Dear Parents and Guardians,

Cumberland’s student population continues to grow and new students in the last week bring us to a whopping 758 students!  This large number means that our hallways, classrooms, recesses and lunchroom are filled to the brim so if your child says s/he was squished in the hallway or it was hard to get to his/her cubby or locker, the truth is being spoken.  We have even run out of lockers in the lower level!  In the next weeks, we will be planning for next year, even as we have a foot firmly in this year. As part of our planning, we will be projecting our student population for 2018-19. If your child/family will not be with us at Cumberland next year, I will very much appreciate knowing this as soon as you make this determination. Please let Debby (Debby.kwong@wfbschools.com) in the front office know. Thanks.

Safety drills: You may recall from earlier communications that we regularly conduct three types of safety drills at Cumberland.  We do these drills at different times of the day so students are practiced in responding quickly no matter where they are. Yesterday, we had a fire drill that occurred during the kindergarten and first grade lunch recess. Students who were outside quickly lined up by class far away from the building, as we would hope. During this kind of evacuation drill, everyone in the building exits through the closest door. Some students are in the front of the building and some are in the back. We have a system for accounting for all students very quickly and yesterday’s drill was a textbook case of many students not exiting from their own classrooms or with their classroom teachers.  Staff members in both the front and back have walkie talkies, and I am in the building with a walkie until every child is located. Our actual evacuation time yesterday was 2 minutes eleven seconds - remarkable considering that we are moving more than 800 people. Ninety-five seconds after this, I knew where every child was. We will have an additional severe weather drill and lock down drill in the coming weeks.

THANK YOU!

Teacher Conference day was a success! Thanks to all that helped and donated time and items during conferences last week.  Thanks to CPK for a great spread of food.