Weekly Reminders October 5-11

Today is Spirit Day – wear your red! Spirit Day is the first Friday of the month, so the next one is November 2.

Henry Hudson 2nd Lip Sync Battle!

TODAY! Friday October 5
4 – 5:30 pm
Location: School Gym
$5/student | ALL donations go to Food4Africa: http://food4africa.org/
Perform to your favourite song! Prizes for 1st, 2nd and 3rd place winners!!
Register here: http://www.giveafreelunch.com/#register-for-our-lip-sync-battle

This Monday, October 8 is the Thanksgiving stat holiday. No school!

In the School Library

Babysitting and Snacks

We currently have the following positions up for election or re-election.  We do have enough volunteers, but if anyone is interested in serving on the Executive should email Robert Ford at HudsonPAC@gmail.ca.

Chair

Vice Chair External – DPAC Rep

Vice Chair Internal

co-Secretary

co-Secretary

co-Treasurer

co-Treasurer

Member-At-Large / co-Activities Coordinator

Member-At-Large / co-Activities Coordinator

DPAC will be hosting a General Meeting on SOGI 123 (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity) on Thursday October 25th 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm. The meeting will be held in Room 180 at the Vancouver Education Centre 1580 W Broadway. Translation services will be available for those requiring them. DPAC encourages parents who have concerns with SOGI education in schools to attend to begin a dialogue. Matt Carruthers (former SOGI District Lead) and Renee Hock (VSB Diversity Mentor) will be presenting.

DPAC meetings are open to all parents and guardians of children in VSB schools.

We are still looking for parent volunteers for Divisions 1 (Lerch), 8 (Morehouse), 9 (Kuang), and 12K (Chang). Class Reps serve as a connection between your class’ parents and your child’s teacher and the PAC. Each week, the Class Rep will connect with their teacher to gather any reminders specific to their class (e.g. field trips, activities), and then will send an email to the class mailing list with the class reminders and a copy of the PAC’s reminders for the week. Contact jennifer.tillett@gmail.com if you’re interested in representing your child’s class.

What is POE? Paws of Empathy program is a program that aims to teach elementary school kids about empathy, ethics, social literacy, law, animal welfare.  The program was founded and is taught by Victoria Shroff, who is an active parent volunteer, animal law lawyer and adjunct professor of law at UBC law school.  Victoria Shroff co-teaches the session with a well socialized dog.

She just ran the second session on September 26 in a grade 6/7 class and it was well received.  The media filmed part of the session while maintaining privacy of the children by not filming their faces.

Watch it here:

A parent has asked for help advocating for the planned expansion of the bike park.

The Vanier Park bicycle skills park is owned by the City of Vancouver and maintained by a dedicated group of locals. October 1st was supposed to be the start date for Joyride Bike Parks pump track expansion at Vanier. The City has hired a contractor and they were ready to start Monday (outside of the migratory bird nesting season). A few local eagle enthusiasts have caused another delay (this time may be the end) of the construction due to the possibility that the eagles may re-nest in the bike park. The original project proposal addressed all these concerns:  removal of invasive species, planting of native species, retention of ALL existing healthy trees, and scheduling to avoid the migratory bird nesting season.

Please email support to tiina.mack@vancouver.ca, malcolm.bromley@vancouver.ca, pbcommissioners@vancouver.ca and vancouverdirtjumps@gmail.com about why you think a pump track should be built. Even just a few sentences! We really need your help on this right away! Thanks!

CLICK: https://tinyurl.com/y74mmdjk for more info including link to the full, detailed 2016 proposal with the original tree retention plan, forest revitalization plan, etc.

This is a picture of pick-up time at 3 pm on Tuesday. Clearly, there are not enough parking spaces on York for everyone who wants to do a drive-up pick-up at 3. The Traffic Safety Committee is adding this as one of our concerns for the city. However, in the meantime, it is not okay to put kids in danger with bad pick-up behavior.

Do not stop in the driving lane for pickups:

– This causes your child to walk through stopped cars in the parking lane. It just takes a second of inattention for a driver to not see your short little guy walking behind their bumper, but it can cause an injury that lasts your child’s lifetime.

– This also causes traffic to build up behind you and can lead to cars blocking the crosswalks for children.

– This blocks parked cars from leaving and freeing up a legitimate spot.

– This is also illegal and can result in a ticket.

Do not stop in the no-stopping areas around the driveway:

– This blocks the view lane for drivers so they can’t see children and parents biking out of the driveway.

– When you back out or pull out of this area, you won’t have sufficient vision to see any children or parents biking or walking out of the driveway.

– This is also illegal and can result in a ticket.

Instead, you may park further from Hudson and walk to pick up your child, or circle the block (safely) until you find a real parking spot to stop in.

If you would like to make traffic around Hudson safer and more convenient for children, parents and teachers, please join the Traffic Safety Committee. On Wednesday this week, 4 parent volunteers filmed traffic at the 3 main intersections around Hudson at drop-off time and tallied the number of cars, bikes and pedestrians. The next steps are to package up the problems we’ve identified and possible solutions and try to shop them to anyone at the city who will help us. If you’d like to join the effort, please email jennifer.tillett@gmail.com