Throughout the school year, Side by Side engages with families with a shared interest in effecting positive change. Community service activities are hands-on and designed to encourage youth volunteerism. Events are parent-initiated and new ways to help are always welcome.

__________________

Greetings everyone, and a special welcome to all the new parents to Berkeley Carroll this year.

I'm Dave Pearson and I'll be serving as the Upper School Vice President with the Berkeley Carroll Parent Association. Each grade, 9- 12, will also have grade representatives who will be doing most of the communicating with you about PA Events for the school year.

I hope by now your student is settling in nicely at school. The PA has some wonderful plans for community buildingthis year. I hope you will keep an eye and ear out for those events and join us. Part of our mission is to inform and bring the BC community together. To do this our main way of reaching you is by email from the grade Reps and our weekly PA Bulletin that is emailed to you. We are paperless in this regard and want to stay in touch while not being too intrusive.

One of the more frequent criticisms we get is that we send too many emails or they get lost in the sea of daily correspondence and one of our laments is we get the sense the community misses some fine opportunities with us. So to ease this a bit we'll try to make our emails easy to read and find later. By the way-this will be one of my longer emails because we have a lot to say to get us started.

In the future we'll try to keep it short and start each subject line with BCPA: Upper School(or the specified grade that applies) and a short title So then among the many emails you receive in a day you can identify ours quicker, read it or come back later by searching for BCPA: etc. A subject line example might be : BCPA: 9th Grade: Halloween Party Volunteers Needed.
The PA Bulletin will have it's own repeatable/searchable subject line.

This is great way to kick off the year; meet old friends and make some new friends! It's really a very jolly time.
If you would like to host one of these dinners for your grade please let me know asap. Hosting is really very easy; you open you doors and almost everything is done for you. The PA contributes a sizable amount toward food and drink, volunteers help set up and clean up, others donate any items not covered and you get some tasty leftovers if not a bottle of wine or two.