Dear Upper School Families, 

Happy Friday! While I know we may be bracing for a Nor’easter this weekend, this past week was lovely. And it was wonderful to see so many new and familiar faces at our coffees this week as well. Your students are settling in nicely; today’s club fair is in action as I write, our college counseling September meetings have been so well received, play practices and athletic practices and games are underway, we are busy preparing for Back to School Night, and our Field Hockey team beat GA. So many lively and life-giving moments to celebrate already. Thank you to all of our parents who are helping us provide a healthy September start. 

I’ve been thinking about a topic I didn’t talk about in my coffees this week, and it’s very much related to a healthy September start: technology use at home. Those of you who’ve been in the Upper School for a bit know that our students’ phones are placed in lockable “garages” in the Cesare Commons and that we work hard to keep our students focused on direct, person-to-person engagement with peers and teachers. In classrooms, teachers monitor laptop use and have a “lids up, lids down” approach to helping students learn healthy and appropriate use of technology. We also teach students when and how to use AI – and when not to do so. 

Outside of school, students have (we assume) much less direct supervision with these devices. Here is my hope: that parents can hit reset on rules with their children around where they study in the home and rules around no devices when it’s time to sleep. You can blame the school. Say that King knows how important sleep is and what the research suggests about the deleterious effects of blue light exposure and overly stimulated brains at bedtime. Say that King knows that studying in one place away from the bed and the temptation of non-study device use is the best way to study. The beginning of a new school year is a great excuse to start a new habit or at least a “pilot” of a new approach. If you need any resources at all on this topic, please reach out! 

Now is also a good time, particularly if you are the parent of a Grade 9 or Grade 10 student, to encourage your child to join a club. I mentioned above that today was our Club Fair (and indeed it was active!), but signing up for a club at a club fair and actually showing up and committing to one is a slightly different thing. 

Our clubs are designed to engage student interest, to be sure, but they are also designed to teach and reinforce many of the skills important to us at King, like collaboration, sustained program development and planning, delayed gratification, critical thinking, and written and spoken communication, among others. Some of our clubs extend specific academic skills beyond the classroom, too – such as clubs like Math Team, Robotics, Model UN, Debate, Literary Magazine, and a number of business clubs, for example. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to your child’s advisor if you’re curious about options or need backup from a non-parent to encourage participation. We have such an impressive set of offerings for our students, and I want to be sure parents understand how important this aspect of King’s curriculum is. 

That’s all for now. I am looking forward to connecting with as many of you as possible at Back to School Night on Thursday, October 1! Here is a poem by Mary Oliver that I love to read about this time each year. 

Be well,

Marnie Sadlowsky
Head of Upper School