Dear Trivium Prep Families,

We are now less than a week away from welcoming your students back to campus! We are so excited to see everyone and get started with an excellent year. Every year, summer is a time when I am reminded how much my team and I love serving the Trivium community as we dream and plan for the future, tackle the logistics of the upcoming year, and, not least, start to miss the students dearly!

Today, I wanted to share a few new things that we are really excited about. The first one will be something of a teaser so that we can fully surprise the students when they return: the house system! As you know, we’ve been slowly and deliberately bringing back our house system one step at a time (beginning with the introduction of middle school homeroom two years ago). This year, we’re bringing it back even more fully! House names and crests, competitions, etc. Stay tuned for more!

Related to school spirit, Trivium Prep will be having spirit day EVERY FRIDAY this year! So, every single Friday your 6th-12th grade scholars may wear spirit wear tops (Trivium shirts, polos, hoodies, even jerseys) with uniform bottoms and shoes. And if we’re able to create some house shirts, they can wear those too!

While you may have heard the sad news that we will no longer be able to use JupiterEd for gradebooks, parent communication, discipline logs, etc., we are getting a great new software called DeansList. This will allow us to keep you regularly updated on behavior, tardies, absences, and even grade reports. Emails from teachers will come mostly through Outlook, and grades and evaluations will come through PowerSchool.

We are also adding mid-quarter progress reports for every student. Students with a deficient grade will still receive a deficiency notice around the 5th week of the quarter, but simultaneously, every single family will receive a progress report for each of their students that will show their overall grade for each class (and likely even category grades for each class). This, I believe, will allow teachers and families to be in even better communication about students’ progress throughout the year.

I also wanted to find a way to connect parents with other parents; so, beginning this year, I am launching what will be called “Community Knights”! This will be an evening event for parents of students in a particular grade level (e.g. 7th grade parents). You will get to hear any news/upcoming events for your students, meet and get to know myself and some of our staff, but even more importantly, it will give you the opportunity to get to know other parents in the same grade level – I believe this will be an amazing way to grow together as one Trivium community and to build a sense of belonging.

Finally, related to community building and belonging, I wanted to share this year’s thematic goal with you. Every year, the leadership team and I spend hours and hours discussing what kind of focus Trivium Prep needs most in the upcoming school year. This summer, we talked a lot about how we have raised the bar over the last few years and then worked hard to build community last year – and we wanted to continue that work. Additionally, I spoke with a number of parents about how we can love your students even better. What we heard was something that resonates deeply with my own heart – we want every student to know and believe that they are known and loved, and this needs to be true even (and especially) in moments of correction or discipline. It may sound bizarre at first, but I want students to come out the other side of a mistake they made thinking “when that teacher corrected me, I could tell she loved me.” So, this year our thematic goal is as follows: Lean In. Love Well. Affirm the Good.

We want to lean in this year, meaning to step up and step in – take ownership of the school and model responsibility, but also lean in to genuinely and lovingly engage with everyone we encounter throughout the day. We want to love well by showing unconditional kindness and concern for every member of our Trivium community; and we want to intentionally speak about, communicate with parents around, point ourselves and our students to, and celebrate the good – excellent things that are happening at school, virtuous things that students are doing and saying, the greatness that we see in our scholars, all of it!

I hope that you will join us in this goal throughout the year! Thank you for the privilege of serving your family; every day with your students is a blessing! We are so grateful for your partnership, and we cannot wait to see you next week!

GO KNIGHTS!

Warmly,

Dan Schutten

Headmaster