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November 16, 2007
Printable version
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PHS Photos: Grandparents and Special Friends Day
Upcoming Events 11-16-2007
ALL SCHOOL EVENTS:
• November 19–MS Parent Conferences, 12:15 PM MS dismissal,
LS Parent Conferences - No LS Classes, childcare by reservation
• November 20–MS Parent Conferences, LS Parent Conferences - No classes, childcare by reservation
• November 21–23–Thanksgiving Break, School Closed, No childcare
• December 13–Alumni Dialogue Circle - Childcare by reservation - 6:00-8:00 PM
• December 19–Follies
• December 20–January 6–Winter Break - School Closed, No childcare
Click here for a downloadable calendar of events for November.
Click here for a downloadable calendar of events for December.
Click here for a downloadable 2007-2008 School Year Calendar
Announcements 11-16-2007
Picture Days
The pictures are READY to be viewed and purchased!!!!! Go to:
http://photographicproof.com/projects/presidio-hill-school
The password is the same as for the community section of our website. You can unlock anything on the website by clicking on it and entering the password.
From the 5th grade class:
San Francisco is home to more than 776,000 residents. Of those, ONE IN FOUR CHILDREN and ONE IN FIVE ADULTS live with the daily threat of hunger. Please help the San Francisco Food Bank (www.sffoodbank.org) provide food for hungry seniors, children, families in crisis, and homeless individuals. The PHS Food Drive is happening NOW THROUGH DECEMBER 7. If you can, please drop off non-perishable items in a barrel located in the PHS lobby. Our school goal is 500 lbs. of food. Help feed the hungry! Thank you so much.
Conference Days Childcare
For Lower School
CHILDCARE is AVAILABLE by RESERVATION ONLY on Monday, Nov. 19 and Tuesday, Nov. 20 from 8-3pm for a fee of $55 when reserved by Thursday, Nov. 15 and $75 for late reservations.
Regular ASR rates will apply from 3-6pm.
*FOR K-2 ONLY: Reservations will also be accepted and are required if childcare is needed during conference times only at no charge.*
For Middle School
CHILDCARE is AVAILABLE by RESERVATION ONLY on Monday, Nov. 19 from 12:15-6pm. Regular ASR rates will apply. Childcare is also available on Tuesday, Nov. 20 from 8-3pm for a fee of $55 when reserved by Thursday, Nov. 15 and $75 for late reservations.
Regular ASR rates will apply from 3-6pm.
Please contact Raymi at raymi_orozco@presidiohill.org or at 751-9318 x.130 to make a reservation and for more information. RSVP by Thursday, November 15, 2007
Parents Education Network Events
On Dec. 6, see Dr. Mike Riera speak about LD and the Parent-Child Relationship. Click here to download a flyer about this event. Click here to visit the PEN website.
Soup
Winter is coming and it is a great time to eat soup. If you are interested in making warm, delicious, and nutritious soup to help keep our PHS staff and teachers going through the cold winter days, please contact Leslie Jones at:
Leslie Jones at leslie_jones@mckinsey.com
Thanks in advance for your support.
PHS will host an exciting new mentor project for children with learning differences. Project Eye-to-Eye pairs high school student with lower school students. Every week the pairs will work on art projects and discuss strategies for approaching organization and learning. The mentor dates have been scheduled for 5:00pm to 6:00pm on the following Thursdays: January 10, 17, 24, 31, February 7, 14, 28, March 13, 20, 27, April 3 and 10. There will be an informational meeting Dec 6th from 5:30-6:15 pm. For more information email PHS alumna Natalie Tamburello natalietamburello@drewschool.org. To sign up email ann_meissner@presidiohill.org
PHS Photos: Book Fair
High School Placement 11-16-2007
Ann Meissner Jennifer Franklin (Seventh Grade Humanities Teacher)
High School
November 15, 2007
As we move towards Thanksgiving vacation we also move into the next stages of the high school placement process. While shadow visits and open houses continue, it is now the time to make decisions about which schools you will apply to, and start on those applications if you haven’t already.
Many students have already begun work on their applications and everyone else seems to have a developed plan for this work. This is a big job, and not one that should be left until the last minute. Please make sure that your student is moving through this process diligently and thoughtfully, and managing time wisely. We recommend setting up a schedule for completing the application for each school. Set specific deadlines and hold each other accountable. Also, remember to maintain boundaries during this time – let the students do their part, especially the essays!
Most students have provided Ann with the signed transcript release form and teacher recommendation forms. If you have not yet done so, please get them in right away. A written list of schools to which you are applying is also due now.
If you are applying to SOTA, make sure that Ann has the recommendation form if you want a PHS teacher to complete it. These are due to SOTA earlier than the other recommendations and so we need them by November 26th at the latest.
Take care,
Ann Meissner and Jennifer Franklin
From the Director 11-16-2007
Giving Thanks II
Last year, I wrote about all that I was thankful for. This letter to you on Friday, November 16, 2007 aims to do the same thing this year.
My attention recently has turned to the unpredictability of the weather. At 3839 Washington Street in San Francisco, sunshine can often peak through the veil of fog that creeps or gallops over the Golden Gate. Sometimes even blustery days give way to winter rains, soaking us all, but cleaning this palette for warmer times. When warmer times do come, as they did one day early this week, it almost seems that we have nothing to complain about because we live in one of the most sun-kissed spots on the planet.
I love Thanksgiving time because it feels like renewal. This has been a very good year, and I’d like to tell you just a bit about what I am thankful:
• Once again, I am thankful for my family, Jaime, Eian, and Olivia, who love me and allow me to love them back. It’s not easy being the immediate family of the head of a school, with the sharing of their dad and husband. They handle their roles with a great deal of grace, humor, and humility, teaching me that every day is just another day, as well as an incredible gift.
• I am thankful to the children of PHS, who live their lives with the fervor of NASCAR drivers on their last laps and the attention of monks after a long time alone in meditation. Every day we adults learn new and incredible things about our own lives from these teachers, which is what adults forget, sometimes; children have been our best teachers.
• I am thankful for a community that is so giving and forgiving. I continue to learn what being in real community is all about. PHS’s culture is very specific, idiosyncratic, and alive. What attracts people to us, the “realness and authenticity” that one admission’s tour-goer described to me, is what I see in our collective faces at the curb and in the hallways of this place.
• Finally, I am thankful for the ancestors—our grandparents, grandfriends, and “the people gone to glory,” as my grandma would say. If we listen real close to those voices, both near and far, they’ll always tell us what is right and what is the right thing to do.
Namasté,
Brian
Here’s another Letter from one of our alumni, who is the grandmother of Josie Noone in Kindergarten, writing to her daughter Addie Hilgard, about her memories of Presidio Hill School in the 1930s and ‘40s:
Hi Addie,
Here is a draft of some of my experiences at PHS. Some of the spellings of names may be wrong, but here goes:
I started at age 5 in 1938 in kindergarten at Presidio Open Air School. I stayed in school there for 6 years, through the 5th grade. During that time the name was changed to Presidio Hill School. I had some wonderful teachers through these years. Mrs. Arnstein ("Auntie Forgie" we called her) taught everything, especially writing, poetry, bookmaking and creativity. Mrs. Nicholsberg taught science and other subjects; I continued to know her after I had left PHS. "King", who was John King, taught PE and yard games, etc. Franz Bergman taught shop. Mrs. Gillis (We called her "Wee Gillis" after Wee Gillis the book) was our kindergarten teacher, who I remember well, we loved her. These teachers were all very kind. I have a specific memory of painting a life size self-portrait in the art room when I was about 9.
Paul Robeson came and sang in the auditorium for the whole school. It was thrilling. We spent a lot of my 4th grade putting on HMS PInafore by Gilbert and Sullivan. The whole school worked on this production. I was understudy for Buttercup and in the chorus too.
There were the Big Kids and the Little Kids at the school. I was a Little Kid and my sister Ellen Howard, 2 years older ande also a student at PHS, was a Big Kid. Some Big Kids accompanied me on the Cable Cars, etc. to get to and from school, as we lived in North Beach. Suki Means was one of them. She had a Boston accent. We called Suki "Big Lug", my sister Ellen "Little Lug", and I was called "Miniature Lug". We had fun. Once a week we got to treat ourselves to a raised doughnut on the way home. I took the Hyde Street cable car, then transferred to the California Street cable car which I took to the end of the line, and then walked from there (past the graveyard, which isn't a graveyard anymore) to school. Also we sometimes carpooled with other parents and their kids.
I remember the Fenn twins, Donald and David (Little Kids), and their older brother Bob. The older girls had a crush on Bob. I remember John Carey and Stephen Carey and also Judy Powers, Barbara Heil, Jean Eliel, Francis Gaskin, Aline Bier, and Donald Huber. Carla Wolff was my best friend in kindergarten and other years at PHS, and has remained my good and close friend through life to this day.
In third grade one morning we sat around the round table in our class and we discussed how war had just started for America. The bombing of Pearl Harbor has just happened. There were posters around school for "Buy War Bonds" and "Uncle Sam Needs You" after that. These became the war years. There were shortages, for example rubber for sneakers. I really wanted some high-top black-and-white Keds to wear while playing in the school yard and I waited several years for them. Also there were shortages of gasoline and butter. Our mothers rotated cooking lunch for the whole student body down in the cafeteria. Food was not tasty, meager ingredients . . . once I had to spend the whole afternoon in the office of the principal (Nushy Planck) because I didn't eat my lunch. I gagged on it. My mother finally came to pick me up when school was over that day.
At School we played games such as kickball, baseball, kick-the-can and one-foot-off-the-gutter. Also the school had two huge teeter-totters I loved to play on.
In fifth grade we worked on long division which I found very hard, but I finally learned it and use it all the time now. My sister Ellen wrote an exciting report on the explorer Pizarro. I looked up to Ellen a lot.
So, Addie, those are some thoughts about my times at PHS. Let me know what you think.
Much Love,
Mom
From the Director of Technology
From Greg Beuthin, Director of Technology
This is a big year for technology at PHS. We have several major projects underway or planned, and students and teachers are already seeing significant changes.
For starters, we've migrated the PHS email system in-house, which means we're saving over $700 a month in Exchange Server email hosting fees. Russ is to thank for all the heavy tech lifting, and we are finally seeing the dust settle. I've spent the last month getting under the hood of our databases, making sure that Namrata can generate the fundraising information she needs, as well as customizing the grading functionality to fit PHS' student evaluations. The Middle School evaluations you'll receive are entered and generated directly from the PHS database - no sorting through electronic folders for individual Word documents any more.
The exciting news for the classrooms is that we're buying 6 laptops and a laptop cart next month. One of our biggest challenges may well be where to store the cart, which will eventually hold 12-15 laptops. This means students will have more access to computers in the classroom, whether it's making songs on Garageband in Spanish, researching and creating electronic presentations for humanities, or modeling different velocity data in
science.
I promised a website revision for this year, and while a new site won't magically appear over the Thanksgiving break, we are well on our way. If you would like to be one of the people to give feedback on the site revision, please contact me via email or phone, and I will put you on my list.
Finally, Brian and I have been in conversation about building a collaborative and collective history of PHS for its 90 anniversary next year. We plan on configuring a PHS "History Wiki" using the same collaborative editing technology behind Wikipedia (amongst other things). We will seed the site with a brief historical timeline, and then encourage the PHS community to add their own personal and collective memories.
As you read this (on Friday, I assume) I will be on a plane to visit family in France for two weeks. I look forward to my trip - of course - but also to getting back and continuing these projects, several which are close to my heart.
Save the date: Follies
