Dear Parents and Guardians,
Welcome back to another wonderful year at Rundle! We hope you had an enjoyable summer despite our cool and wet weather. We are looking forward to an excellent year of learning and growing with our students. We have had many new families join us this year and we continue to accept new registrations. This increase in enrollment may require some changes in our classrooms to accommodate our higher numbers. Those decisions will be communicated directly to the parents in the classes impacted. As always, our focus is on providing the very best learning environment for all students with the resources available.
We have had some other changes here at Rundle as well. If you have been in to the office recently you will have seen some new faces. Our wonderful team of Mrs. VanOosten and Ms. Diane have both moved on from Rundle. Although we are still in close touch with them, we will really miss them at Rundle and we know that they were very important people to all of the students, families and staff at Rundle. We do have two new staff members in the office. Mrs. Linda Coulter will be the smiling face at the front counter and Mrs. Maysa Abdel Bar will be stepping into the administrative secretary role. They have both started with us and we know they will do a wonderful job. Please introduce yourself when you are in next!
We also have some new faces in the rest of the school this fall. At the end of the school year, Mrs. Galbraith accepted another position in another area and Ms. Hall has stepped into the role of Resource teacher. Ms. Chui has taken over in room 15 teaching grades 3 and 4 and is doing a wonderful job. We also have Mrs. Wagemakers who is providing excellent teaching in room 12 during Mrs. Nisbett’s absence this fall. We have also welcomed Mrs. Zeena Karmali as an educational assistant supporting our students. We are so pleased with everyone who has joined our exceptionally strong and caring staff.
This year we are planning to continue our work on increasing student achievement in all areas, with a particular focus on math and reading. We started our year with a focused professional session for staff on teaching non-fiction reading. The session was shared with 5 other schools and teachers came away with very concrete ideas to consider as well as a great review of theoretical underpinnings. We will be continuing to work with other schools over the course of the year in order to make the best use of our professional learning time.
Thank you to all the families who came out and joined us last night for a wonderful Family Fitness Fun Fair! It was a great opportunity to meet families and for the students to have some fun with new classmates. We look forward to meeting with parents again at our upcoming Parent Teacher conferences on September 19 and 20. If you haven’t yet signed up for your MyCBE / Powerschool account, this will be how you book an appointment when the system opens on September 14. If you need help setting up your account, we are happy to help you with it in the office. If possible, we ask that you try to avoid the beginning and end of the day as we are very busy with student arrival and dismissal and may not be available to help you.
If you have any concerns or questions about issues at school or in the classroom, we encourage you to connect with your child’s teacher as soon as the concern arises. We are very happy to help with any issues and can best help when we know early about a concern or question.
Wishing everyone a happy and healthy new school year!
Sue Rutherford
