Bridges Community School

Families -

Wow! What a powerful way to end the week! The students and staff shined as the music today transported us to a world of wonder and joy! Thank you again to Mrs. Chambers and Mrs. Baty for their passion in music and spreading this love to our students. Well done!

Just a reminder tomorrow our students, along with Jefferson, will be singing for Mrs. Olivo's Celebration of Life at 2:00 pm! Students will spread out around the Gymnasium to come together to show our love, support and Mrs. Olivo's message of hope, dreams and JOY! This will be an open house style with light food from 1:00-4:00 pm in the Bridges Gymnasium.

On Monday and Tuesday, our building ran extra smooth with Eila and Brooks as our Assistant Principal's! Thanks for all your work planting flowers, checking in books, checking in with staff and helping with students! You were amazing!

Dear Families,

Our district values your feedback! We are surveying MAPS families during the month of May in order to gain insight into your perception of our school and district effectiveness. To ensure we continue to provide high quality, rigorous learning experiences that meet the needs of our learners and prepare them for college and career, we need your feedback. We want to know what you think.

To administer these surveys, we have partnered with Panorama Education to conduct our 2024-2025 Family Survey. Panorama safeguards your privacy, keeping your responses confidential. The survey shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to complete, and will be a valuable source of information for us as we work to make our schools and district as good as they can be.

You may complete the survey online between May 1, 2025 and May 28, 2025 using a computer, tablet, or smartphone by visiting the website: https://surveys.panoramaed.com/mankato/login and entering your school’s access code list below:

3293314538

We thank you in advance for your thoughtful responses. If you have any questions about the survey administration, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Thank you,

Jody Rittmiller

Please complete this form to let us know what your plans are for early release. School will dismiss at 12:50. This form needs to be completed every month for staffing purposes.

https://forms.gle/LiQ4kwCeBV8PUh6MA

We are so excited the time has come for our new playground to be installed. The new playground will replace items that aren't ADA compliant and items that aren't working properly or don't have replacement parts. The pieces of equipment that are being replaced were items that were installed when this was a 6th grade school. Thanks BAC, families and students for raising funds for this amazing equipment. The piece of equipment you see above will be green and blue to match our equipment. There will also be 3 bucket spinners and a communication board installed. Students wanted equipment that would spin and for climbing and upper body strength! Thanks to all of the fundraising and the parent support for these amazing new pieces!

Dear Families,

We want to remind you that our ACES School Age Child Care Program uses the school playground as part of its daily programming. To ensure a safe and structured environment for ACES students, the playground is reserved for their use until the program ends at 6:00 p.m.

After 6:00 p.m., the playground is open to the public. We appreciate your cooperation in helping us maintain a safe and supportive space for all students.

If you’re looking for alternative play spaces before 6:00 p.m., the City of Mankato provides a list of parks here, and a map of North Mankato parks can be found here.

Thank you for your understanding and support!

Update on Global Studies and Our Dream Team:

• We identified the 14 home languages and the order to introduce them during community groups for the 2025-26 school year. We will be reaching out to families to help us with a little video so we learn how to correctly pronounce and greet each other with welcome and hello in different languages!

• We continue to plan for our "being here and there" experiences inside and outside the classroom to enhance our learning around our CORE topics.

• Friday, March 14 our staff had inquiry based learning training at Minnesota State University, Mankato. We will continue our learning in June. We are excited about the hands on learning, engagement and cross-curricular content where students help to guide their learning! Curiosity is KEY!

• Our kindergarten and 2nd grade teams met this past week to create the IBL unit of student to incorporate ELA and social studies standards into a key topic! Our grade 3, 4 and 5 teams have also been hard at work!

Please join us on Monday, April 28th at 6:30 in the Bridges media center.

The 2024 - 2025 yearbook can be ordered online through Monday, May 5. To order your yearbook, please follow this link and search for Bridges Community School or enter our school ID: 711764. Cost is $13 + tax.

Find more information HERE.

Looking for a way to connect to MAPS? We strive to connect our community to our district and schools. Subscribe to this newsletter to get the current information and links to events.

Follow MAPS Facebook and Instagram for student celebrations:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ISD77MAPS

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/isd77maps/

MAPS Website: https://www.isd77.org/

Bridges BAC Website: BAC website link: : https://bridgesbears.weebly.com/faq.html