If you have been watching the news lately you have probably seen the growing popularity of personal websites and chat rooms. This is growing in popularity in De Leon as well. Many students have these websites and chat online frequently. There are some positive points to these websites such as self expression, computer skills, and familiarity with the internet. However these sites have the possibility of being used in a negative way.

Because of the potential harmful effects, the school has filters that try to keep out the unwanted material. We try to be aware of certain sites and try to block them so the students can not access them from the school. Together we can try to keep our kids safe.

Parents we need your help during the testing week. We need all of the students to get plenty of sleep that week. All of them need to eat a good dinner the night before the tests also. We will serve them breakfast the morning of the test but if you would like to feed them a home cooked breakfast that would be great. The students are allowed to bring snacks like goldfish, pretzels, and ritz crackers. Anything like that will be OK for them. We try to stay away from hard candies or anything that has a wrapper that will cause noise during the testing. It takes all of us to make sure that these students do their very best on the tests.

Students will need #2 pencils for the test.
**IMPORTANT**
STUDENTS WILL NOT BE ABLE TO HAVE CELL PHONES IN THE CLASSROOMS DURING TESTING. If they do have a phone and it rings or is taken out then their test will be voided. The Texas Education Agency (TEA) is really cracking down on us in this area. Students are not allowed to have phones at school anyway but we understand that there are times when you send them to school with a phone. Students should turn that in to the office. We will hold it for them and then they can swing by when school is out and pick it up. If a student does not turn in their phone and it gets taken up we will hold their phone in our safe for 10 days. We need your help with this matter.