Do you remember your first day of high school? ...the excitement, the nerves, and trying to figure out where your classes were? Well, today we had the chance to connect with our incoming Groton-Dunstable Regional High School Class of 2030 and transfer students and help them to find their place here as they transition to 703 Chicopee Row.
OUR FOCUS: The primary focus of our GD New Student Orientation is to ease the transition and foster a sense of belonging, connection, and community for our incoming freshman and transfer students. We believe a thoughtful, organized approach to helping our students enter Groton-Dunstable Regional High School will build confidence, foster social connections, and equip our incoming students with the essential knowledge, resources, and routines they need to thrive in their new academic environment. Our orientation program has four core components:
Social Connection: Creating a welcoming, inclusive community by breaking large groups into small teams and pairing students with GD upperclassmen or peer mentors.
Navigational Fluency: Helping students locate their classrooms, find their resource people/caring adults, and familiarize themselves with key facilities like the cafeteria, library, and student support center.
Logistical Readiness: Ensuring students receive their class schedules, school-issued chrome books, email accounts, and high school building map/floor plan.
Cultural Integration: Introducing our high school’s core values, performance and action standards, character objectives, classroom guidelines, achievement and participation norms, and co-curricular club opportunities.
Our students will spend 4.5 million seconds with educators and their peers this year at GD. The option to us all is being completely open to the potential of who, what, and how we will be right now.
And now.
And now.
And now…