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Urban academy news

Weekly Update | October 18, 2018

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October 18, 2018

Dear Urban Academy Families,

It was a wonderful week working with your children. We are getting to know our new students and new families well and we appreciate our veteran families reaching out to those who are new to the community to make them feel welcome. The volunteer opportunities are starting to shape up and we urge our new families to take part in these events early in the school year. You will meet others in the community and get a start on your 25 hours of school community volunteering. Thank you to Joanne Ward for her leadership with our Parent Participation program – all of you will get used to seeing her messages on your volunteer app and she is great at answering questions to help you get started.

Our Annual Appeal is underway and is going well. Every day donations grow for our work together as our school develops and matures; we are well over the $40,000 mark now with contributions coming in daily! Thank you to those families who have contributed and for those who are preparing to do so, thank you for making time to get your donor forms in. I have attached the donor form again this week for you.

A Parent Education program is something that UA has wanted to undertake for some time now. Our last parent survey to our community whole-heartedly supported the idea that some professional in-service and qualified speakers on a variety of topics of interest to parents would be well-received by UA parents. We know our families are wanting to learn and share discussion on critical parenting issues. The first such opportunity is coming up and a working group of PAX, Board members and staff are organizing the events. Please mark your calendars for Wednesday, November 28 at 7:00 pm at Uptown where we will have BC Safer Schools present and discuss digital safety with kids. We encourage parents of all of our students to attend, hear the presentation and be prepared to ask lots of questions – this is a topic that is of interest and concern to parents of children of all ages. An evite will be coming out to our community within two weeks so that you can RSVP to this first opportunity. We will offer two evenings with guest speakers this year, one in November as noted and one in April on Anxiety and Developing Resilience in Children. There will be two other opportunities for parent education as well, Body and Sexual Health and Graduation and Post-Secondary Pathways, both of which will take place in the new year. We will provide a little more detail on all of these as the term progresses, but please plan to join us on November 28 at the Uptown campus for the first one.

Tomorrow is the Provincial Professional Development day and virtually all schools in BC, public and private, work together to offer outstanding professional development for teachers on this day. Our staff are off to a wide array of in-service on topics directly related to their teaching; technology in the classroom, environmental science, outdoor education, early primary curriculum and so much more. The professional educational community works together to ensure that the offerings are extremely diverse, the costs are minimal and top-quality speakers are available. The presenters are well aware of the availability of such a large professional audience on this day. Our teachers take full advantage of this to the benefit of our students.

Enjoy the weekend – this weather is amazing and we need to enjoy it!

Mrs. Cheryle Beaumont
Head of School

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