Category Archives: Community News

November 2020 PTO Meeting Recap

Thank you so much to everyone who joined us for our PTO meeting via Zoom on Tuesday, November 10th!  Special thanks to Superintendent David Fleishman and School Committee member Emily Prenner for joining us, and to Principal Morrissey and K teacher Sarah Jang for the updates on Lincoln-Eliot.

If you missed the PTO meeting, you can review the minutes at this link:

November 2020 PTO Meeting Minutes

We are always open to ideas to help build connections throughout our community, especially between our hybrid and DLA kids, so please reach out anytime to president@lepto.org or secretary@lepto.org with suggestions or any questions!

Our next PTO meeting will be in January; we look forward to seeing you then!

FORJ Updates

The Overdue: Confronting Race and Racism in Newton Series (http://www.newtonma.gov/gov/mayor/initiatives/overdue.asp) will continue on Tuesday, November 17, 2020 at 6:30 pm with Richard Rothstein, author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.

Please register here: https://newtonfreelibrary.libcal.com/event/7087081 or RSVP HERE

Check out this guide for more anti-racism resources. You can also order a copy of The Color of Law from Newtonville Books.

FORJ (Families Organizing for Racial Justice) is a coalition of school-aged families in Newton coming together to teach our children – and ourselves — how to stand up for racial equality. Our Lincoln-Eliot FORJ contact is parent Lanni Isenberg: lanni_harris@yahoo.com.

 

PTO Meeting: Tuesday Nov. 10th at 6PM (Please Note Time Change!)

Please join us over Zoom for our PTO meeting  this Tuesday, November 10th, at 6pm.  We will be joined by Superintendent David Fleishman and School Committee member Bridget Ray-Canada, and we will receive updates from Principal Morrissey and our teachers as well, followed by open discussion/Q&A time for parents.  Please note the time change; we will be starting a half hour earlier than we usually do, at 6pm instead of 6:30.

A Zoom link will be sent out on Monday or Tuesday, so please look for it in your inboxes (or email secretary@lepto.org if you don’t receive it!).

All parents and guardians in the Lincoln-Eliot community are a part of the PTO, and we would love to see you there!  If you cannot attend the meeting but have a question or a suggestion for us, please submit it to us using this form or email it to president@lepto.org.  We will post the minutes from the meeting in our next newsletter.

Thanks very much!

Fall Festival Flipgrid & Scavenger Hunt

Even with the weather conspiring against us, we still had a really fun fall festival week — we’re so impressed with all the amazing mini pumpkins that appeared in the display!  Yay for all our awesome kids!  If you didn’t have a chance to pick yours up again on Friday, we’ve left the rest on a table in the overhang so you can still get them on Monday.

Also, if your child didn’t get one of the gift bags, we have plenty left over — just email us at secretary@lepto.org and we’d be very happy to help figure out how to get it to you!

Flipgrid:

We adore all the videos that have been posted on our Fall Festival Flipgrid!  Thank you so much to everyone who has participated so far — we encourage everyone to check it out, and feel free to keep posting videos this week!

The Flipgrid website is:  https://flipgrid.com/605f8702 — click “sign in with Google” and sign in using an NPS student gmail login in order to view or post!

Scavenger Hunt:

If you haven’t had a chance to try out our Fall Festival scavenger hunt or enter the raffle, there’s still time!

Find the scavenger hunt form here:  https://forms.gle/KiGAEYhQh8MLYFSv9

Because of the weather, we’ve extended the raffle deadline to Monday, November 9th — fill out the form by then and be entered to win a $50 online gift card to a local bookstore!  Remember you don’t have to get the answers right to win, and even if you can’t do the hunt, you can still enter your email address to participate in the raffle.

Thank you all again for your support and participation!  We miss you and hope you’re all doing well . . . if you have any ideas for more socially distanced community events, we’d love to hear them anytime!  (Or please bring them to our next PTO meeting!)

Missing Room Connectors

We are still missing a room connector for many of our teachers and would really love a few more volunteers!  Our goal was one parent per cohort, but we need at least one parent per class, to make sure every teacher is supported.

The classes which do not have any room connector at all yet are:

K Bradley
K Kremer
K Jang

1 Ward

2 Rooney
2 Gayle
2A McDonald

3 Gueye

5 Foster
5 DeNoble/Triest

Please reach out to our Room Connector Coordinator, Emily Núñez, at nunezemily77@gmail.com if you might be interested or want to know more (and please include your name, your child’s name, and your teacher & cohort!).

We absolutely understand that this year is really overwhelming for everyone, so we want to make this role as easy and not time-consuming as possible!  Our hope is just to have one point person per class to help connect parents and support our teachers, in whatever small way you can.

Thank you so much for your help, and thank you to everyone who has volunteered so far!

First Grade Pumpkin Project!

Our wonderful first grade team put together a fun hands-on project for all our first graders, including our DLA class, with sugar pumpkins provided by the PTO.  Students were asked to create a book report about their favorite book, and decorate a pumpkin character to go with it.  The results were truly adorable and we are all so impressed with these talented kids!

A big thanks to our DLA parents who helped get pumpkins to the students at home, and to our teachers for coming up with such a cute idea!

The PTO would love to help facilitate more hands-on projects like these that can be offered to both our DLA and hybrid kids, so if you have any ideas or suggestions, please send them to secretary@lepto.org anytime, or bring them to our PTO meeting!

Fall Festival: All This Week!

Happy fall, everyone!  While we can’t all be together for our usual fall festival — dancing and showing off our costumes and crossing our fingers for the teacher treat raffles — we still want to celebrate the season and our community in a safe, socially distanced way, and we hope you can join us!

* Mini Pumpkin Display!

We hope everyone had a chance to pick up a mini pumpkin from 93 Gardner St.; if you didn’t, or if you would like to keep decorating, we have several left, so please stop by and pick them up from the porch anytime.  (Here’s our Pinterest page of ideas again, if you need it!)

Once your pumpkins are decorated, we’d love for you to add them to our outdoor display so everyone can come by to admire them.  Tables will be set up in the overhang area from Monday (10/26) at 12:30pm through Friday (10/30) at 3pm.  Drop off your pumpkin whenever you can and pick them up again at the end of the week!

We would also love for you to share your pumpkins, costumes, and anything else that’s making you happy this fall on our fall festival Flipgrid:  https://flipgrid.com/605f8702 — just sign in with your NPS student email and upload a short (no more than 30 seconds) video to share with everyone!

* Fall Festival Activity Bags!

When you stop by to see the pumpkins, you’re invited to pick up an activity bag for each of your kids — they’ll be set out in the overhang all week.  The bags each contain a fall-themed bookmark craft kit, a piece of candy, and a printout of our scavenger hunt for your family to do together!

* Lincoln-Eliot Fall Scavenger Hunt!

Go for an adventure around the outside of our school and see how many of these questions you can answer!  Then, if you’d like to, come back here and fill out this Google form with your guesses:

https://forms.gle/KiGAEYhQh8MLYFSv9

Everyone who fills out the form by Monday, November 2, will be entered in a raffle to win a $50 gift card from a local bookstore — and don’t worry, you don’t have to get all the questions right in order to win!  (If you can’t make it to the school to do the hunt, you can still enter the raffle — just fill out the form with your email address and feel free to guess some of the answers if you’d like to!)

As a reminder, while you’re on school grounds, please observe all the current rules: wear a mask at all times, stay six feet apart from others, and wash your hands / use hand sanitizer in between touching anything.

We hope this gives everyone a fun, safe way to connect with the school and each other — we really miss seeing you all!  Thank you to the volunteers who helped make this happen!  Have a wonderful week, everyone!

Fall Festival: Pick Up Your Mini Pumpkins!

Plans are underway for our socially distanced fall festival, which we are hoping to celebrate with an outdoor display and activities the week of October 26-30th.  Creative ideas are still very welcome — please email them to secretary@lepto.org anytime!

For starters, we hope many of you have had a chance to stop by 93 Gardner St. (right next to the school) to pick up your mini pumpkins this weekend!  If you haven’t, they will still be out on the porch for the rest of the week; or if you need help getting them, please let us know (at president@lepto.org) and we’d love to help figure out a way to get them to you.

Once you have your pumpkins, we encourage your kids to decorate them in their own unique way — here’s a Pinterest page of ideas if you need help getting started!

And then we would love for you to share your pumpkins with us in two ways:

  1. Add a short (30-second) video of the decorated pumpkin and/or your kids in costume to our Flipgrid at https://flipgrid.com/605f8702 (please use your child’s student gmail to sign in, as a safety precaution)
  2. Bring your pumpkins to the school the week of October 26-30 for a festive display in the overhang area.  (And then pick them up again at the end of the week!)

More details coming soon!  Thank you so much to everyone who’s been working on making this happen!

Upcoming FORJ Events

This coming Tuesday, October 20 from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m., join the Newton Police Reform Task Force to learn from Dr. Mahzarin R. Banaji, author of Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People.  Dr. Banaji will give a presentation on implicit bias and be accompanied by Task Force members Judge Sonja Spears and City of Cambridge Police Department Deputy Superintendent Robert Lowe.  Register here for the program, a part of the Overdue: Confronting Race & Racism in Newton series.

The following week, on Wednesday, October 28 at 6:30 pm, the Task Force will host an open meeting to hear from you about community experiences with and thoughts about the Newton Police Department.  For more information and to access the Zoom link, please visit the Task Force’s Information on Meetings and Public Input webpage.


Raising Antiracist Kids
Thursday October 27th 7-8pm
Hosted by the Newton Public Library
Cosponsored by FORJ, The Harmony Foundation, & the Newton Human Rights Commission

Join us for the first in a multi-part educational series on being an anti-racist. This program is part of Overdue: Confronting Race and Racism in Newton, a city-wide read and series of events and conversations on race and racism. The panelists will be:

  • Ellie Axe, Director, Story Starters
  • Michele Leong, Newton North High School Office of Human Rights
  • Kathy Lopes, Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Newton Public Schools
  • Dr. Henry Turner, Principal, Newton North High School
  • Dr. David A. Fleishman, Superintendent of Schools will moderate

Register here.  An email with a link for the webinar will be sent out prior to the event.


Housing Inequities with special guest Richard Rothstein
Wednesday, November 17th 6:30pm-8pm
Richard Rothstein, author of The Color of Law, A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, argues with exacting precision and fascinating insight how segregation in America is the byproduct of explicit government policies at the local, state and federal levels.  Join us for a virtual session with Mr. Rothstein.  The talk will be followed by a panel discussion moderated by FORJ, the program cosponsor.  Attendees will come away with a deeper understanding of the systemic issues that contribute to housing inequities, particularly as Newton engages in a comprehensive review of its zoning codes.
RSVP HERE