Arleta K-5

Dear Arleta Families and Guardians,

It was wonderful to have so much of our community together for our Back to School Night last night! Our staff is very grateful for this chance to connect with and learn from you. If you weren’t able to attend, a reminder that each teacher, including our Academic Support Team, created slides that contain all the important content: you can access all slides from this link on the main page of our website, and teachers also emailed just their own slides to families directly.

I unfortunately have two problems to make you aware of. First, there have been several incidents of hate speech that have happened this year. This is unacceptable. Hate has no place at Arleta. We are working with our district restorative justice specialist, Amy Chotzen, to determine how we repair the harm, to create a proactive plan for learning and prevention moving forward, and to refine our protocol for interrupting hate speech.

Here is a good resource from a PBS kid’s site for parents about talking to kids about race and racism that could be helpful to look at whether you’ve been having such conversations with your child for years, or whether you want to have these conversations but aren't sure where to start. Please don’t hesitate to be in touch if you have questions or suggestions.

The other problem is that we’ve had a few car-bus accidents occur during dismissal. If you pick your children up from school (and/or drive them to school), you already know how crowded SE 66th Avenue gets and how tight it is for buses to turn the corners coming west onto SE 66th (turning left from SE Raymond), or from either direction turning onto SE Mitchell from SE 66th. I really hope we can prevent anyone else from the stress and distress of having to deal with an accident. It is also incredibly stressful trying to drive a bus around corners where cars are parked near the bus’ turning zone. Buses arrive in the a.m. around 7:35 (give or take 5 minutes) and in the p.m. starting about 2:05. If you drive, we ask you to please avoid parking on the ends of the street where the bus’ need to make their turns.

Thank you so much for your contributions to our community in these specific, important ways. And, for myriad others and for your partnership and trust. Please be in touch if you’d like to talk for any reason. 503.348.3982 cell, lhawking@pps.net email (adding “message from Arleta parent” to your subject line helps me find your email in my very full inbox!

Sincerely,

Lisa