CONCERTS AND PERFORMANCES: This year’s winter concert will take place in January and will highlight the Chorus, 8th grade performance groups, and hand bells. Smaller “showcases” have been scheduled on other dates during the school day, and parents are welcome to attend. The first of these showcases will be for 7th grade Dance and Music. It will take place on Monday, November 24 at 2:20 in the Sinex. After-school dance groups such as Tapline and Hip-Hop and Grade Level pieces will perform for Grandparents Day (Nov. 25) and at the Holiday Fair on December 6.
CONTACTING THE MS OFFICE: Please remember that we ask that all notes, phone calls, and emails about early dismissals or lateness come to the MS Office by 8:15. This enables us to send to teachers each morning a complete list of absences and anticipated arrivals/departures.
PROGRESS REPORTS: Students will bring home mid-semester reports this month, shortly before parent-advisor conferences. These are narrative reports with a focus on your daughter’s effort and work habits; in short, the emphasis is on the process of learning. They are a good starting point for the discussions you will have with advisors in conferences on November 13. Letter grades in academic subjects will be sent home when the semester ends in January. Please note that the effort grades focus on the degree to which a student is meeting the expectations of the course. By and large, we expect most students to be at a Level 2, “Meets some expectations but needs improvement” or a Level 3, “Meets expectations.” A few students will sometimes be at Level 4, “Exceeds expectations”, or Level 1, “Does not meet expectations.” It is our hope that these descriptors will give you a helpful picture of your daughter’s strengths and areas for growth.
MS GRANDPARENTS DAY, Tuesday November 25: This year, the Middle School welcomes grandparents and special friends to visit classes and attend a concert performance on the day before the Thanksgiving Holiday. Invitations are in the process of being mailed. On-campus parking will be available for all grandparents. Please contact the MS Office with questions or RSVPs. If you are not sure if we have your daughter's gradparents' contact information, please log in to School Base and update the information. Parents are also welcome to attend the concert, which begins at 10:30 in the Sinex Theater.
THE MIDDLE SCHOOL “BOOK THING”: Thanks to a donation of about fifty paperbacks from a former middle schooler who was cleaning her shelves, we now have a collection of free books to share among students for casual reading. Additional donations of interesting, appropriate books your daughter would like to pass along are very much welcome. Look for the bright red cart in the Hampton Commons!
MIDDLE SCHOOL SLEEPOVER, Thursday Dec. 18, 8:00 p.m. This is one of our favorite events of the year, a chance for the girls to bond as a class and enjoy fun and games with teachers and students from other grades. In the past few years nearly 100% of our students have attended! Please support this event by allowing your daughter to attend and by refraining from offering conflicting social events on this night.
SECURITY: Please remember to use the main entrance in the Harris Center when you come to the Middle School during the school day. For safety reasons, the other doors are locked, and faculty and staff are not supposed to open them for anyone. When picking up from After School Study Hall, it is okay to knock on the door near the Middle School Commons and ask to be let in; at all other times, please enter through the Harris Center and sign in as a visitor.
ALLABOUT MIXERS – THE PARENT’S ROLE: Because we cooperate with five other schools to organize mixers, it is important that all students and parents honor the guidelines agreed upon by the schools. (RPCS has a terrific reputation in this regard – thank you!) A few things to remember:
- If your daughter loses her ticket or forgets to buy one ahead of time, she won’t be admitted to the mixer. Please don’t ask!
- Our girls can only bring a guest when the mixer is at RPCS.
- Doors open at 7:30 and no one will be admitted after 8:00.
- If your daughter is too sick to attend school that day, she may not attend evening events.
These rules help us to ensure consistency and enable us to provide structure for an experience that can involve as many as 300 students, most of whom are not known by the hosting school. Your cooperation is essential, and we value it highly!
EMAIL CONVENTIONS: Much of our communication these days takes place by email. As a faculty, we have developed the convention of not including students’ names in the subject line of an email as a way of preserving privacy (in case a student should accidentally get a glimpse of a teacher’s screen.) As parents, you can help us with this practice by keeping your daughter’s name out of the subject line of an email. Instead, you could title the email something like “my daughter” or “a homework concern.” Thank you for your help.