Mustang Memo - Feb, 21 2025

With Random Acts of Kindness taking place all week, we have continued on with our kindness focus at DCE. After all, it is one of our 4 core values and one of our school expectations!

We see examples of kindness happening all over the school. From big buddies helping their little buddies with reading or math games to students helping out to sort the lost and found tables, there are small acts of kindness taking place all over the school!

Why does kindness matter? It turns out that our brains are actually wired to be kind and to have compassion for each other. Want to learn more? Check out this video on the science behind kindness:

Here's wishing you a weekend full of giving and receiving kindness - because it's good for you!

Helene Hewitt & Jay Robertson

Principal & Assistant Principal

You belong here!

Table of Contents

Week At a Glance

Action

• Pink Shirt Day - Promoting Kindness and Inclusion

Opportunity 

• Lost and Found
• Retro 80s Family Dance - We Need You!
• Addiction and Mental Health Newsletter

Information

• Fee Survey Summary
• Parents Make the Difference

WEEK AT A GLANCE

ACTION

Pink Shirt Day - Promoting Kindness and Inclusion

Mark your calendars! Pink Shirt Day is on February 26th, and we are excited to celebrate kindness and inclusion throughout the week with special activities for our students.

Friendship Bracelet Making – During lunches this week, students can join Miss Julia, our school’s Mental Health Capacity Builder, to create friendship bracelets as a symbol of kindness and connection.

Classroom Presentations on Kindness – Miss Julia will also be visiting each class to lead engaging discussions and activities focused on kindness.

Storybooks, Videos & Class Discussions – Teachers will explore resources on kindness and bravery. See this Pink Shirt Day presentation for an idea of what classes may explore together. 

Pink Shirt Day – February 26th – We encourage all students and staff to wear pink to show their support for kindness, inclusion, and anti-bullying efforts. Students are also invited to wear their kindness buttons, designed by DCE students!

Wild About Kindness Assembly – February 28th – Our whole school will come together to celebrate the impact of kindness in our community.

Let’s make this a meaningful and inspiring week for everyone—kindness starts with us!

OPPORTUNITY

Lost and Found

Once again, our Lost and Found is overflowing! Next time you are in the school, take a peek at the items laid out on the tables in the foyer!

Retro 80s Family Dance - Calling all Gen X!

Your school council parent group is organizing a fun Retro 80s themed family dance on April 4, 2025!

They need your help! 

Do you like the 80s? Do you like to decorate things to look like the 80s? We need you! We are looking for a small, fun committee of parents who want to help decorate, get prizes, and help with the concession. This is your chance to plan a totally tubular, awesome sauce, gnarly dance partay! We can, like, all be chillin' like a villain if parents help us to make it happen! If you can help out in any way, please email Kari, at communicationsDCE@gmail.com.

Addiction and Mental Health Newsletter

The March edition of the Recovery Alberta Addiction and Mental Health Newsletter focuses on mental health literacy. Click here to read it.

INFORMATION

Fees Survey Feedback

Thank you to the 48 families who completed our fees survey. Your feedback was helpful in setting the direction for fees for the 2025-26 school year. 

A few themes that came from the survey included:

• most people feel that extracurricular and activity fees are reasonable at this time 
• most people feel that noon supervision fees are fair
• 80% of respondents wanted 3 or more field trips a year 
• 40% of respondents would pay $20 to $30/trip
• respondents felt that field trips were an important part of school and something students look forward to beyond regular classroom instruction
• 92% of respondents value swimming lessons and would like to see them continue

Our plan

For the next school year, we will keep all but one of our fees the same as this year. The only exception will be to raise the swimming fee by $1.50 to cover possible increases to the costs of busing. As with all of our fees, we only charge the actual cost which sometimes may be less that what is in our fee schedule. That means that if our bus contractors don't raise their prices, neither will we!

Why are there no swimming lessons for older grades? 

We will continue to offer swimming lessons to students in K-3 but will still not offer them for the older grades for two reasons.

First, students in older grades reported feeling uncomfortable in change rooms. There are limited individual changing stalls with doors and not enough time to wait for an available stall before the bus leaves. This left some students feeling unsafe.

Secondly, the new curriculum in the older grades is very full and has significant jumps in content difficultly. On lesson days, including travel time, students spend around 80 minutes out of the school. While 30 of those minutes would fall under our physical education instructional time, 50 minutes of instruction would be lost twice a week for 8 weeks. Given the intensity of the curriculum, we cannot justify the lost instructional minutes for an extracurricular activity. It is for those two reasons that we will not offer swimming to grades 4-6.

If you would like to learn more about this topic or any other topics of interest to parents and caregivers, please consider attending a school council meeting. We talk about this kind of thing and more at meetings. Our next school council meeting will take place on March 18 at 6:00 PM. 

Parents make the difference

Here is this week's article with helpful tips for families:

Tackle friend problems before they affect school performance

Learning how to deal with “friends” who turn out not to be friends is a tough lesson for kids. And it’s one that can distract your elementary schooler from academic learning and affect performance in school.

Talk to your child about all of the qualities that make someone a true friend. Then, suggest your child be cautious with classmates who seem:

• Does the person seem self-centered and manipulative? Are they using your child for personal gain?
• Does the person say one thing and then do another?
• Someone who wants to use a friend to cheat on a test is not really a friend at all.
• Did the person offer to walk home with your child after school, but then head off to someone else’s house instead?

Explain that your child is worthy of real friends who are supportive. Friendship should be earned, so remind your child to be wary of people who have not earned it.

Reprinted with permission from the February 2025 issue of Parents make the difference!^®  (Elementary School Edition) newsletter. Copyright © 2025 The Parent Institute^®, a division of PaperClip Media, Inc. Source: R.M. Kidder, Good Kids, Tough Choices: How Parents Can Help Their Children Do the Right Thing, Jossey-Bass.