Hello Middle School families. I hope you had a great weekend. The picture is from the 5th and 6th grade art students.
Upcoming 8th grade events:
All 8th grade students who live in Groton have the option of applying to Nashoba Valley Technical High School for 9th grade. 8th grade students who live in Dunstable may apply under school choice, if space permits. All 8th graders also have the opportunity to go visit and tour Nashoba Valley Technical High School with parent permission on Thursday, October 27th (more details in the permission slip).
All 8th grade students who live in Dunstable have the option of applying to Greater Lowell Technical High School. Our 8th graders from Dunstable have the opportunity to go visit and tour Greater Lowell Technical High School with parent permission on Tuesday, October 25th (more details in the permission slip).
Please check the GDRMS counseling department website for more information. You may also contact Ms. Zwicker, the 8th grade school counselor, if you have any specific questions.
Grades 5 and 6:
It’s an exciting time because our new 5th grade and 6th grade English Language Arts teachers are getting some new books for their classroom libraries. Thank you Ms. Densmore, ELA Coordinator, for your help with the purchasing.
Assemblies:
We will be having grade level assemblies in the next week or two to review our first 6 weeks of school and remind students of norms, expectations and to practice gathering in a large group again. We are working on getting some exciting assemblies for our students this school year now that we can gather again. Stay tuned.
Reminders:
If you are interested in hearing more about our PTO our joining our team please email the PTO at gdrmspto17@gmail.com
Important Information about Bringing Your Own Device: As of September 2022 the Bring Your Own Device protocol is being suspended. As new technologies continue to change the world in which we live, they also provide many positive educational benefits for classroom instruction. GDRMS is a 1-1 chromebook school. We want our families to know that the district has, with great effort and expense, provided equal access to technology for all students. When we are using all of our devices we can be sure we have good Internet speed and connectivity. Part of our ability to achieve this with a small staff is uniform hardware, managed by the tech team. This enables us to widely employ best practices (needed in any large network) as well as the ability to track abuse and violations. Personal devices circumvent some of these sound principles. A student Chromebook owned by GDRSD is essentially sandboxed. Meaning they cannot log into any other domain other than GDRSD. They cannot add any extensions, apps, or add ons that we (or Google) do not seem safe. With outside devices that is not the case, we do not have control over the device, which limits our ability to troubleshoot and get a student up and running quickly. For these reasons we are asking that all of our students use our GDRSD devices. If you have any questions please feel free to reach out to me. At this time if your child uses their own device we will be asking that they no longer bring their devices and that they use the devices we have for them.
Dates to remember:
Picture Re-take 10/21
Parent Conferences 11/16 ½ day afternoon conferences, 11/17 ½ day evening conferences March 17th ½ day parent conferences.
Sincerely your Groton Dunstable Regional Middle School Principal
Wendy Salvatore wsalvatore@gdrsd.org