Hello UA Community,
Last weekend, I was so pleased to be able to visit with so many members of the UA community at Breakfast with Santa. A big thank you to everyone from PAX who helped organize the event, and to all 240 members of the community who came out and supported it! These types of events go a long way in helping UA live our value of ‘Belonging’ not just for the students, but parents as well.
There are so many activities, initiatives and events on the school calendar given that we are approaching the winter break. You do not need me to tell you all of the events going on in your children’s classes and schedules as I know Class Parents are doing a great job of keeping you up to date. So, I will keep this update brief and remind you to please read the rest of this weekly update and visit the Parent Hub for all of your end-of-2023 updates.
The last week of November, I spent time at another Independent School in Toronto as the Vice Chair of the CAIS Peer Review Team. Going through this process as part of the review team highlighted how fortunate Urban Academy is to be a CAIS candidate school. Our UA staff is diligently working to prepare for our own CAIS Peer Review visit just over a year from now. We have teams working through guided questions for each of the 12 CAIS standards and will be preparing our Self-Study report’s first draft for the end of June. It is a great deal of work, but so valuable as going through the self-reflection process requires us to reflect on our practices, what is going well, and areas we feel we have growth opportunities. Being a member of CAIS instills a philosophy of continual school improvement in all facets of the organization.
A reminder that report cards will be published to MySchool on December 20 as a representation or snapshot of your child’s learning to date. These first report cards are an assessment of learning to date, and an instructive guide as to where students can apply constructive suggestions and invest their energy and focus for the two terms to come. As these come early in the year, when only a few summative activities have been completed, there is still a lot of learning ahead of us for the 2023–2024 school year!
Stay healthy at this busy time of year, and we will see you at the concerts in the coming weeks!
Yours in education,
Mr. Slinger
