Another Warm Start to the School Year
Students and staff at JFK experienced another warm start to the school year. Prior to Oct 1st, there were already 36 cooling days, making the start of the 2019-20 school year one of the warmest ever. The number of cooling days is actually on an upward trend since JFK was built in the 1960s. During the last three school years of the 1960’s, there were 46 cooling days. By the last three years of the 2010s, there were 71.
In the fall of 2016, a complete Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) plan for JFK was developed. The boiler replacement aspect of the plan was completed in the summer of 2017. The remaining parts of the plan would address the heating issues associated with the hot water pipes, which are anywhere from five to 35 years past their life expectancy, ventilate the building using mechanical means, and allow for air conditioning. The remaining parts of the HVAC plan are currently being reviewed and updated. It sure would be nice to have them done before next school year!
Marching Bands at Assumption Thursday
The 7th/8th grade Catholic elementary bands will be marching with the Assumption band at Thursday’s football game at Brady Street. Come out for an enjoyable evening!
School Pictures
October 8th: Retakes and make-ups
Oct 24 and 25
Oct 24: End of the quarter. Special dismissal at 12:40. (I think the paper lunch menu said no school. A corrected menu is online.) No PM preschool classes.
Oct 25: No classes. ECLC open. Pumpkin Run and activities in evening.
Locals Love Us – Do You?
Vote for JFK on LocalsLoveUs.com. Preschool, childcare, and K-8 Private school categories.
Thank You, Jeff Edens
Jeff Edens will be concluding his second term as evening custodian with us on Friday. We have been blessed with about a year and a half of his service this time around. Not only is Jeff a good employee who takes pride in his work, but he’s an even better person, and we’re glad to have had him in our lives at JFK.
OLV parish bulletin: Click HERE or use the following link/url: https://www.olvjfk.com/olv/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2019/10/October-6-2019.pdf
Read about the OLV Foundation reaching its $1,000,000 goal! With a $1,000,000 endowment, the foundation is able to donate nearly $50,000 per year to OLV and JFK.
The Unwritten Rules
Last weekend, as one of my daughters was getting ready for bed, she spotted a big spider near the bed in a room that she was sharing with her sister. She came downstairs and told us about it. Others of us then went upstairs to try to find the spider but were unsuccessful. That event has set off a little back and forth about “unwritten rules:”
- Large spiders near beds must be killed.
- It’s OK if you don’t kill it yourself, but you cannot let it out of your sight, and you must call out to have someone else come kill it.
During and after this event, the following types of phrases seemed very common: “Everyone knows these rules. How do you not know the spider rules?” I fed the sisterly back and forth again on Friday when I took a picture of the hallway at school with all of the paper spiders made by students on the walls and sent it to the two girls. That reignited the comments: “It’s OK not to kill paper spiders!” Apparently, there are just some rules that you’re supposed to know.
The older I’ve become, the more lenient I’ve become with “the rules.” I remember that when my kids were younger, we didn’t go down the back-to-school aisle in the store until August, the Halloween aisle until October, and the Christmas aisle until Thanksgiving. Everything needed its own special time; let’s not rush our lives away. Now, I’m a little more flexible. When Caitlin was bringing her roommate home for Thanksgiving and really wanted to show her how beautiful the house would look when we decorated for Christmas, what’s a week earlier?
“No desert unless you finish your supper” was another one of those rules. Now, once in a while, Whitey’s is supper. Perhaps it even tastes better because we all know that we’re really “breaking the rules.”
I hope you have your own special sets of family rules and can even enjoy breaking them once in a while!
Chad
