We are thrilled to welcome you all back to CDS for the upcoming 2024-2025 school year! All our CDS staff members have been working hard preparing for the arrival of our students on August 12th and we have many new and exciting things for you all this year here at CDS!
Regarding our facilities, our team has been working extremely hard in breathing new life into our campus. Lead by our facilities coordinator, Maria Jose Canas, our campus is looking brighter than ever...and our elementary house has received a special make-over as well! Ms. Canas, along with our Marketing, Admissions, and Communications team have also overseen the creation of the new CDS Campus Store, The Paw! We hope you all come in and visit the store and check out all the new CDS fan gear we have available. We are also in the process of adding the lights to our athletic field so we can practice, play, and have fun well into the evening here on campus.
Along with a revitalized campus look and feel, we have three incredible announcements to make that affect the whole community. First, as we do every year, we announce our school-wide theme that will guide our community in reaching goals and growing together. This year, our entire staff worked diligently to identify, Be Present, Engaged, and Prepared, as our theme/ focus for this year. With a new cell phone policy prioritizing student engagement and focus, we feel this theme will support our whole community in being more focused, efficient, and intentional about how we work together as one.
This year, we are also proud to announce the SCHOOL-WIDE Code of Conduct, The Panther Way. The Panther Way encompasses everything that we expect from our students and community: Respect yourself, respect others, and respect our environment. Our code of conduct will be articulated differently for each grade level in an age-appropriate way, so students all know what eachof these three expectations look like for them in their classrooms and as individual members of our community.
Finally, we are so happy to announce the return of our CDS Animal Teams! Some of you may remember that the elementary school had the “Animal Nations,” mixed age level groups of students developed to create community within the elementary house and help students connect more across the grade levels. Now, we have taken this to new hieghts with the Animal Teams spanning the entire school! All CDS staff and students will join one of our 4 teams: Sloths, Toucans, Monkeys, or Iguanas and then we will let the team building and fun begin! The teams are set up in a legacy system where immediate family members (brothers, sisters, parents) are all part of the same team. We look forward to this new chapter in building our community even stronger here at CDS!
The 2024-2025 school year will be an incredible time for our community, and we are thrilled to welcome over 120 new students from 70 families into our CDS family. We are also welcoming 19 new instructional staff members from all over the world! Please join me in giving them all a warm welcome when we see each other on campus in a few short days.
We wish you all a wonderful last weekend of vacation and look forward to seeing new families tomorrow morning, Friday, August 9th for new family orientation and then all returning students on Monday, August 12th, for our first day of the new year!
