Dear Parents and Friends,

I am a resident of the Hollywood Dell. We are seeing more and more babies born in the Dell, Beachwood and the Oaks it seems like on a weekly basis. Have you noticed all the strollers? LOL!!

I am posting here to tell you about an amazing group of parents in the Dell that have began the process to re-integrate the entire population back into Cheremoya Elementary. There is a wave of children begining Kindergarden in 2006. Amazing things have happened to Cheremoya in the past few years. Just to mention a couple, Cheremoya's test scores have risen in the past few years by %200. This is an amazing accomplishment. My hat goes off to the teacher's.

Another bit of good news is that Cheremoya will begin a single track school year in September. This means it will now be on a normal school year schedule. The population has shrunk dramatically.

If you are a parent, expecting a baby, planning a family or a neighbor who would like to get involved, please feel free to e-mail me. Just click on the mail box logo next to my name and my e-mail address will pop up. You will be added to the e-mail list for updates and news. We have several meetings coming up and would love to see more Beachwood families and neighbors attend.

Thank you for reading and I hope to hear from you soon.

Sincerely,
Debra Gainor
Dell Resident and Mother to Gillian

Andrew Glazier (Holly Drive) met with the new principal at Cheremoya. Here are some notes on his meeting with her.

Debra Gainor
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Here' s a summary of my meeting with the new Cheremoya principal, Armineh Alexan. She is super nice, and very excited about starting at Cheremoya. She was previously at Ramona Elementary for 15 years as a kindergarten teacher and then a coordinator, and most recently for 2 years as a vice principal at Fletcher Elementary School in East Los Angeles. She also is fluent in Armenian and taught bi-lingual classes back when the District used to do that. She also has a 5 year old of her own who is soon to start kindergarten in Glendale Unified.

We talked about the school population and she asked me where the kids come from, which was perfect segue into a discussion about the new group of parents in the hills. She was very excited about the idea of bring the children north of Franklin back to Cheremoya, and I gave her a brief history of what had previously happened. She was really happy to hear that we were going to try again. I also mentioned that one of the common fears of parents was that their child might enter kindergarten already knowing how to read while others in the class might be at different levels. She agreed that this was a perfectly valid question and that it is something we can work on building a comfort level with parents as far as differentiated learning. I told her that there was a group of parents would would be ready to start sending kids in fall 2006, and she was happy to hear that. Apparently, enrollment has fallen off a little faster than the District anticipated, so she is anxious to keep the numbers up so that they don't lose teachers. We also talked about our next steps, and here is what we agreed on:

1) She likes the idea of the welcome party, and we can coordinate it with her to try to have something before school starts.
2) She is happy to have a meeting with Board Member Canter to take questions and have another opportunity to meet parents.
3) She thought the idea of a bus tour to some of the high performing schools in the District was a great idea, so i will work on that.
4) I mentioned that there are parents that would like to volunteer and she liked that idea. However, I caught her on her first day at the school, so she was still a little overwhelmed with everything (she hadn't had a chance to even meet all the teachers yet). So we agreed that maybe we could let her get settled for a few months before we start sending volunteers down so she can get to know teachers and have ideas about where to place people. But of course she likes the idea.

I also asked her about whether she has plans to stay at Cheremoya for a while, and she said that she has no plans to leave assuming all goes well.

So, overall, a very positive meeting.