Dear Parents, 

Hope everyone is having a good weekend.  I ran just over 13 miles today.  Some of you might be thinking, "Good work, Mr. Ying!  I see you are increasing distance from last week’s 12-mile run."  No, no, no, it’s 13 miles because I took a wrong turn…. 

Happy belated Mid-Autumn Festival!  We had a great festival last Friday.  Many families and friends came out.  The two hours were filled with lots of arts and crafts, food tasting, and student performances.  Parents, if you came to our festival, I want to thank you for making the time and I hope you enjoyed the event.  I want to once again thank our PTO members, all parents, staff, and students who helped make this fun night possible.  Towards the end of the festival, I witnessed something special and it touched my heart. I took a shot of it and posted on Twitter.  Towards the end, I saw parents and students rolled up their sleeves and helped our staff clean up the cafeteria.  That shows a sense of unity.  That tells me our community is all about helping one another and making our school great.  

The following is this week’s update.

1. Dress code. Starting last week, we started to enforce MIMS dress code.  If your child is out of dress code, our front office ladies will call and ask you bring uniform to school.  We understand that it might cause some inconvenience, but we need to make sure every student come to school in uniform.  On that note, we are being understanding and flexible about hoodies.  Students are allowed to wear hoodies as long as they don’t cover their head with the hoodie.  

2. Schedule update. 

a. For the 7^thgraders who are on advance Chinese track, they WILL BE taking Chinese One.  We apologize for the mix-up, and we are correcting this schedule issue as soon as we can.  

b. Due to low enrollment, we might be losing our Technology teacher, Ms. Hill in the near future.  Ms. Hill is also a certified Dyslexia teacher, and I’m looking into the possibility of having her assigned to MIMS for Dyslexia service.

c. One of my mid-term and long-term plans for MIMS is to strengthen student’s Chinese proficiency. Ms. Colion and I are looking into possibly adding more Chinese courses that focus on conversational Chinese to make up for the loss of Technology class.  

d. In addition to conversational Chinese courses, it is also my vision to provide advance technology class, such as coding.  I believe advance technology skills will give students an edge to become successful when they graduate.  With that in mind, I want to ensure you that I’ll bring Technology class back to our campus the moment I can.  

3. On Tuesday, 9/17/19, we are supporting the Houston Astros by wearing jeans and Astros attire.  Your child may also wear t-shirt that has Astros’ color – navy blue and orange.

4. Also on Tuesday, our school is offering Parent University to all parents.  We will be talking about understanding culture differences and the art of working with people who grew up in a different culture. 

5. I am excited to inform you that we have started a new routine – daily morning announcement. Currently, our morning announcement is scheduled at 8:35.  It is very brief; it’s only about 2 minutes.  We use this time to celebrate the little successes that’s happening around the campus, talk about general reminders, and wish students and staff happy birthday.  Similar to my weekly updates to parents, we want to utilize the morning announcement to communicate with the entire student body the important items that are pertaining to them.