Letter from EC Principal

Dear ANCS Elementary Families,

I hope you are having a great week so far. The parent-teacher conference window will be opening next Monday. We are offering virtual and in-person options this year. Make sure you sign up for a time, as this conference is a mandatory part of our reporting system. The purpose of this first conference is to mainly focus on social/emotional aspects of your child’s year so far. Additionally, MAP scores will be discussed and a conference guide will be shared with you. If the times that the teachers have offered will not work for your schedule, please reach out to them directly so you can work that out with them.

We are focusing on our last guiding principle this week, We celebrate our individual and collective successes. This guiding principle mainly focuses on having good sportspersonship, acknowledging and celebrating when we persevere through a challenge and learn new things. This year we are also emphasizing that we will celebrate mistakes as part of the learning process. Mistakes are an important part of growing and we celebrate when they are acknowledged, reflected upon, and learning occurs. It’s a beautiful thing!

Now that we are back to having field trips, mystery readers, and visitors in the building for celebrations (yay), I wanted to remind us about the privacy that all of our students and faculty deserve. Facebook and other realms of social networking are such a fun and quick way to share information and thoughts with friends and family. It is so easy to take a picture with your phone, post it on your Facebook page, and enjoy receiving comments from others about it. However, when that photo contains pictures of students here at school, we are asking you to exercise caution. Some families do not wish to have pictures of their child posted online. We have taken measures here at school with the photo galleries shared with families by making them password protected and avoiding posting pictures of students whose families have asked for their child to have no pictures posted online. With that said, I am requesting that you do not post pictures or videos of children from school events onto your preferred social media site without permission from the other children’s parents/guardians.

Speaking of social media, I also request that if you have a concern about something here at school, please come to us and speak with us about it before posting it online. We cannot find solutions to problems if we do not know what they are, and we do desire to be part of the solution. As I explained in my last courier letter, we recently discussed our fourth guiding principle, We resolve conflicts in a peaceful, thoughtful, meaningful way. One way we can all model this guiding principle for our children is by bringing wonderings directly to the source (teachers and/or staff and vice versa), rather than posting it online and waiting for it to get back to us in a roundabout way, as it almost always does.

Finally, one more thing about safety here at school. We have noticed that some children are going up to the fence at recess to see dogs that are being walked by and then having conversations with adults. They will sometimes want to engage in conversations with adults simply walking by the recess field. We are telling our students to not engage in conversations with folks outside of school grounds for their own safety. You can help us with this by not encouraging students to come to the fence if you are walking by the school during recess time. We also tell our students that the only people in the building who are allowed to open doors for anyone are the adults. Even if a student knows the person, they are not to open the door for them. Please understand that all of these measures are put into place for the safety of us all.

I hope you have a wonderful remainder of your week. As always, I am happy to answer any questions you may have.

Lara

Lara Zelski

Lara Zelski began working at ANCS in 2007. Previously, she worked at the Howard School and taught art, Spanish, reading and math. She taught 6th, 4th, and 2nd in DeKalb County. She taught 4th and 5th grade in Decatur and then moved to Title One reading and math instruction for 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders. She taught 5th grade at the ANCS elementary campus for two years.