	Middle School - Weekly Bulletin

Middle School Update

Volume 7 Number 25

April 2 , 2007

CALENDAR:

April 5-6		No School – Easter Vacation
April 12-14		SCAC Basketball tournament
April 18	7:30 p.m.	Parent Workshop
April 20	7:30 – 10:30 p.m.	MS Rec Night

NJHS INDUCTION: On Monday, March 26th, we celebrated the induction of new members into the National Junior Honor Society at a Middle School Assembly. Juan Gabriel Delgado and Megan Butterfield were members at their previous school and were invited to join the group as well as: Camila Bayly, Michelle Furman, Samantha Ho, Valeria Alvarez, Ximena Delgado, María Gracia Gan, Melina Toscani, Gabriella Silva, María Gracia Santa Cruz, Hyun Jin Kwon, Paul Cornelius, Rashmi Gupta, Alice Bae, Molly Nesemann, Cody Alba, Natalie Istrati, Mariale Furukawa, Stefano de la Feld, Spencer Gould, Ivy Miyasato, Ana Inés Galleno, Ian Leggett and John Nesemann.

SCAC BASKETBALL: Teams from Nido de Aguilas (Santiago, Chile), Lincoln (Buenos Aires, Argentina), and American Cooperative School (La Paz, Bolivia) will be on campus for the Southern Cone Athletic Conference (SCAC) Basketball Tournament. Games will be played Thursday ^ Saturday. The student participants are girls and boys in grades 9-12 of these schools. You are welcome to come to watch the action. Specific schedules will be available from the main page of the FDR website.

DO YOU REALLY KNOW WHERE YOUR CHILDREN ARE AND WHAT THEY ARE DOING WHEN THEY ARE AT HOME? This is a topic I find I need to bring up every couple of years. Adolescents used to spend hours on the phone talking to friends – one at a time, or they gathered at one of their homes. In this electronic age, students are connected to many people at one time. They might all be in one chat room talking as a group or they might be in a number of different chat rooms. A number of parents have mentioned that they check the contents of these chats periodically. Often, they do not like what they are reading. The language is, at times, vulgar or offensive and at times mean and directed at individuals. It is difficult to say where they learn the language they are using. It is not the same as the language they use at school or at the dinner table. Certainly they hear it in music, videos and at the movies. Somehow saying bad things online does not seem significant because “everyone is doing it.” I encourage parents to monitor chat rooms and what is being said. Something said in a chat room is almost like putting a note on the bulletin board at school. Once something is said in a chat room, it spreads and gets distorted as it is passed from friend to friend.

Potentially more dangerous than chat rooms are sites like Hi5. There are several sites where users put up a personal profile which includes photos of themselves and friends. Visitors to the site can then make comments. The comments made might be serious, a joke, or a mean comment. Some of these sites encourage users to make negative comments about classmates or others. It is “fun” to read the comments. Very seldom does the author think about how the comment will make the other person feel.

A very real possibility is that the comments are not written by the person who signs the message. Sometimes this is because students know or can guess each other’s passwords and can get in pretending to be someone else. Another possibility is that a predator finds a way in posing as a student. In every country there are documented incidents of adults making friends with adolescents online and finding out enough information to allow them to stalk or even attack the youngster.

If your child has a profile on a website, ask to see it. Look at the photos with the idea that if it is on the web it can be seen by anyone. Look to see if there is too much personal information – phone number, address, activities that your child does regularly at predictable times. It is much better to take these steps now than to later wish you had.

For some real life stories of kids and cyber bullying, go to the following website:

http://www.netsmartz.org/resources/reallife.htm

Play some of the videos, especially "Tracking Teresa" farther down on the page. It is chilling.