Greetings,
GreenMount Community,
This is an exciting week for us at
GreenMount! On Wednesday, our seventh
and eighth grade students will embark on their respective journeys away from
school, representing everything that is great about our school and our
students.
Our seventh graders will be traveling to Washington,
D.C., for an overnight visit to work with an organization that brings in young
people to provide assistance for homeless individuals. They and their chaperones will be sleeping in
a church on Wednesday night and will return on Thursday.
The eighth grade students will be going a bit farther
to Costa Rica for nine days, including travel.
They will start by learning what “0 Dark-Thirty” really means as they
basically open the airport at about 3:00 a.m. on Wednesday. They will spend a day in San Jose, after
which they will depart to a remote village inland, which comes complete with a
waterfall and a volcano. But it won’t be
all fun and games as they will complete an actual service project for the
villagers there, with whom they will live for several days. Every time we visit this village we bring
school supplies for the children there because the village is very poor and
they lack a lot of the things we take for granted. Today and tomorrow we are asking for
donations of school supplies (Mr. Fletcher sent you a list) or money to buy
paper since it is too heavy to carry on the trip. This is a great experience for the students
and I will provide you with updates as the week progresses. Ms. Elaine is great at texting us and keeping
us informed about all the experiences that the students are having.
We are very proud of the kinds of
programs we have established for our students that allow them to experience the
world in real terms. From taking walking
tours of Baltimore, where we learned about our own neighborhoods, to an ascent
through the jungle to see a volcano, our kids get to experience things that
help them appreciate their place in the world and the value of others. We believe that these kinds of experiences
shape young people and that they come away with a new appreciation for their
fellow human beings. These experiences
also provide for some lifelong bonds, such as the ones we see form between the
students who sweat and build together in Costa Rica when they return as a team
that has learned the power they possess from working together. If you want to see this bond in action, come
to our community day when the eighth graders make a presentation about their
trip. We will announce that date once
the students are prepared.
As we plan for the new learning
cottage that we will open in September, we realize that we will need more
technology to support that learning environment. We are looking at purchasing another netbook
lab and projectors for the Mimio. And as
we contemplate our technology needs, we are thinking about the future and how
we will be able to provide for what students will need in years to come. We have heard that netbooks are being
replaced by another generation of computers for schools even as we anticipate
buying another lab for the school. Many
schools are actually embracing a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) program and we
are thinking about something like that to gradually augment the computers the
school owns. Several of our students
currently bring their own laptops and they seem to like the idea of being able
to save all their work on their own device rather than sharing with other
students. Those pesky flash drives have
a way of going missing as well.
We will be discussing this some more as the new year
begins in September, but I wanted to plant this seed in your minds now so that
you can begin to think about how you might assist with your child’s assistive
technology. In a recent TV ad, I saw a
Samsung Chrome laptop advertised for $249.
Wow, have the prices of laptops come down!
Cheers,
Steve
