Administrative Reminders & Updates: Protecting our Children
Online Safety:
Tonight we will be hosting Theresa Chamblee from Catholic Charities. Mrs. Chamblee will be presenting on how to protect your children online with a focus on sexual exploitation and human trafficking. You may be reading this thinking that your children are too young for me to be thinking about such things, but I would encourage you to attend regardless of the age of your children. This topic is super prevalent in today’s online culture, so early education is very important. This event will take place in the parish hall at 6:30pm.
Online streaming is not available at this time.
Cell Phones, Smart Watches, etc:
We have noticed a significant uptick in student technology policies being broken. The technology user agreement infractions range from simple things like students trying to play an online game instead of doing classwork to cell phone use in restrooms. The request is for each family to review our family policy guide (p.51) and share these rules with your children.
In particular we would like to highlight our policy about wearable technology. Our policy prohibits the use of “connected” watches such as iWatch, Gizmo, Fitbit, etc. Thus far we have been flexible with this policy asking students and parents to ensure that the watch is not connected. This hasn’t been working, so we emailed parents last Friday asking parents to not allow their children to wear these types of watches. We are giving some grace this week and are asking any students wearing such a watch to take it off and put it in their backpack. Next week we will enforce our posted consequence (p.52).
Carpool:
Through his years of school safety training, Mr. Fletcher has learned that morning and afternoon carpool are considered the most dangerous times of the day for students. With this in mind, we have designed our carpool to limit the number of variables to ensure a simple and efficient process (p.24).
We completely understand that things come up, we all run a little late, it’s inconvenient to wait in line and the many other factors that come into place. When these things come up, please call the office and we can help navigate the situation. There is no judgement here, we are only interested in helping!
We would also like to share that this past week we had a student bitten by a dog in afternoon carpool. We don’t have an official policy in our handbook on animals in carpool yet but we are asking that everyone keep their animals either in your car or at home. Preferably at home, we did have a dog jump out of a car one morning and run through the parish hall. Again, just trying to keep everyone safe!
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