April 4, 2026 

Dear Families of Rising Freshmen (Class of 2030),

Welcome to the fourth and final quarter of your children’s time in Middle School. This past Tuesday evening, we had the wonderful opportunity to meet with many of you at our “Transition to Upper School” program. As promised, we’d like to share with you our Rising Freshman Parent/Student Slide Presentation along with a few other items that will be useful for you in the coming weeks.

Yesterday morning, we met with the entire eighth grade to talk through a condensed version of the presentation we delivered on Tuesday. Our focus was to highlight some aspects of student life and potential elective courses available to them in Upper School.

Our rising freshmen also learned about a Personal Balance Reflection they will be asked to complete at home via Google Classroom that captures a sense of their routines and activities outside of school. These insights help our upper school advisors get to know their future advisees a little better. We ask that students complete this GoogleForm survey by Wednesday, April 8.

To assist you in conversations around choosing electives, please review our Freshman Elective Guide as a family sometime in the coming week. During advisory on Wednesday, April 15, our rising freshmen will complete a Google Form to make their selections of up to 2.0 elective credits along with any additional zero-period classes.

Please anticipate another message from the Upper School on Wednesday, April 22, which will outline the final steps to review your children’s course requests in Blackbaud and make any further adjustments or appeals.

Finally, as we know the shift to Upper School can elicit questions regarding the college process, we want to include our CA College Process Timeline, which was also shared on Tuesday.

We look forward to getting to know our soon-to-be freshmen and, in the meantime, wish them a strong finish to their middle school experience.

Warmly,

Cory Izokaitis

Head of Upper School

Craig Dow

Associate Head of Upper School for Academic Affairs