Dear Parents and Guardians-

In light of Friday’s events, we have elected to not show Student News this week, as the topics will likely focus on the tragedy in Connecticut.   Though CNN does a great job of creating kid friendly and appropriate news casts, we felt that due to the emotional weight and sensitivity of this topic that the conversations would be better placed with in individual families.  

We encourage you to visit http://www.cnn.com/studentnews  to preview the episodes, and if you feel the topics are appropriate, use the content to drive your discussions at home. 

Here at school we reminded the students that this is a very “big kid” topic and needs to be only discussed with adults they trust, and is not appropriate to talk about between friends.   It is important to remind all the students that school is a safe place and that we do everything in our power to protect them 100%.

As parents and educators we walk a fine line between protecting our children and giving them enough information to feel secure and heard, please let us know if you have any questions or concerns.

Here are some links that may be useful in your discussions at home -

Helping Children Cope:

http://www.nasponline.org/resources/crisis_safety/terror_general.aspx

Coping with Crisis and Children with Special Needs:

http://www.nasponline.org/resources/crisis_safety/specpop_general.aspx

Dealing with a Death as School:

http://www.nasponline.org/resources/crisis_safety/neat_poland.aspx

Best Regards ,

Connie Miller

Noah Rabinowitz

Jennifer Grant

Annabelle Stonich

Alicia FaJohn

Marie Gruber

Amy Dixon

Jennifer White