Student Drop-Off Changes

As many of you are aware, we have experienced difficulties with our drop-off and pick-up area.  After reviewing our procedure and receiving advice from Weber School District, beginning Monday, January 12th, we are implementing the following changes:

· We need all cars to pull ALL THE WAY FORWARD to the west end.   

· All the main doors on the south side of the school will be available for students to enter the building before school starts.

· Once you have stopped, have your child get out of the car on the side facing the curb. Do not let students out on the other side with the oncoming traffic.

· Leave the lane as soon as possible so that other cars may pull up.  Do not block traffic on the road.

· Please make sure to have all homework and papers signed before leaving the house. Say your good-byes and give hugs and kisses before getting into the car.

If you choose to park in the parking lot, please be sure to walk in the crosswalk when dropping off or picking up your students. Please do not call for your child to walk across the busy lane instead of using the crosswalk.

If you live in designated bussing zones, we encourage you to take advantage of our transportation. This will help alleviate some of the congestion in our drop-off and pick-up area.

There will be a treat for the students on this first day!

We realize there may be some inconveniences with this change. We thank you for your help and your support in making this a better situation for all our parents and students

It is my greatest hope that we never have an emergency at Orion Junior High. We try to be as proactive and prepared as we can in case of an emergency at our school, but sometimes things happen that are out of our control. If there were ever an emergency at Orion, of course my main priority is keeping your kids safe—NEXT would be contacting parents and letting them know what happened and what we’re doing about it.
I’m sure you heard about the recent lockdown at our neighboring high school, Fremont High. Administrators and police officials there needed a way to contact parents quickly and easily as they were very busy during the lockdown. After talking with Fremont’s principal, it’s clear to me that the parents that had taken the time to sign up for emails and text alerts were able to get accurate information from school officials quickly—and didn’t have to wait for a letter to be sent home! That’s what I’d like for you to do.

The three easiest ways to stay in contact with us are:

1. Please make sure your email address is updated in our system. This can easily be done by logging into myweber.wsd.net. Please feel free to call the school if you need assistance in this matter at 801.452.4700.
2. Please consider following us on Twitter using @OrionJuniorHigh. Signing up is easy and you’ll get the added bonus of seeing cool things that are happening around the school (games, assemblies, Titan Time activities, etc.). If you’d like to see our “tweets” but don’t want a Twitter account, you can “fast follow” us by texting “follow @orionjuniorhigh” to 40404. Fast followers get their “tweets” in the form of a text.
3. Weber School District has set up a notifying system (very similar to Remind101) that I’ve been using all year. It’s called “MyConnect” and we’ll be switching to this system in the next week-- please take a minute and sign up. We’ll use MyConnect to notify you of school schedules (late starts, snow days, early outs, etc.) AND emergencies