This month at JVH/Jewett has been an exciting time!  

We’ve been excited to see a number of new students and families move to our area, and are thrilled to be hosting 5 International students at JVH in the High School. Our focus as we re-open has been organizing for learning, and particularly around the priority of creating a Caring and Inclusive Learning Culture.  

To that end, staff have been making strong connections with families through welcome emails and class newsletters, parent meetings, and very focused and purposeful bonding and bridging activities in these first few weeks. One of our school priorities to assist us with building our learning culture is to improve home-school communication, specifically by increasing the number of face to face meetings or phone calls and reducing the volume and complexity of emails or memos.

Now that the global pandemic is behind us and we are fully open, it’s our priority to encourage deeper and richer understanding of families, school functioning, procedures and regulations, and overall positive school-community relationships. Emails and memos lose the nuance and context of what is being communicated; it’s only through 1:1 communication that we can fully build understanding share the contextualized pieces which are essential to understand the beauty of our complex human experience.  

To that end, last Thursday September 14th the JVH staff hosted our second annual “Meet the Teacher” night, attended by over 50 students and families in the Lighthouse Theatre and classrooms. At that time we gathered in circle and I shared some school priorities for the year, and each staff member introduced themselves and shared a bit about what their role was. Following this families were encouraged to visit their child’s class, mix and mingle, and ask questions.  

All in all it was a very positive event, with lots of interaction and sharing.

We look forward to our first PAC meetings this week, September 19th at Jewett and September 21st at noon in the JVH library, to continue our work in this strategic area.