THE VIKING
Hinesburg Community School - April 19, 2019
Suzan Locke, Co-Principal, Grades K-4
John Pontius, Co-Principal, Grades 5-8
Alicia Kurth, Special Education Administrator
Dear HCS Families:
Primary students were treated to a special event this week. Students in kindergarten through fourth grade were able to choose and take home a brand new book - selections from Elephant and Piggie to Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day and the latest Dogman and Diary of a Wimpy Kid releases. Build Your Library, is an effort to support building students’ home libraries. According to a 2014 study in the sociology journal, Social Forces, the quantity of books in a person’s home was the most important predictor of reading performance. “The researchers measured the impact of the size of home libraries on the reading level of 15-year-old students across 42 nations, controlling for wealth, parents’ education and occupations, gender and the country’s gross national product.” Findings revealed the greatest effect to be in home libraries of about 100 books, which resulted in approximately 1.5 extra years of grade-level reading performance. Build your Library is our effort to get parents and students excited about owning books and reading more often at home. Hooray for new books!
Warmly,
Suzan and John
Dates to Remember
Through May 31: SBAC Testing, Grades 3-8
Monday, April 22 - Friday, April 26
April Recess - NO SCHOOL
Tuesday, April 30
Early Dismissal Day
Thursday, May 2 - 5:15 - 7:00
Kindergarten Family Night
Items Needed
Thank you!
HCS Middle School Students Attend Empower Youth Leadership Conference
Twenty of our HCS middle school students recently attended the Empower Youth Leadership Conference at the Holiday Inn, Burlington. They were joined by 30 other students from towns in Vermont, including Williston, Winooski, Burlington, Grand Isle, and South Burlington. The students participated in workshops designed to build personal leadership skills.
The day started with middle schoolers working with student facilitators to get to know each other, identify and celebrate those who have been leaders in their lives, and to create their dreams for a better world. These ideas were shared with students in Uganda via a live Skype conversation. As the day progressed, students engaged in activities aimed to enhance communication skills. Highlights included creating vision boards that identified future goals and learning about the power of nonverbal communication. In a workshop on money smarts, students learned about credit, debt, investing, and compound interest. The day ended with students learning how to practice and express gratitude as a way to bring abundance and positivity into their lives.
The event was organized by Hinesburg Community School teacher, Mary Muroski, and Charlotte Central School Counselor, Kathy Batty, and co-sponsored by the Children’s Legacy Partnership through a grant from the NOVO and Education First Foundations. Local sponsors, who helped with the event included, Larkin Realty, Holiday Inn Burlington, New England Federal Credit Union, and Lantman’s Market in Hinesburg. Another conference will be held in the fall and more of our students will be invited to attend. It was so heartening to see the insight that these future leaders have to make the world a better place for all!
Annual Carpenter-Carse HCS K-4 Art Show
The 2018-2019 annual Carpenter-Carse HCS K-4 art show is coming up! This show highlights about 70-80 pieces of art from students in Kindergarten through 4th grade. Each class will have 4-6 of pieces of art chosen for the show and award certificates for students whose work was chosen will go home on Thursday and Friday, April 18th and 19th.
The show will be up for viewing in the Community Room of the library during regular library hours (please check their website) from Wednesday, April 17th through Monday, May 13th.
** There will be a small reception for the students and families that have their work in the show on Wednesday, May 1st from 5-6pm with refreshments. Please come and celebrate all the children’s beautiful work.
Pictures from our "Build Your Library" Event!
HCS Climbing Club
Coming in Fall 2019 to HCS: HCS parent and mountain guide Nathan Fry will coach the HCS Climbing Club. The club is open to students in grades 6-8, with a max capacity of 12 students for the first year due to equipment limitations. The club will use the rock wall in HCS for regular practices and also take trips to local outdoor climbing areas. Rock climbing is a great way to get fit while also teaching self-confidence and teamwork! there will be an information session at HCS on Tuesday May 28 at 6pm. See HCS Athletics/Activities webpage for more information. Contact Nathan directly at Nathan.fry13@gmail.com if you have any initial questions. See you on the rock!
Dominoes Pizza Day!!!
On May 10 Hinesburg Community School will serve Domino's Pizza instead of our usual Friday pizza as part of our hot lunch program. Come in and grab a slice!
“Caw”ling all Class of 2023 Redhawks!
Save the Date: FRIDAY May 31st 2019
With cooperation from all the CVSD middle schools, CVU is proud to announce the 4th Annual “Spring Social,” an event meant to bring together the CVU Class of 2023 before the end of eighth grade.
Who: All incoming 9th graders from the towns of Hinesburg, Williston, St. George, Shelburne and Charlotte
What: A DJ’d DANCE and an opportunity to get to know your fellow students of the CVU Class of 2023! This as a fantastic way for you to foster relationships with peers from other sending schools in the district before starting the 9th grade together in the Fall of 2019!
When: Friday, May 31st, from 7pm-10pm
Where: CVU “Mini-gym” (upstairs)
Why: Because you KNOW you want to see who will be joining you at CVU for the next four years. And, it’s a great opportunity to make some connections before the start of summer vacation! And, it's a fundraiser for the CVU Sophomore Class Council. Be there!
Cost: $8 Admission
Snacks and drinks will also be available for purchase
Casual (but classy!) dress→ this is not a “formal”
Questions? Please contact Michelle Fongemie at mfongemie@cvsdvt.org
News from the Tooth Tutor / Dental Hygienist at HCS
The past few months have been very busy as I visited every classroom from Kindergarten through the 8th grade to teach our annual oral health presentations. The children seem to enjoy learning about their oral health and had many questions for me! The younger grades (this year K-2) should have come home with a toothbrush and 3rd graders should have come home with dental floss.
February was Children’s Dental Health Month and we had a bulletin board displaying dental health outside Nurse Shelley's office.
This month I will be doing visual exams on those students that have not had a dentist appointment in the past year, or have never been to a dentist.
I am here to help if any parent or guardian needs a recommendation for a dentist that accepts new patients in our area, or if you are not sure which dentists in our area accept your type of insurance. Our state insurance for children, Dr. Dynasaur, covers two dental cleanings, exams, fluoride and x-rays for every child, every year. Most parents are not aware that this insurance which also covers medical needs, has this dental component as well! I can also help fill out the necessary paperwork to apply for Dr. Dynasaur, which must be filled out yearly. If there is a need for transportation to a dental appointment, I can arrange that through our statewide Medicaid van as well.
Please direct any questions to me by calling 482-6294 or via email at: HCSToothTutor@cvsdvt.org
Darcie Thorburn
Mrs. Johnson's Superheroes!
Tech Talk
By Beth Swanson
When my daughter was born in 2005, managing cellphones at a sleepover wasn’t even on my parenting radar. Thirteen birthdays later, I agreed to host a slumber party with 13 girls. They would play games, watch movies, eat ice cream and sleep in a giant pile on our living room floor. And cellphones were my main concern.
At 11 p.m., my daughter put out a bright pink basket and asked the 11 girls with phones to pass them over. Three phones appeared. I picked up the basket and walked around to groups of girls, still on their phones, and asked them to please put them in with the others. Five more phones. I put it on the table and made a general request, that anyone still holding a phone put it with the others, and I went to get ready for bed. Ten minutes later, I collected the phones from my daughter.
“There’s nine,” she said. “That’s pretty good, right?”
Great. Somewhere, shoved under pillows or stuffed animals, were two remaining phones. I looked at my daughter’s face and I could see her silently begging me not to make a scene, not to go on a search, not to embarrass her in the middle of her birthday party.
Parenting in the age of technology comes with its own set of challenges, and none is clearer to me, a newly minted parent of young teenagers, than how we regulate and monitor cellphone use. The average age a child gets a cellphone is 10. According to research released by Nielsen in 2017, of the kids who have phones before 13, 45 percent get them between age 10 and 12, and 16 percent have phones when they are 8. By the teenage years, 95 percent of kids have access to a smartphone. All of this translates to more phones at younger ages, which means that phones are the norm in places where they used to be the exception. Places such as elementary and middle school sleepovers.
In the past two years, my daughter has been invited to parties that use phones for scavenger hunts, photos and making movies. But what happens at 2 a.m., when the games are done, and a parent is left with a group of kids, all with relatively unsupervised access to phones?
“What we see with sleepovers is what I would call diminished inhibition that comes with sleep deprivation,” says Devorah Heitner, author of “Screenwise: Helping Kids Thrive (and Survive) in Their Digital World” and the blog Raising Digital Natives. “A kid who makes sensible decisions at 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. might not be the kid that makes sensible decisions after hours of junk food, of no sleep, of being kind of worn down by peers.”
Our first experience with this late-night lapse in judgment came two years ago, when my son woke up to a text that said, “We have taken your sister.” Funny to her friends, when sent from her phone in the middle of the night, but scary to my groggy son, who was convinced that his sister had been kidnapped. He calmed down only when we called his sister to show him she was fine. Plot twist: She was asleep, had no idea the text had been sent and felt terrible about it.
Beyond the sleep deprivation, kids are in a group with no exit at a sleepover, and trying to fit in with their friends.
“Group think might develop over time because you have the kids there for many hours. If a bunch of girls want to do something inappropriate, there might be peer pressure in a more negative direction,” Heitner says.
Internet safety and cyberbullying have become hot topics for parents and tweens, and many parents use hardware or apps to cut off access to the Internet, thinking that will keep kids off adult sites and out of trouble. Limiting access doesn’t curb the trouble caused by phones at sleepovers, though.
“Using someone else’s phone to impersonate them, to send someone texts as them, or to share an embarrassing picture of someone sleeping — which is a situation that you can’t get consent, so clearly you shouldn’t be taking pictures of anyone when they’re sleeping — you just shouldn’t do that,” Heitner says. “It’s upsetting and it’s a big violation.”
Just ask my son.
What’s the best way for parents to manage cellphones during a sleepover? Clearly, putting out a basket to collect them isn’t the most effective strategy, as I learned.
“Parents need to step in and be the frontal lobe, the person who regulates the impulses,” says Danny O’Rourke, a clinical psychologist in Seattle who works with adolescents and the author of the blog Knowing Anxiety. “I like the idea of putting it in the invitation ahead of time so they know they will be asked to hand in their phones, or individually ask kids to turn in their phones. You may be more successful because they know what to expect when you ask for the phone, and they would have to actively disobey a request.”
And what if, like me, you learn that lesson a little bit late? I was staring at my daughter at 11:30 p.m., torn between concern about missing phones hidden overnight. I thought it had worked. But by the following night, I heard stories of texts sent to people who weren’t invited, and of pictures taken of sleeping girls.
Parenting tweens and teens is a balancing act. A child in late elementary or middle school with a phone might look and act like a mini-adult; they might even claim to be one. But they’re kids, and teaching responsible technology use in a group setting has been added to our parenting tasks. Maybe sleepovers are a good time to just let kids be kids, without the pressures of texts and social media, without forcing them to grow up faster and in ways we’d never considered 15 years ago.
“I think most families will be happy that you want to unplug the kids,” Heitner says. “They get all the risks of connectivity as well and how much fun it will be to be in a space to just relate to your friends and talk all night and whisper and tell jokes.”
Beth Swanson is a freelance writer living in North Bend, Wash. Find her on Twitter @write4chocolate.
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School Calendar, Forms, Student Handbook & General Information
About Us
Suzan Locke, HCS Co-Principal, Grades K-4
482-6299, slocke@cvsdvt.org
John Pontius, HCS Co-Principal, Grades 5-8
482-6298, jpontius@cvsdvt.org
Alicia Kurth, HCS Special Education Administrator
425-6285, akurth@cvsdvt.org
Email: hcsinformation@cvsdvt.org
Website: https://www.cvsdvt.org/hinesburg
Location: Hinesburg Community School, 10888, Route 116, Hinesburg, Vermont, USA
Phone: 802-482-2106
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Hinesburg-Community-School-125786304154731/
The Viking Newsletter is published bi-weekly, when school is in session. It is available on our web site and is also delivered to email via Blackboard Connect. If needed, a hard copy can be provided for your child to bring home. The Viking includes upcoming events, after school opportunities, notes of interest for parents and the community and updates from our school administration.