Town of Sedgwick Maine - May 15, 2008 Newsletter

Pre-school Opens!! The Head Start and Child Care program, known as the Peninsula Early Childhood Education Center at Sedgwick Elementary School, opened Monday with five students. They are all four year olds from Sedgwick who happen to have older siblings in our school. It looks as though there may be as many as a dozen beginning by the start of next week. This is a great opportunity for our kids and is funded, almost completely, by Head Start, Child and Family Opportunities and the Community Fund at St. Francis Episcopal Church in Blue Hill. The program runs five days a week from7:30 a.m. until 5:00 p.m.

Free & Reduced Meal Forms Tomorrow is the deadline! If your family qualified for free or reduced meals last year and you wish to continue in the program for the 2007-08 school year, you must complete a new application no later than tomorrow, September 28.

Innisbrook Wrapping Paper Sale Begins PTF’s very popular Innisbrook wrapping paper sale begins tomorrow, September 28, and extends for the next two weeks. Catalogues and a sales sheet have been sent home with your child today. Also, all money must be collected when you take the orders. This is a great opportunity to contribute to the PTF, the organization that sponsors many school activities, including after school programming. Anne Dentino is in charge and she can be reached at 359-8900.

Calling all Parents! We still have the following areas of need: Volunteer for Cartridge Recycling Program Volunteer for K-6 Fluoride Program Substitutes for Teachers & Support Staff Volunteers for Fitness Trail/ Campus Cleanup - October 4 Carpenter to submit bid for school trim board work If you, or someone you know, would be interested, contact the school at 359-5002.

Fitness Trail/Campus Cleanup Thursday, October 4 There will be a coastal clean up/ campus cleanup and fitness trail work day on October 4. The rain date will be October 11. Projects will include work on the Peace Garden, the Fitness Trail, the playgrounds and other areas. We may send students to the shore for a coastal cleanup. There is an area along South Cross Road that could be cleaned also, if we have parental help. We can always use volunteer help, so let us know if you can. It would be a great help if parents could send in rakes, shovels, and other garden’ type tools for this day. Please label them, so we can get them back in the right hands.

Thank You to Parents Thank you to parents for changing your schedules on September 21 so teachers could meet to work on our English Language Arts curriculum. The workday was profitable for us as teachers took the time to discuss what they were doing in their classrooms and compared that to what the state now requires in the newly revised learning results and grade level expectations. Just before the meeting, teachers looked at data gathered from the wealth of information generated by the Maine Educational Assessments.

October 5 Workshop/No School Friday, October 5 will be a Union 76 workshop day for teachers in Brooklin, Sedgwick, and Deer Isle/Stonington and a no school day for students. Teachers will be working at Deer Isle Stonington Elementary School. K-2 teachers will be learning about a new reading instruction technique called Fundations which stresses phonemic awareness. Teachers in grades 3-5 and 6-8 will be working with reading expert Candice Bray on expanding methods for the instruction of reading in older kids. Teachers will also be working on scoring the writing prompts students took this past week. The principal, Dr. Buckingham, attended a workshop on interpretation of the Maine Educational Assessments on Wednesday. For the information of parents, and others, Sedgwick Elementary has made Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) again this year. AYP is the benchmark designated by the state for all schools. Again, thank you for your forbearance October 8. Also, the following Monday is the Columbus Day Observance and another no school day.