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Monday - April 4, 2011


Dear 6th grade parents,As we begin the placement process for next year, I thought it might be helpful to give you some sense of how we work. Homeroom teachers spend a number of meetings reflecting on your children with whom they have developed such close relationships, and their work is both careful and thorough.In making placements into 7/8 teams, we seek to build good groups rather than assigning students to a particular teacher, which would limit our ability to build effective working groups. We want an even mix of girls and boys, we want to take into account the newly accepted students and where they fit best, and we want to consider students who have – or who have the potential to have – good working relationships with each other. While we do believe that it is important for children to have friends in their group, we also want them to be open to forming new friendships, especially in seventh grade when a large group of new students enters the School.As students enter the 7th grade, two additional perspectives are important: First of all, team placement affects only two of their six classes with certainty: English and Social Studies. Although there is some effort to place students with team teachers in other subjects, all other classes could be with students on other teams and depend heavily on language choice and math level. Friends who are not together in a team often find themselves together in other classes. Second, students are now older, and we expect them to be able to develop friendships with a wider group of people. Building a schedule with balanced classes is hard enough; we cannot and do not take friendships into account with every selection.With those limitations in mind, we invite parents to share their perspective on friendships and good working relationships with other students. Under no circumstances will we entertain requests for a specific team. I have the utmost confidence in all of our teachers and have seen over the years that kids and adults are able to form strong academic and personal relationships in all sorts of ways.Your input by email or hard copy to me is optional, and teachers will not schedule conferences specifically to discuss placement. Finally, let me remind you that we will take into account the information that you send us but that final decisions rest with the School.Send letters by hard copy or email to me by Monday, May 2.One other transition item: Language choice forms for 7th grade will be distributed tomorrow to all current 6th grade students. A copy will also be placed on the sixth grade Moodle page. Please look over the options and return the form by May 2nd.Sally Selby


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