EF Academy Pasadena

Monthly Family Newsletter: October 2024

Dear Families,

Happy October!  We have had an amazing launch to our school year and are eagerly anticipating the exciting events of October ahead.  I am thrilled to share news with you today.

With 129 of our students being new this year, along with 24 new faculty and staff members, it is lovely to see our new community members settling in so nicely on campus.  I see wonderful relationships forming between students and non-stop caring mentorship occurring between adults and students in classrooms, dorms, clubs, activities, and study hours.  As a faculty/staff community our professional learning focus in the month of September was on “Duty of Care,” with all adults spending time in thoughtful reflection about how best to care for our students. With faculty, house parents, advisors, club leaders, coaches, and UACs all focusing on their skills in active listening & empathy along with providing timely feedback and accountability, I see each student authentically connected with many trusted adults on campus already.

We have just begun our 2nd blue session, with students studying their periods 1, 2, and 3 courses again.  I am seeing incredible learning experiences inside and outside of our classrooms all day long!  The featured author in this month’s newsletter is Dr. Kaela Clapp, our Dean of Academics.  She will share more details about exciting academic updates from September and information on our upcoming Quarter 1 Progress Reports and family/advisor conferences in October!

Outside of the classroom, we are having an exciting fall season of sports and clubs.  Our girl's volleyball and co-ed cross-country running teams have been working very hard in practices and in competitions, and their growth and improvement are visibly evident week over week.  Our student-athletes are committed to growing a serious sports culture at our school, and they are doing a wonderful job at it!  Meanwhile, our new high-commitment clubs are living their vision with students’ deep investment and daily commitment to rehearsing for our fall play, Clue; building a practice robot in preparation for the competitive robotics season that begins in January; and building skills and teamwork in E-sports as the team prepares to represent EF Academy in competitions.  

Our campus and community service club is working hard to figure out how to make a meaningful impact on our campus and in the broader Pasadena community.  On behalf of that club’s student leaders, I am sharing this quick announcement.  They welcome participation from local and international families in their:

Canned food drive! The Campus and Community Service Club is partnering with Friends in Deed, a local non-profit organization near our school! The Friends in Deed’s food pantry provides food assistance to low-income and no-income families in the greater Pasadena and Altadena areas. Our club will be collecting food from Oct. 21 - Halloween, Oct. 31st. You can bring in canned items or order them on Amazon using the organization’s wish list. Email [email protected], the club advisor, if you have any difficulty making an online donation. 

This club has also partnered with our Activity Specialist to combine our annual neighborhood trick-or-treating with the canned food drive.  Club students are dropping bags and instructions at neighbors' houses next week for them to leave canned goods out on their porches on Halloween night.  While we are out enjoying trick-or-treating, we can also perform this act of service for Friends in Deed.

Our Student Media Services (SMS) club completed their first project in September, filming and editing the Grade 12 University and Academic Counseling Parent Info Session.  This session was attended in person by several local Grade 12 families, and Jim Sargent will share a link to the video with all families this week.  The SMS club also had an opportunity to receive some hands-on training from a group of professional videographers last month, who were on-site to film a new episode of Dr. Laurie Santos’ latest online course.  Dr. Santos is a Yale Professor and founder of the highly popular Happiness Lab podcast series.  She serves on EFAcademy’s Advisory Council and she and her research team partner with us on building wellness programming on campus!

Looking forward to October, the biggest thing on our horizon is our much-anticipated inaugural fall immersion trips!  Students and chaperones are getting very excited to head out to amazing locations in less than two weeks! As we shared last month, locations are below, but now, they have links to itineraries and packing lists.

• Grade 9: Wonder Valley Outdoor Camp (Oct 12 - Oct 15)

• Grade 10: STEM Tour of San Francisco (Oct 12 - Oct 15)

• Grade 11: Peaceworks Service Learning in San Diego (Oct 12 - Oct 15)

• Grade 12: Las Vegas and National Parks (Oct 12 - Oct 16)

All students must have a completed waiver to participate in the trip.  At this time, we have nearly all waivers returned, but we ask for a parent partnership to collect those final waivers this week!  For the small handful of families that have informed us their boarding students will be opting out of the trip, a member of our residential life team will be in touch to gather their campus departure details and ensure alignment with our campus closure period.  The campus is closed from the morning of Saturday, Oct 12, to the evening of Tuesday, Oct 15.  No student opting out of a trip may be on campus during those times.  When students and chaperones return from the fall immersion trips, we enter our brief fall break.  Classes will resume on Oct 21.

Our October Activities Calendar has been shared with students.  We have a lot of fun things coming up on evenings and weekends, with our large excursions of the month including:

• Saturday, 10/5 – Huntington Beach and Pier

• Fall Break:

  • Thursday, 10/17 – Irvine Spectrum Center Mall

  • Friday, 10/18 – Grand Central Market Bazaar

  • Saturday, 10/19 – Bowling

  • Saturday, 10/26 – Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights

For our Grade 12 students, we also highly encourage participation in the College Application Boot Camp that we are offering on campus on Friday, October 18 from 10:00 am - 4:00 pm.  Hosted by our University and Academic Counseling (UAC) office, this boot camp provides a wonderful high-touch opportunity to make tremendous progress on applications and avoid the stressful last-minute push that some seniors find themselves in every fall.  If a Grade 12 student would like to opt out of this boot camp, we ask that they meet with their UAC first to discuss other strategies for ensuring their timely completion of all application requirements.

Also, in October, we are excited to expand our Wellness Wednesday programming on the evening of Oct 23 to include our families and the local community alongside our students as we host Eduardo Lara from the Harvard Center for Digital Thriving (CDT).  CDT’s mission is to create knowledge and research-based resources that help people – especially youth – thrive in a tech-filled world.  Our recently elected Student Council Board of Directors - Ari Duan (Grade 12), Ray Huang (Grade 10), and Taiga Muraoka (Grade 12) - will have the opportunity to meet with Mr. Lara before his visit to review the results of a soon-to-be-published research report from the CDT focused on social media and burnout. These student leaders will then be responsible for hosting and moderating his visit to campus on Oct 23!

As you can see, there are so many exciting things happening on campus this fall!

As always, thank you for sharing your wonderful children with us.  It is a privilege to be part of their journey to adulthood.

With appreciation,

Sally

Co-author note:

Dear EF Academy Pasadena Parents and Families, 

I am excited to share some academic reflections as we head into our second full month of school for the year. There is already so much to celebrate from the initial launch of our third year. Whether conducting interviews for Journalism class, exploring Newton’s law of cooling through experiments in Integrated Math, or hiking Eaton Canyon for exercise in PE, students are fully immersed in diverse learning experiences and evidencing their growing competencies. 

Students have had particularly engaging hands-on learning opportunities through our school’s signature program, Innovation and Impact. In just over a month, we’ve already had over 100 students in Phase 1 of Innovation and Impact participate in empathy trips, where they connected with local organizations such as TreePeople, the Pasadena Humane Society, Project Angel Food, and Friends of LA River. These trips are a crucial part of the design thinking process, allowing students to apply their learning in real-world settings. As the year progresses, students across phases of Innovation and Impact will continue to have service learning opportunities and are encouraged to bring their project ideas to program directors to further develop community partnerships.

In addition to Innovation and Impact, students have been exploring local Pasadena and Los Angeles communities through field studies organized in their core classes. So far, teachers have organized over 30 field studies, where students have had opportunities to visit Amazon Fresh for Computer Science, Huntington Gardens for Mandarin, Santa Monica Pier for Physics, and the LA Natural History Museum for World History. Through these field studies, students are cultivating skills to develop into more empowered learners, ethical researchers, cross-cultural collaborators, critical thinkers, compelling communicators, inspiring innovators, and global changemakers.

As we approach the end of the first quarter of school in late October, we encourage all families to sign up for our family/advisor conferences. These meetings provide a valuable opportunity to discuss your student’s academic progress and understand how they are working toward mastering key competencies in each of their classes. Advisors will be reaching out this week with sign-up details for conferences, which will take place Tuesday, October 29th and Wednesday, October 30th. 

Before your conference, please carefully review the teacher comments that will be sent to families on Monday, October 28th. These reports will provide personalized feedback on your student’s progress in each class. During conferences, students will lead the conversation by presenting evidence of their growth, complemented by personalized teacher feedback. 

Finally, for our returning students and families, you may notice that this year’s Quarter 1 Progress Reports focus solely on narrative feedback from teachers. Because students will have only had one or two sessions with their classes leading up to these progress reports, teachers are emphasizing actionable goals and strategies for skill development through their narrative feedback. Seeing as students will have had limited opportunities to demonstrate evidence for in-depth competency scores, reports will not have competencies or competency scores listed. To see a comprehensive list of competencies for each class, please refer back to course syllabi that were sent out in early September. 

To summarize, please see the following dates to note upcoming communication from campus around academics:

• This week: Advisors will send email to families inviting them to sign up for a family/advisor conference

• October 28th: Quarter 1 Progress Reports sent to families digitally

• October 29th: Afternoon and evening timeslots (in PDT) for family/advisor conferences

• October 30th: Morning timeslots (in PDT) for family/advisor conferences

All of our educators are excited to speak with you all about your student’s progress and to partner with you on supporting student goals this school year!