Hi again, Canyon Crest Families!

Well, we’ve jumped from one very busy month right into the next! Students and teachers are working hard to ensure each student is making good progress, and we appreciate all our parents who attended our student SEPs. It is vital that parents be part of their students’ education and routinely updated on student progress. We work as a close team with parents to ensure each student is growing and advancing to the best of their abilities. We appreciate parent input and feedback of how their child is thriving emotionally, socially, and academically at school.

We have a lot of upcoming STEM training for our teachers this month. Among some of the training is our UCET Technology Conference in which many of our teachers are planning on attending. As a school, we are training in Code.org, so that all of our students have the opportunity of learning coding and working with programmables. Thanks to a couple of generous family donors, we will be able to purchase a set of programmables for each grade level this year. Students will have access to these awesome components to help them learn and use problem solving, collaborative, and reasoning skills. This will be a wonderful addition to our school and STEM program!

As promised, our Space Lab is underway and we will be starting our space missions this month! Our director, Megan Christensen, is learning the ins and outs of the mission programs, and we will soon offer some parent missions as well, so that our patrons can see what an outstanding opportunity this is for our school. We want to thank our District, particularly Superintendent Rittel, for listening to parent input and helping us financially and materially get the lab up and running this year. Please be watching for a family mission sign-up for our upcoming STEM Family Night on April 22nd. This will be an amazing event for our community!

Our District personnel has also been listening to parent safety concerns at our school, and will be implementing an electronic check in, cameras, and buzz-in system to our front entry. This is a pilot program and Canyon Crest is one of two schools in the district chosen to implement the program. Thank you to Provo City School District and our PTA funds for helping make this happen. Big safety changes to our school are on their way!

We are so proud of the accomplishments of our Canyon Crest students! This month we would like to congratulate Zoe Frankman (Photography) and Julie Kim (2D Visual Arts) for receiving the Award of Merit at the State level for the 2019-20 Reflections! This is a great honor for our school! Also, we would like to congratulate our school Spelling Bee winners: Aston Isom (1st place), Samantha Smith (2nd place), and Charlotte Hartman (3rd place). These students will be going on to the Regional Spelling Bee. We are proud of these students and wish them the very best as they represent Canyon Crest!

Kindergarten Registration will be on Friday, March 27th in the library from 2:00-4:00 pm. Please bring your Kindergartener with you so we can do a little pre-assessment to see where your Kinder is at. This will take about five minutes. Please also let anyone in your neighborhood who has a Kindergarten-aged child know of the date and time. More information will be coming as the date gets closer.

A BIG thank you to our drama teacher, Amelia Dunlap, for a wonderful musical production performed by our students last week. Eighty five students participated in the singing, dancing, acting, and set/tech crew, of “Seize the Day – A Broadway Musical Review,” and we were WOWed! in a school assembly, as well as an evening performance for Canyon Crest families. Thank you to all who helped make this production such a wonderful event for our school community!

We are excited and proud to announce that we will be introducing the Jr. Achievement Program to Canyon Crest parents and students. What is Junior Achievement? Junior Achievement is the world’s largest organization dedicated to giving students from Kindergarten through High School the knowledge and skills they need to own their economic success, plan for their future, and make smart academic and economic choices. The JA program provides relevant, hands-on experiences in financial literacy, work readiness, and entrepreneurship for students. We are excited to have Canyon Crest participate in this program that will give our students educational opportunities in preparing them for real-world financial experiences. We are looking for parent volunteers to help in the presentation of classroom lessons in April and May. If you are interested (and Dads – we need YOU, too!), please contact Sally Burningham who is coordinating this effort. More information to come . . . .

Parents, please be aware of additional safety as Kindergarten students are picked up in the afternoon. If you have a Kindergarten student, please do not park in the lot and have your child cross over to you without being in the crosswalk or having assistance maneuvering around the cars. We have had a couple of concerns come to our attention and want to ensure that every little student is safe as they are being picked up. And another matter that will help our front office run a little smoother: although we will check students out after 3:00 pm, please keep in mind that this is a particularly busy time for our secretaries as we wrap up the school day. If at all possible, please try to keep checkouts at that time to a minimum. We recognize that situations do happen that require end-of-the-day checkouts, but we hope that students can attend to their learning up to the very end of the school day. Thank you for your assistance in these areas.

As you can see, there are SO MANY great things going on at Canyon Crest! We invite you to participate in our upcoming events and, again, appreciate all the service our wonderful parents are rendering to enable us to give our students such rich educational opportunities. Please remember that my door is open for any concerns or feedback you may have. We appreciate you and love working with your children!

Sincerely,

Rene Cunningham