Weekly Reminders from Gateway School

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Reminder: No School March 4th and March 7th for Teacher In-Service Days.

Childcare is available on Friday March 4th (please sign up in the Main Office), but is NOT available on Monday March 7th.

Spring After School Classes

The spring session of After School Classes begins this week! Sign up for Lego's, Ukulele or our new Clay class. To register for classes, download a registration form from Gateway School's web site or pick up a paper copy in the Main Office. The beginning date for Clay class will be Thursday March 3rd.

For specific information and to register for classes select the after school class flier on the website.

40 Acts of Kindness Updates

Stuff the Bus: One of our Gateway 8th grade students, Blake Rovai, is collecting donations on behalf of our local "Stuff the Bus" initiative as part of his community service hours. Stuff the Bus provides school supplies to economically disadvantaged children in our area. If you would like to support this initiative, please bring to the bin in the lobby any of the following supplies: pens & pencils, crayons & colored pencils, 3-ring binders, dividers & paper, rulers & calculators, Spanish/English dictionaries, or backpacks (no shades of red or blue please). Thank you!

Human Race Walk-a-thon: Gateway will be putting together a Championship Team to participate in the Human Race on May 9, 2011. Any interested parents and students who are willing to participate in this fundraising event are invited to an organizational meeting on March 8th 3:15 at the picnic tables. Students who participate in the team will vote to select which non-profit the school's team will support at this meeting. For more information or with questions, please contact parent coordinator Viriginia Ganley at virginiag@cruzio.com.

6th graders will do a Beach Clean-Up on Friday 2/25 as par tof our Save Our Shores stewardship of It's Beach.

Auction News

Online Auction 3/19-3/27

Auction Gala 4/2

Invitations were mailed yesterday; look for your invitation in the mail this week. We expect tickets to sell quickly, so please respond right away. If you have or know of a business that might like to receive promotion in our auction program as well as our online auction website, please contact Kristin Smith kristin.smith@gatewaysc.org in the Development Office for business sponsorship opportunities. If you have any donations to make for our online auction, please get those in as soon as possible. Auction proceeds support our Financial Aid program and a portion of the 2011 proceeds will support the Beach Flats Community Center.

International Spring Celebration

Gateway School will host our first International Spring Celebration on Thursday March 24th. The arrival of spring is celebrated in cultures throughout the world and represents a time of growth, renewal, and of new life (both plant and animal) being born.

In the inaugural year of our International Spring Celebration, we will introduce the community to the traditional Persian celebration of Norooz, or New Day. Norooz marks the first day of spring and is celebrated on the day of the astronomical vernal equinox.

This year, Gateway's celebration will have two major components - a morning assembly for parents, faculty and students, and an all-school potluck in which we invite families to share food from a meaningful tradition in their experiences, hopefully associated with the spring.

We are soliciting parent volunteers to help by:

Bringing a dish that is meaningful to your family to share with the community as part of our potluck luncheon.
Baking traditional breads (e.g., naan, tortilla, pita, etc.) that will be passed around after the Norooz celebration, on which students can taste different herbs and spices from the Life Lab garden.
Hosting a stand where you can introduce the community to a spring celebration that you cherish.

If you are interested, please e-mail us at internationalspring2011@gatewaysc.org.

Calling all New Leaf Shoppers!

Scrip cards for New Leaf are available in the Main Office. Cards come in $100 denominations and acts like a gift card (you don't have to spend it all at one time). You can pay for the gift card by writing a check to Gateway School, or charging your account. Gateway will receive 5% of all purchases. What a great and easy way to support our school!

News from GPA President, George Delli-Santi georgeds.gpa@gmail.com

Dear Parents,

In-classroom training for Mindfulness awareness practices started yesterday at Gateway. I, and several of our Room Parents, had the opportunity to hear Megan Cowan, Director of Mindful Schools, speak to parent volunteer leaders a couple of weeks ago in advance of the training to introduce its fundamental concepts. These are life skills all of us can benefit from and to have them introduced to our children at this early stage of their education is in keeping with Gateway's philosophy and mission to, "...foster self-awareness, self-confidence, and self-discipline; the ability to cooperate, collaborate, and resolve conflicts."

Here are a few interesting things I learned about Mindfulness practice and why I think its wonderful that our children are getting an early start on these concepts and skills:

Mindfulness is the technique of paying attention, on purpose, without judgment. It is a skill of meeting our experiences -- whatever they may be -- with an inner stillness and an openness that does not create a need to change anything.
Mindfulness creates a space between our emotions and reactions; it breaks what is usually an autonomic link between emotion and reaction. With mindfulness we are taught to notice our emotion or feeling and separate the emotion from our usual, automatic reaction. By creating space between the feeling and the reaction, even for a split second, there is room for a thoughtful response to replace the reaction. This gives the student a very important sense of control. They can get in touch with their internal compass and leverage their power of choice!

Megan led us in a basic mindfulness lesson of listening to sound. The various lessons over the 8 weeks of training will include awareness of sound and breath, mindful walking, eating, and heartfelt practices of showing care and concern for others. While Mindfulness has been used in the medical field (primarily to assist in pain management) for three decades, it has only recently come to the school arena.

Megan encouraged us, as parents, to listen to what our children may tell us about the Mindfulness practice over the next 8 weeks but also advised not to push them for information. She said that as the weeks pass and the children gain some experience with it, they will become more confident. Within the classrooms they will have an opportunity to take time leading a mindfulness session with their classmates. She said they may also want to share their learning with us so as parents we should remain open to, and be on the lookout for, opportunities to allow our children to be a teacher to us about this skill. I think we can all look forward to some outstanding benefits of this addition to our curriculum!

On another topic, allow me to also take this time to reiterate that the GPA is your organization and a forum where all parents are welcome to bring comments, concerns and constructive ideas. Please do not hesitate to contact me at any time, 408-338-9011, georgeds.gpa@gmail.com should you wish to do so.

Thank you.

George Delli-Santi, GPA President

Re-enrollment for the 2011-2012 School Year

Re-enrollment packets were mailed to current Gateway families at the end of January and are due back by Monday, February 28th. Each family is a valuable part of our Gateway School community, and we look forward to welcoming each family back next September. After the February 28th deadline, the school offers open enrollment to the general public so please submit your paperwork and fees by the deadline to ensure your child's space in his/her grade. If you are applying for financial aid, we automatically hold a space for your child once we receive confirmation from SSS that they have your application.

We are in the planning phase for next year's budget and need your help to ensure that we are able to deliver the breadth of programs and the quality of attention that you and your child deserve. As a tuition-driven school, we rely on enrollment numbers to determine how we will staff and what programs we will offer for the coming year. Your timely commitment to our school allows us to plan the exciting programs that engage our children in this wonderful learning community. In order for us to allocate resources to new programs, staff development, technology, supplies, books, field trips, teacher assistants, yard duty staff, and balls for the ball wall, we need to know our enrollment numbers.

Please return your completed re-enrollment packet to the Main Office by Monday, February 28th. Thank you very much.

Financial Aid for the 2011-2012 School Year
If you would like to apply for aid for the 2011-2012 school year, please click on this link for the complete packet of forms and instructions. In order to apply, you must file a Parents' Financial Statement (PFS) with School and Student Service for Financial Aid (SSS) and you must submit a copy of your complete 2010 tax return to SSS. In order to be considered in the first round of financial aid awards, parents needed to file their PFS by February 1^st and to submit their 2010 tax return copy to SSS no later than February 25^th. After the first round of awards, Gateway will continue to award financial aid on a rolling basis to families who complete their applications after these deadlines, until our financial aid budget is exhausted. We recommend that parents file the PFS online, rather than filing the paper form, and that they upload their tax returns to SSS, rather than mailing them, if they want their request for aid to be processed by Gateway School as soon as possible. If it is possible to upload your tax return rather than mailing it to SSS, we recommend that method. However, the limitations on the file size that the SSS upload system can accept may leave you no choice but to mail your tax return copy in. Please remember that you must include your state tax return and all supporting schedules for your federal and state returns. Please contact Rima in the Business Office at x 308 if you have any questions.

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