Initial Welcome Letter 8-1-25
Hello Early Childhood Families,
We are so excited to welcome you to the 2025-26 school year. The staff and I have been hard at work preparing for the new year. I know that many of you have numerous questions about the coming year and I am going to provide some of the answers in this newsletter and then additional information as we get closer to the First Day of EC and then throughout the year. I typically send EC Newsletters out on Fridays and the district sends out their weekly newsletters on Wednesdays. I encourage you to read both of them as they provide important information about what is happening in the program and around the district.
Important Upcoming Dates: The school calendar is attached here.
There will be an Open House on Thursday, August 14th. AM families will have a chance to meet their teacher, see their classroom, drop off supplies, and pick up transportation tags from 10:15-11:15 for AM families and PM families will come in from 12:45-1:45 PM. The Early Childhood Supply List can be found here.
We are requiring that all adults who come into the building for the Open House have their state ID’s scanned and be issued a name sticker. Here is the Google Form to RSVP for the Open House. Mrs. Brandt will check the RSVP against our security system and let you know if you need to visit the EC office prior to the 14th to have your ID scanned or rescanned if it is missing from the system as sometimes happens during updates.
Younger siblings are able to attend as we know that child care may be an issue for some families, but we highly encourage parents to find alternate child care for younger siblings as parents are responsible for monitoring their safety.
The first day of EC is Monday, August 18, 2025.
A gentle reminder that EC students are held to the same attendance standards as the rest of the district so vacations that occur during the school year are highly discouraged and we encourage you to schedule appointments on Fridays or other non-attendance days to limit the amount of instructional time that your student will miss. We appreciate all of your support with this endeavor. Attendance is also one of the district’s strategic priorities (#2) so you will be hearing lots about it throughout the coming year!
Here at EC, we tend to refer to your child’s classroom by color. Here is a list of the teachers and what color classroom they are in.
Pink- Mrs. Novack
Green- Mrs. Wozniak
Orange- Mrs. Gindele
Red- Mrs. Dorsey
Blue- Ms. Wardynski
Yellow- Mrs. Bielski
Purple- Ms. O’Donnell
Just a reminder to families that are new to EC. It is a requirement that your student has a physical and immunization record on file at the building. You can drop these forms off at the EC Office at any time between 8 AM and 4 PM Monday-Friday. These physical and immunization forms need to be on file so that your student can attend our program. Please contact our building nurse, Kelli Coonrod at Kelli.Coonrod@bps101.net with specific questions. Also, if your child needs medication to be kept here at school, your doctor needs to fill out this form and return it to Mrs. Coonrod with the medication.
Our curriculum includes a daily snack time. It is purchased by the program and the purpose behind it is to work on turn taking, counting, measuring, and pouring skills. Students serve themselves from a bowl in the center of the table and pour water from a small pitcher into a school provided open reusable cup. The snacks that we provide are graham crackers, Cheerios, Cheez Its, Club crackers, Goldfish and water to drink. If you have any concerns about these snacks, please reach out to your student’s classroom teacher.
If you are new to the program and this is your first newsletter from me, please be aware that we frequently have information linked to the newsletter so be aware if you see a word in a different color or underlined it is very possible it is a link to more information. This detail can be difficult to see if you are viewing it on a small screen
I am so excited to meet all of you in a couple of weeks.
Paulette Ollie
Paulette.Ollie@bps101.net
630-937-8053
Backpack Mail -This link will take you to flyers and information about different activities and news information from the district.