March 2024

Here is the presentation from the administration's informational session at the KJHS Winter Open House. Please feel free to contact Ms. Palmer with any questions. 

KJHS is hosting a 6th Grade Welcome Night on Monday, April 29th, to welcome our incoming sixth graders, the KJHS Class of 2027. Further details will be shared in the April Family Connection as well as being sent out to incoming 6th grade families at the beginning of April. 

The KJHS IMC is hoping to "shower" the shelves with some great new titles for your students. Want to help us out? Simply click on our wishlist, purchase any title, and it will automatically be shipped directly to Kingsley Junior High School for the IMC. 

We are seeing an increasing number of student conflicts at KJHS caused by social media usage, especially Snap Chat. Given this, we wanted to share some insights into Snap Chat from our friends at Decatur Public Schools in Alabama. We hope the information below will help our Kingsley families provide guidance to students in the usage (or elimination) of this app. 

Does your child use Snapchat? It's a popular app with teenagers used for creating multimedia messages referred to as "snaps" that consist of a photo or a short video, and can be edited to include filters and effects, text captions, and drawings. While the premise behind the app seems innocent, it can lead to problems if used inappropriately. With school about to start, be sure you are up to speed on all that snapshot offers(good and bad).

Snapchat offers extra protections for 13-to-17-year-olds, including requiring teens to be mutually connected or in their respective phone contacts before they can start communicating.

Please follow the links below to learn more about tools parents can access to learn more about Snapchat safety:

Snap has a set of in-app parental tools called Family Center.  The goal of these tools is to help parents get insight into how their teens are using Snapchat, including who they are communicating with and what public content they are viewing. https://values.snap.com/safety/family-center

Easily report concerning accounts to Snap’s 24/7 Trust and Safety team.  You can learn more here: https://values.snap.com/safety/safety-reporting

Here is a list of important actions to help protect your teens on Snapchat.

FAMILY AND FRIENDS ONLY: Tell your teen to only invite and accept Friends on Snapchat if they are friends in real life or family members. Encourage them to check their Friends List regularly to make sure they still want to be in touch with each friend.

LOCATION AND PRIVACY SETTINGS: Talk to your teen about their location and privacy settings. At Snapchat, privacy settings are turned on by default, so people can only see the things you want to share, for as long as you want to share them.

IN-APP REPORTING: Make sure your teen knows how to use our in-app reporting tools and that we don’t tell Snapchatters who reported them. These reports go directly to our 24/7 Trust and Safety team to investigate and take appropriate action. We also offer reporting tools on our website for those who don’t use Snapchat – which any parent can easily use.

THINK BEFORE YOU SEND: Remind your teen that, as with sharing anything online, it’s important to be really careful about sending anyone – even a partner or close friend – personal or sensitive images and information. Snaps and Chats may delete by default, but there are ways to capture images from a phone or other device without a person’s consent. This is true despite Snapchat sending a notification in some instances when a screenshot is taken.

JOIN FAMILY CENTER: Make sure you and your teen are signed up for Snapchat’s Family Center.

Given the fact that we have over 700 students in our KJHS community, conflicts are bound to occur. If your student is experiencing an issue with another student and needs adult assistance to help work things out, please encourage them to complete the "What's Up Kingsley?" form. This will alert the adults in the building to the issue and we will direct the students involved to the KJHS resource best suited to the conflict. 

If you are wanting your child to ride a different bus on a certain day (i.e. , they are riding home with a friend), please contact the Transportation Office (309-557- 4287) to make this arrangement as they will need to notify the bus driver. Please do this as early as possible in order to ensure that the message is communicated. KJHS cannot make this arrangement for you. 

Want to enjoy KJHS home games from the comfort of your own home? Check out our Kingsley Activities You Tube page for live streams of all home events and enjoy how our student led Stream Team broadcasts each and every game!