Dear OV Families:
It’s that time of year again! We are starting to get some cooler evenings, see some morning fog in the valleys, hear chirping crickets at night, and receive incessant advertisements about something you absolutely have to have for “back to school” season. That means that the start of the school year can’t be far away, and our OV students will be back in the halls in just under 3 weeks!
We are looking forward to having our students back in the building and continuing to work together to support their growth as learners and people. This year, we will continue the efforts laid out in our continuous improvement plan: improving student attendance, decreasing our failure rates, improving student proficiency, and improving our school climate.
This letter outlines some key back-to-school information that will help your student transition successfully into the school year.
Please take the time to review this letter carefully and please contact your student’s counselor or me if you have any questions or needs as the year gets underway. We recognize that there is a lot of information in this letter, and appreciate you taking the time to read it and understand its contents.
New people
We are excited to welcome several new staff members to the building, each of whom is eager to be part of the Otter Valley team:
Marc Cesario will be a long-term substitute in Spanish.
Carson Leary will be the new middle school health teacher.
Ainsley Moore will be our new HS math teacher.
Jean McMullen is back at OV as a special education teacher.
Cathy Moulton will be joining the Foothills program as the Behavior Intervention Specialist.
Whitney Nichols will be our general education teacher in the new Pathfinders alternative program.
Karyn Stannard is our new Associate Principal in the high school.
Rachel Taylor is our new receptionist.
Mackenzie Thurston will fill in as the middle school counselor until Kendra Ross returns in late October.
Key Fall Dates
Please make note of the following key dates for the first couple of months of school:
August 24 - Welcome Back Night
August 26 - First day of school for Grades 7-9
August 27 - First day for Grades 10-12 (second day for Grades 7-9)
September 7 - No School - Labor Day
September 18 - Early Release Day (students dismissed at 12:00)
September 22 - School Picture Day
October 8 - Fall Family-Teacher Conferences
October 9 - No School (In-service)
October 12 - No School (Indigenous Peoples’ Day)
October 14 - Fall Family-Teacher Conferences
October 16 - PSAT day
October 30 - End of Quarter 1/Early Release Day (students dismissed at 12:00)
Complete Your 2026–2027 Student Registration
Next week, you will receive an email with a link to complete your student's 2026–2027 Student Registration in PowerSchool. All families are required to complete this annual registration. Please complete it as soon as you receive the email to ensure we have your student's most current information. If you do not receive the email by Friday, August 15, or if you have any questions or experience any issues completing the registration, please contact registration@rnesu.org or call 802-247-6833, Ext. 2605.
Back to School Event - August 24
Our school-wide welcome back will take place from 3:15 - 6:00 on Monday, August 24. As in years past, this is an opportunity for you to pick up a hard copy of your schedule, find all of your classrooms, and check in with some of the teachers that are on hand for the event. Administration and support staff are on hand to answer any questions, and we will have a kiosk to complete registration paperwork and ensure you have access to PowerSchool. There will also be some OV swag for students in attendance! Students and families in Grades 7-12 are welcome to come at any time during the window.
This year, we will have a free BBQ from 5-6 on the grass between the OV building and the baseball field. We hope our students and families will stop by and catch up with our community!
Special Schedule August 26
We will again have our first day of the 26-27 school year (August 26) be for our 7th, 8th, and 9th grade students only. This day will give us an opportunity to orient students to their teams and the building, and set a strong foundation for the year with each of these groups. Students in Grades 10-12 will join on August 27. The exception to this is Stafford and Hannaford students, who will follow the schedules of those programs.
Attendance
One of our major focal areas this year as a school is supporting good attendance, which is critical for academic success. In our school, students who are chronically absent (missing more than 10% of the school year) are twice as likely to fail a course as students who are in attendance regularly. The typical marker for good attendance is a 95% attendance rate, which equates to missing 9 days or less in the school year.
With that in mind, I wanted to share some important information about attendance:
Absences are recorded in our system as unexcused or excused. Excused absences are typically for significant illness, legal matters, religious holidays, college or employment visits, and bereavement. Note that personal travel is not grounds for excusing absences, and thus we encourage families to plan travel during our school vacations. Parents and caregivers may call a student out due to illness and have the absence excused ONLY if the student has fewer than 10 total days of absence in the school year. Guidance on when to remain home due to illness is included HERE.
Students must maintain good attendance in order to be eligible for extracurricular activities. Students with more than 6 unexcused absences in a quarter will be required to participate in an attendance improvement plan in order to remain eligible for these activities. Full details are specified in the student handbook on p. 21 and 22.
While we do our very best to catch kids up from absence through our Flex periods and within our classes, there is limited time to do so. We ask that students check Google Classroom regularly and attempt to keep up with work and learning when absent from school.
Bell Schedules and Student Schedules
The student day will again run from 8:00 - 2:55. The bell schedule will remain the same at the middle school, but the high school will be transitioning to an 8 period day with some classes running for 42 minutes each day (period classes), and others running for 87 minutes each day (block classes). This means that there will no longer be A and B day classes in the high school. Please see below for the bell schedule.
Middle School
| High School
Note: the three-minute passing time allotted between Period classes (e.g. 1-2,3-4,5-6,7-8) is allotted only for classes that are changing and is meant to allot time only to get from one class to another. The longer passing periods are designated between blocks to allow for breakfast break, bathroom access, nurse/counselor check-ins, etc. |
In terms of individual student schedules, schedules will be available in the PowerSchool portal as of August 12. Please log into PowerSchool or check your email to access your schedule. Should you have any questions or need to make revisions to your schedule, please complete the schedule change form so that your request can be considered. Schedule changes can be made up until Wednesday, September 9th, but we do not permit changes to schedules on the first two days of the typical school schedule (August 27 and August 28).
Arrival and Dismissal
Our arrival and dismissal procedures remain the same as they were at the end of last year.
For morning arrival, car riders will drop off in the front of the building, while busses will drop off behind OV. Please note that we do not have supervision until 7:45, and we do not allow students to be on campus before 7:30. If this presents a problem for your family, please contact me so we can figure out a plan.
In the afternoon, busses will pick up at the front of OV, while car riders will form a line around the back of the school so that students can be picked up on the north side of the building. We do not permit student pickups in the main parking lot area. Unless an emergency, we do not permit dismissals between 2:30 and 2:55.
Thank you for being patient and kind with our school staff and bus drivers who are helping enforce safe arrival and dismissal.
Cell Phones
Vermont is now in full implementation of its school-based cell phone law, and Otter Valley will continue to enforce a bell to bell ban on the use of cell phones at school. Our families were outstanding partners when we rolled out the bell to bell ban last year, and ask for your continued support in helping our school be a place free from distractions.
Students are required to store their cell phone in an approved location (their locker, the main office, or in their backpack) and are encouraged to leave them at home if possible. Cell phones being seen during the school day will be confiscated, and students that have multiple violations will be required to turn in their cell phones each day for a specified period of time. We encourage students and families to review the full cell phone procedure on page 33 of the student handbook.
Chromebooks
All OV students are assigned a 1:1 Chromebook for use during the school year. Students will receive information about how to log into their Chromebooks when they pick them up.
Middle school students will receive their Chromebooks on the first day of school (August 26). Middle school students typically keep their Chromebooks at school.
9th grade students will receive their Chromebooks on the first day of school (August 26).
Students in Grades 10-12 can pick up Chromebooks in the library before school or during Flex on August 27 and 28.
Website, Calendars, Communications
While we will regularly communicate with our families about Otter Valley-specific schedules and various community events, I wanted to make sure all families had the link to the RNESU District Calendar 2026-2027. Please consider bookmarking this calendar. Additionally, we maintain a calendar of events happening at Otter Valley for our students and families. Those events can always be accessed at the Otter Valley website (https://ovus.rnesu.org/o/ovumshs) or via this link. Please be sure to check this calendar on a regular basis for updates, as we are actively adding our events for the school year.
The administration will send a newsletter update (“In Otter News”) with important upcoming events and deadlines, school news, and reminders. That will be sent via email and text to all families and students and posted to the website approximately every two weeks. However, if you want a single place to access all newsletters, please bookmark this link. Additionally, we will send a monthly newsletter called “Things You Otter Know” with information about happenings at Otter Valley.
Lastly, we have heard from families that the website can be hard to navigate. While we try to have everything that a family might need on the website, that can also be overwhelming. To that end, we have created an important links document (available https://tinyurl.com/OVFamilyLinks) and added several “buttons” to the website that should direct you to some of the most important resources you will need (schedules, the important links document, student handbook, and others). If you visit our homepage (https://ovus.rnesu.org/o/ovumshs) and scroll down, you should see lots of these key links which will hopefully make it easier for you to access important information about our school.
Student handbook
Please make sure you take some time to review the student handbook (available at https://tinyurl.com/OVHandbook26-27). That outlines nearly all student expectations and behavior/conduct policies.
Our partnership with our families is ongoing and critical to student success. Please don’t hesitate to reach out at mruppel@rnesu.org to set up a time to talk about any matters pertaining to OV! We always like to hear from our families about how we can best support our students.
We can’t wait to see our wonderful students soon!
Best wishes,
Michael Ruppel, Principal
Karyn Stannard, Associate Principal
Joel Jones, Associate Principal