SFX NewsBlast

Father Barkemeyer Visit

Please visit the Middle School News page to see photos and a video from Father Barkemeyer's visit to St. Francis on Tuesday.

New Blogs!

Careful readers will have noticed some changes to our classroom pages today: New blogs! Instead of homeroom pages for grades five through eight, you will now find pages for each individual teacher. You can find links to these pages in the left-hand column of the NewsBlast. We have also added pages for our specials, so please click on Art, Latin, Spanish, and Physical Education to find out more about those courses. Finally, we have added a new page just for our middle school students and parents called Middle School News.

We strongly encourage everyone to subscribe to these new pages. While you're at it, considering signing up for Library and School Lunch, two blogs that are brimming with information.

You can find an email subscription box on all of our pages, or considering using a service like Google Reader. We know our pages have readers because the NewsBlast had its most popular day yet on Wednesday, with over 300 hits before 8:00 a.m!

Please feel free to contact Mr. McKenna or Miss Kelley with any questions about these new pages, and enjoy the day off on Monday.

Teacher Blogs

Are you wondering how to find your son or daughter's class blog?

And 2B too. . .

Quick FYI to any 2B subscribers: Another observant parent let me know that the 2B subscription was linking to the 2T feed, so if you're getting e-mails about 2T and not 2B that is why! It's fixed now, so go ahead and unsubscribe/resubscribe with confidence. Again, I apologize for any inconvenience.

Miss Kelley

4A and 2T Blogs

An observant parent just alerted me to the fact that the feeds were incorrect on the 4A and 2T blogs, so if you have already signed up, you might instead be subscribed to 4Gz and 2B. I have corrected the problem, but you will need to sign up again. Sorry for any inconvenience! And thanks for subscribing!

Miss Kelley

Blog Updates

As the NewsBlast blog approaches the one-year mark, it's a good time to update your e-mail subscriptions and consider your approach to communication from the school. A year ago we had one blog, the NewsBlast; today we have over twenty! There are blogs for each homeroom and for several special activities. We are in the process of updating these blogs for the new school year, and you can expect to see a welcome statement from each homeroom teacher before the first day of school.

Those of you who take advantage of the email notifications provided by feedburner should update your subscriptions at this time. There is an unsubscribe option at the bottom of every email reminder that you receive that you can use to stop the emails from last year's classes. You can sign up for new subscriptions using the form on each web page.

Another easy way to keep track of new blog posts is to sign up for a service like Google reader. Google reader is a free service that tracks new content on any sites and blogs that you choose. You simply type in the site that you want to follow (such as the School Lunch blog), and the reader will check it regularly for new content. This means that instead of checking multiple blog pages each day, you can simply check your Google reader page and see new content for ALL of your blogs.

Any questions or suggestions about the blogs should be directed to Mr. McKenna and Miss Kelley.

Thank you!

E-Mail Restored

As of 3:30pm today, we are able to receive incoming e-mail messages. However, we are still not able to send any messages, although that will hopefully be corrected overnight. Please resend any important messages that you sent between Sunday morning and 3:30pm today.

Thanks again for your patience,
Miss Kelley

E-Mail Outage

Please be advised that e-mail to and from all school addresses (those ending in sfx-school.org) has been down since some time on Sunday. We are still unable to send or receive any messages. I will post again when service has been restored, and will advise at that time whether messages from the last two days will need to be resent. Thank you for your patience, and please call the office if you have any questions.

Miss Kelley

Feedburner Update

Thank you to the many of you who 'subscribe' to our blogs via e-mail. It appears that the transition to Google is complete and that all of our subscription lists have been restored. You may have received a catching-up e-mail that included all of the posts that were not sent during the transition. This is normal.

E-mails are only generated when there is new information on the page, so most e-mails will not arrive every day. All of the 'feeds' are set to check for new content by 7:00 a.m. each morning. There are a few things you can do if you are still not receiving e-mails.

1. First, check to make sure there is new content on the blog. Only content posted before 5:00 a.m. will appear in your morning e-mail.
2. Check your junk mail folder. Be sure to label e-mails of this kind as "not junk".
3. Check your subscription. You can do this by trying to subscribe again. Feedburner will refuse your subscription request (and tell you why) if you already have a subscription.
4. Send an e-mail to the relevant teacher (to let them know that you are not receiving the news) and to both Miss Kelley (leakelley at sfx hyphen school dot org) and Mr. McKenna (danielmckenna at sfx hyphen school dot org). Only Miss Kelley or Mr. McKenna can make changes to the feeds, and they will check on the problem as soon as they are able.

We strongly recommend that all families subscribe to the NewsBlast, the Principal's Page, and any relevant classroom pages. You must subscribe to each of these pages separately.

Please feel free to contact Miss Kelley is you have any other questions about our blogs.

Principal's Page and E-mail Notifcations

Two important announcements:

1. There is an important message about Terra Nova from Mrs. Drehkoff located on the Principal's Page. Please read the message and feel free to contact Mrs. Drehkoff with any further questions.
2. Also, many of you have subscribed to our blog pages using the "Subscribe" feature located on each page. This feature was originally offered by Feedburner, and is now in the process of migrating to Google. You may notice that feeds come at odd times of the day, or maybe not at all. During the migration we will also not be able to access subscriber lists. Thank you for your patience while Google finishes this process, and be sure to check your child's blog page in the interim.

Thanks again,
Miss Kelley