This week, the Deal calendar has some end-of-the-year traffic jams. Wednesday promises to be an interesting night, as both events scheduled are great opportunities to become better educated as well as share your views. The ADCA meeting will be at 6:30 and is the last one of the year. At 7:00, the Ward 3 Education Network is hosting a discussion on the soon-to-be-completed PARCC assessments. For convenience sake, they will both be at Deal.

I urge the community to come first to the ADCA meeting, held in the multi-purpose room in the new Reno Wing. After ADCA business, there will be a guest presentation by Gregory Smith. He will be discussing how parents and students could practice internet safety in this tricky age. As a community, we should be very concerned about internet safety. Situations involving Instagram, Kik, Snapchat, and their ilk continue to pop up on my radar. I take this threat very seriously. We have given (me, too) our children access to the entire world for personal, concealed communications - complete with video and picture capability and with almost total anonymity. Most of us have become dependent on our devices and struggle with how to limit the most freeing invention of our time. Many of us are loathe to violate our children's privacy by overseeing what they are doing - or are having a tough time keeping up with the technology. Clearly, education for children about internet safety needs to increase here at Deal, because what I am seeing is very concerning. Our society gives many mixed messages about independence, communication, and relationships - and our children suffer while they try to sort these messages out. I am looking forward to Mr. Smith's commentary; I hope you will join us.

Starting a bit later in the cafeteria will be a discussion on the PARCC assessment. I recommend that you stay for the ADCA speaker then join me in walking over to the PARCC meeting. This is presented as a fact-finding, information-sharing event, with individuals from PARCC itself, OSSE, and DCPS all present. I will be there as well, but as an audience member. The new Ward 3 group is appropriately seeking to have a greater degree of discourse on the topic. As we are just about to wrap up PARCC at Deal for 2015, I am curious about directions for the coming year. The speakers are the right ones for this level of discussion; I am glad we can all meet together.

I want to take these last few lines to thank our 8th grade teachers (and especially Ms. Trenkle, Ms. Simpson-Wayne, Ms. Daniels, and Ms. Huber) for what was a well-organized trip to Gettysburg (even with some wrinkles from me thrown in at the last minute). It is wonderful that we can take every Deal student to the site of one of our country's great battles for freedom, have it connect seamlessly with our curriculum, and have it be another way that the students can bond together over their last couple of months at Deal. We used to do the Gettysburg trip on just one team, but its success really needed to be shared. There is a lot more in 8th grade world coming up in the shadow of promotion, so we will surely have more kudos to distribute.

Our World Language department also knocked one out of the ballpark. (Baseball metaphors are apt now that the Nationals have started to win!) On Saturday, we hosted students from Eliot-Hine MS, Browne EC, Shepherd ES, and H.D. Cooke ES for the first World Language Festival here at Deal. With over 100 students, art, dance, movies, presentations, food, and more were on the bill and received very well. This will surely grow in years to come. The Festival reflects our hope that we can provide support to other world language teachers across the city and share the love for and benefits of language instruction with students. I thank the whole team for making this wonderful event possible.

Take care,

James Albright