LETTER FROM SHARON HOLSCLAW, HEAD OF SCHOOL

Welcome to our new web-based monthly Guardian newsletter. I’m delighted to report that our students,from 3-year-old nursery to our new 8th-grade Class of 2010, are settling in and making a good start to a new year of growth and discovery.

St. Martin’s-in-the-Field is exploring new ways to communicate to our families the values we have long held dear—that every student is a child of God and that we are entrusted with nurturing each child’s God-given talents.

I thank you for your patience as we worked to get our new “green” web-based newsletter up and running. Although our communications platform is new, our activities, lesson plans, dedicated staff, and student-focused teaching are tried and true. We continue to emphasize small class size in order to provide high-quality instruction suited to children’s various learning styles.

As I walked around the school this past month—the first month of our fifty-second year—I couldn’t help but be impressed and touched by the special connections I witnessed between teachers and students and among students themselves. The spirit of friendly inclusiveness is a hallmark of student life at St. Martin’s-in-the-Field. It shows up in our interscholastic sports teams! It shows up in our close school-family relationships!

As we prepare our children for the future, we are crossing the threshold to the future ourselves in terms of our communication methods. The Monthly Guardian—a chronicle of our life as a school—will reside on our St. Martin’s-in-the-Field website, just one click away from our home page.

We ask that you look at our website regularly for news and updates. I wish especially to thank parent Richard Kokoski, who has generously given his time and his skill to help our school update its computers, email functions, and software. He has been unstinting in his efforts—a true “first responder” when our communications life functions were threatened. We all have benefitted from his know-how and can-do spirit. Thank you, Rich!

I hope you find the new look of our web-based newsletter clean, accessible, informative, and helpful. It’s our new sheet of music from which we continue to sing the many voices of St. Martin's-in-the-Field Day School.
October 2009 Newsletter