Happy Friday IA Families,
I hope you all had restful breaks. We are happy to have the students back in the building and are looking forward to an incredible second semester.
I’m happy to see that our students have selected their pathways, and each school will be together on Flex Fridays.
A few important points.
Scheduling
We are entering the scheduling season, and it’s a good time to start talking to your students about what classes they are interested in taking next year. Ms. Lundy and our counselors have done an excellent job putting together informational sessions for parents and students to make sure everyone clearly understands the process and deadlines we need to follow. You should have received an email from her yesterday with all the specifics.
You can review the course catalog on our website to see what classes are available.
Ms. Lundy and our teachers have put together a great resource that will show you the anticipated out-of-school workload for each course, reported both from students and teachers. I encourage you to review this with your student to ensure the workload you child is taking is appropriate. While we do have a rigorous course of study, we encourage students to have a well-balanced schedule.
Human Trafficking Summit
Our Interact club and Alpharetta Rotary are pleased to host First Lady Marty Kemp as a keynote speaker for a summit to address the problem of human trafficking on Saturday, January 21st. While I would love to say this is a distant problem, human trafficking is a problem that permeates all our communities. I encourage you all to register for this event and come learn more about what we can do.
I’d also like to thank our Interact club who have worked with Rotary International, even traveling to Texas for the International conference this summer, to bring light to this issue.
We love Pi! Raspberry Pi!
Our IT department will have a hackathon on March 24 that will focus on solving problems with Raspberry Pi microcomputers. In order to give students an amazing hands-on experience, we need to have small groups, so if you or someone you know has experience with Pis, we would love the support. Please complete this form if you are interested in helping, or forward the link to someone who might be.
Carpool
I need to ask all carpool families to make sure that anyone who comes to pick up a student follows our procedures in the back of the building. Frankly, this is the one place where our community needs to come together better. I have three amazing assistant principals who are out there day after day. They have been yelled at, ignored, almost hit, and scolded. None of these are appropriate ways to interact with professional educators. They have developed an efficient system that moves 1100 students off campus in 15 minutes. When people start skipping in line or trying to go out a different direction, others follow suit, and it becomes dangerous for our students.
With this in mind, I’m asking all parents and guardians to remind anyone who is authorized to pick up your child to follow the system we have in place.
My first priority is the safety of our students, and we cannot have people on campus who are unwilling to follow our procedures.
Thank you for all the continued support. As always, I am proud to have the opportunity to work with you and your children.
Scott Kent