"Our 5th grade class has made history as the first class to do distance learning for the entire year!" commented by our 5th Grade Class Speaker, Devon Miller.
Clearly, it has been a challenging year for many of us. We recognize that a lot of changes and sacrifices had to be made to accommodate your child's learning needs which we appreciate from the bottom of our hearts. We cannot begin to thank our teachers and supporting staff for making this happen as a team. We made it and this is something that we will always remember for the rest of our lives. Now that the 2020-21 school year has ended, we wanted to share a couple things that will take place during the next school year, and they are listed below:
-
Throughout the year, our themes were based on COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, and Distance Learning. As we dealt with COVID-19 and Distance Learning, our department immersed into the Black Lives Matter movement and how it has impacted us as individuals, a department, an entire school, and a community. Under the guidance of Victorica Monroe of Monroe Pedagogy, we invested time in discussing a variety of related topics. Reviewing our calendar, we held 16 brainstorming sessions on how to address this through change and improvement for our department regarding racial equity. It was both a challenge and beneficial to carrying this type of dialogue through Zoom. We look forward to continuing this next year.
- In addition to our monthly Heritage Month assemblies and celebrations, new "Intersectionality" bulletin boards will be posted in the hallways of our Elementary building. This will give our students opportunities to be exposed to history all year round. The concept of intersectionality will be applied to the boards. For example, if we introduce an Asian-American Deaf Lesbian individual or leader, the individual will appear in two different places, the Asian-American and the LGBTQ bulletin boards. It will ensure our students to understand that people may have several identities and that we should embrace every one of them. Further discussion regarding this will be continued once our elementary staff returns in August on how we will integrate and introduce this exciting display to our students.
- We are thrilled that more materials from our Fountas and Pinnell curriculum will be added to our BLA program. Our wonderful teacher assistants have helped clean up and re-organize our Book Room to prepare for the arrival of the new materials.
We want to bid farewell to Ms. Zoe Harmala, Mr. Andrew Taylor, Ms. Kristin Beller and Ms. Marissa Mejorado who will be leaving CSD to explore new adventures. Yes, we gave each of them a CSD boomerang as a hint that they are always welcome to return to CSD in the future! We also wished good luck to Ms. Leah Bornstein, Mr. Eric Kunze and Mrs. Julie Sepah who will be moving to other positions on campus. We want to thank each of them for all their hard work and valuable contribution to our wonderful Elementary students!
Lastly, your child should be receiving a package - an annual t-shirt and a Deaf Black Lives Matter coloring book. We encourage your child and the whole family to take time to to read this special book during the summer. We will be reviewing with them in the fall. Please see the pictures below.
Take a good care of yourselves so you can feel recharged and ready for another school year in August!
Best,
Joey & Ryan
Elementary Principals
