Advisory Competition Trophy until next month! A sincere thanks to everyone who helped us with this food drive.
We are nearing the end of National School Counselor Week. We have four excellent school counselors and three school psychologists at RJ Grey who do important work every day. I happen to be attending a conference tomorrow with one of our counselors, where we will lead a middle school breakout session about the important relationship between counselors and administrators. I rely on our counselors every day. They are often very knowledgeable about students, their families, and their needs in the classroom and beyond. We are wrapping up our annual administration of the SOS (Signs of Suicide) Program this week. The counseling team is instrumental in our annual teaching about depression and suicide. 7 Red's lesson was bumped from today and will now happen on Tuesday morning.
The main focus of our SOS work is to have students remember a simple acronym, ACT: Acknowledge, Care, and Tell (a trusted adult). I find that the acronym is useful in lots of situations but is highly applicable to a situation when an adolescent is concerned about a friend who might be feeling depressed, upset, or in the worst case, suicidal. We talk with students about the differences between sadness and depression, we alert them to warning signs for depression, and we ask them to think about who a trusted adult is for them. While we hope all RJ Grey students have at least one trusted adult at school (89% report they currently do), we know that almost all of them are more likely to have someone they trust in their homes (94% report that they do). One of the vignettes presented in the SOS video is between two middle-school-aged boys. While one of the boys is resistant to talking to his own mother because she has so much going on, the friend offers up his mom as someone who could help. Please know that many of you may be a trusted adult for kids who aren’t even in your own family! Kids certainly know who they can trust, so please be open if a student needs to talk to you about something important. Thank you for your ongoing support of all of our students.
Take care and I hope you have a nice weekend,
Jim