Dear Parents & Guardians,
Thank you to the 25 parents who attend our first IN PERSON school council meeting on Tuesday night. It was a FULL HOUSE. Many parents were excited to meet Mrs. Sherri Sherren, our new grade 1 teacher and learning leader.
Thank you so much to Julie A. for planting the 3 planters at the front of the school again. The flowers look so pretty and make the school’s entrance so much more appealing. Here is the news many of your have been waiting for:
Staffing Update and Grade Configuration for 2022-23
Enrolment: 131
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K – 21 Geoff Kearney
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Grade 1 – 27 Sherri Sherren & Tara Grant; full time education assistant
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Grade 2 – 20 Robin Drinkwater
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Grade 3 – 17 Dena Leigh
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Grade 4/5 – 15 +15 Deborah Ling & Brittany Reid + Dave Scott, full time education assistant
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Grade 6 - 16
Brittany Reid
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Music (Grades 1-6) & FSL (Grades 4-6) Deborah Ling
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Physical Education & Wellness
Grades 2-6 Geoff Kearney
Math Celebration
Liz from Grade 4 has mastered all her multiplication facts up to 12x12! Congratulations to Liz! A number of students started practicing multiplication facts, but stopped at some point, not finishing the x12. Please, if you have not started or have stopped mid-way, please continue practicing over the summer. Math success starts with knowing your facts (subtraction, addition, multiplication).
As we are almost at the end of the year, I would like to look forward to NEXT school year. Joanne Pitman, one of our superintendents, highlighted the following six points that make the CBE such a great place to be and that will ensure ongoing success in the future.
- Supporting all needs: Each student and adult at CWS needs different things on different days to thrive. Our goal is to support each person in the way they need to be supported each day.
- Gaps: Each year (COVID or not), students in each class come with a breadth of skills; some high, some low. Early in September, numeracy and literacy skills will be tested and each student will be supported in moving forward.
- Disruption: COVID is always mentioned in the same breath as learning disruptions. At CWS, we were fortunate to have almost no cases the first year. Overall, we were only online when we were mandated to be online. Otherwise, staff and students were in the building.
- Connections: It’s our strength at CWS. We are a small community school with staff who live in Inglewood, too. Everyone knows everyone. This has helped us make it through the last 3 years.
- Resiliency: Our personal connections helped us being resilient. We are one of the few schools who had no staff go on a medical leave due to mental health reasons. While we had people fall ill, 90% of the time we had substitute coverage, which, again, has ensured that our students have had less disruptions in and of their learning than students in other schools. Please thank your teacher for being at school as much as they did!
- Curiosity: As lifelong learners we (students, staff and parents) need to foster curiosity to support our students to thrive and to discover how much fun it is to learn.
I would like to take this moment to express
my gratitude to all of you: our parents, our students, our CWS staff. Together, we made it through three difficult years. Years, when the world changed, a time when we faced HUGE unknows. As a person who likes to plan ahead, I was, at times, reduced to a tunnel vision of: lets make it through one more week of no cases (during the first COVID year). We made it through together. Your unwavering support of CWS, the staff and myself have helped us pull through.
I am excited to see everyone leaving into a summer break that promises to be ‘back to normal’. Stampede, family trips and vacations, meeting friends inside and outside. Personally, I will be seeing my sister and her family for the first time in over 3 years when they come to visit for 2 weeks to participate in the my son’s wedding celebration (now more like a 1st anniversary party). Later on in July, I get to hop on a plane and visit my aging parents. I have post-phoned this trip 3 times in the last 3 years. Fingers crossed I make the flight this time. These three years have been hard for them, as both fell ill with COVID in December 2021 and my dad almost passed away. Thanks to my mother’s care, he recuperated. Looking at their photos, they have changed much. Frail is not a word I have associated with my strong, smart, funny father. Now I look at his photo and it is the one thing that pops into my mind. My mother has changed a lot too. The last photo my sister sent me, I looked at her and – saw my grandmother. Very eerie. It is high time that I see and hug them again.
I hope you will have a chance to reconnect with some of your loved ones you haven’t seen in a while or with friends from far away. I love our Alberta summer: the heat, the smell of harvested wheat, the sound of combines running.
Enjoy, celebrate, have fun. See you on September 1!
Warm Regards,
Meike Thomsen, Principal
