Our 2021 summer semester is nearly over for another year. All summer semester work must be completed by Friday, August 6. If you have any questions or concerns about summer school at VVS, please contact us at vvsupport@pembinahills.ca.

We are at peak processing time for 2021-2022 registrations. As recently noted on the website, our office staff are currently swamped with applications, and as such it is taking longer than normal to respond to inquiries. If you have any questions or concerns about registration, please email us at vvsupport@pembinahills.ca. Your patience is much appreciated.

Fall registrations must be completed prior to September 17 for the school year starting September 1. We encourage everyone to register earlier rather than later.

Key dates for the coming school year are as follows:

• Grades 1-9: September 1, 2021 to June 15, 2022
• Grades 10-12, first semester: September 1, 2021 to January 15, 2022
• Deadline for submitting first semester assignments: January 15, 2022
• Grades 10-12, second semester: February 1 to June 15, 2022
• Deadline for submitting second semester assignments: June 15, 2022
• Summer school: dates TBD
• Open entry for adults and international students

Our online application process has been upgraded from the previous year. Current students who are 18 years old (or their guardians if the student is not yet 18 years old) can submit an automatic application form and simply confirm information instead of entering all the same information over again. This feature will be available on the left-hand side of the parent portal, for which login information was recently provided.

Are you new to Vista Virtual School? If so, you will definitely want to watch this 2021-2022 orientation video hosted by associate principal Frank McCallum. Even if you have previous experience with virtual learning—as many now have thanks to COVID—VVS will invariably be quite different from what you are used to if you are new to the school, and this video will be extremely helpful to you.

Topics covered include: textbook fees and pick-up, what VVS courses are like, teacher correspondence and availability, how to navigate coursework, COMM 1255 (e-learning course), planning your academic year, tips for success in distance learning, important dates, diploma exams, and upcoming Q&A sessions.

Are you newly registered for Vista Virtual School this year? Do you have questions that were not covered in the orientation video? If so, you can expect an email in the next week or so inviting you to an online Q&A session. A VVS support staff member will notify you of the date and time of your session, which will be either this month or in early September. Stay tuned for more.

VVS celebrated its first ever fully virtual commencement ceremony in June of this year. Now you can watch the full ceremony online on our website here. Highlights of the ceremony include a farewell address from outgoing principal Mike Loitz, a valedictory speech by Zachary Larsen, and an uplifting musical treat at the end that we think you’ll find fitting.

Congratulations again to our graduating class of 2021! If we haven’t said it enough, we’re all very proud of you—especially given everything you’ve had to deal with this past year and some!

The past year saw considerable disruption to normal school activities, including diploma exams. Barring any unforeseen setbacks, however, Alberta Education will be overseeing diploma exams as normal for the 2021-2022 school year. Exam dates have yet to be announced but will commence in November. Dates will be posted on this site once they have been announced.

Diploma exams MUST be written in person. VVS will be overseeing exams at testing centres in both Calgary and Edmonton. If you do not live in either the Calgary or Edmonton areas, you have the option of writing diploma exams at your local school, should they be able to facilitate this and provide supervision. If they cannot, you will have to travel to either Calgary or Edmonton for these exams.

If you have any questions about diploma exams, please contact vv.main@pembinahills.ca.

Do you, like many Albertans, have concerns about the government of Alberta’s draft K-6 curriculum? If so, we encourage you to complete the government’s online survey on the draft curriculum, which will remain open until the spring of 2022. You can further make your voice heard by writing a letter to your MLA, the education minister, and/or the premier expressing your concerns about the draft curriculum and other issues facing our educational system amid the pandemic.

With the closure of ADLC and of our former distribution centre in Barrhead, VVS has a new materials warehouse and distribution centre at our Calgary campus. Considerable work has been put in to get this warehouse up and running, and we are now nearly ready for the 2021-2022 school year. Special thanks are due to all the support staff who assisted with this transition!

See below for images from our new materials hub.

Students and parents will soon be welcome to order and pickup textbooks—you will be notified by our support staff once we’re ready. If you live in the greater Calgary area, the expectation is that you pick up your textbooks in person, although we still request that you make an appointment beforehand. We will be mailing textbooks to students who live outside the Calgary region.

We are still accepting textbook returns from the 2020-2021 school year at our Calgary campus. Please note that students/parents are responsible for postage for mailed returns. Please return textbooks and other loaned materials, either by mail or in person (by appointment), to the following address:

Vista Virtual School
341 58 Avenue SE
Calgary, AB T2H 0P3

Support staff are now back at VVS’ Calgary Campus and will be responding to calls at 1-855-974-5333 x5317. However, we still request that visitors to the campus book appointments in advance, whether it is for returning textbooks or for any other reason. Those wishing to visit are required to book an appointment in advance, follow all Alberta Health Services guidelines, and—of course—to wear a mask.

Parents and guardians who have not yet logged into the VVS Student Information System (SIS) should do so as soon as possible, as this is the best way to monitor your child’s progress, review correspondence, keep track of course timelines, and stay up to date with your child’s activities and submissions. You should have received an email providing you with login information for your account.

To get started, visit the school website and click on the Student/Guardian Login button in the top right hand corner to be directed to the SIS login page. If you have forgotten your username and/or password, you can retrieve them by submitting your email address.

You can also contact us at vvsupport@pembinahills.ca or by phone at 1-855-974-5333 x5317 if you have any trouble.

Vista Virtual School welcomes applications from adult upgrading students—defined as those aged 20 or up as of September 1, 2020—throughout the year; adult students can start courses at any time. For more information on our adult program, please visit our website or email us at vvsadults@pembinahills.ca.

Although we do not have a formal School Council, we welcome parents, guardians, and students to provide input on the operations of the school. Your suggestions can be directed to Principal Steven Kaplan.

Our VVS student community is always scaling new heights in a myriad pursuits, from athletics to the arts to community citizenship, that it’s practically impossible to keep up. Nevertheless, we do love to profile some of our standouts in this newsletter. If you know of a VVS student (or you ARE one) who has recently accomplished something major or is involved in something unique, we would love to hear from you.

Please direct all messages regarding our student success story columns to newsletter editor Ben Freeland at ben.freeland@pembinahills.ca.

In addition to this newsletter and our regular website news postings, Vista Virtual School is also active on Facebook and Twitter. We encourage you to follow us for updates on everything from post-secondary orientations to work experience opportunities to news articles and online resources of interest to students and parents, as well as to just say hello and engage with us.

Also, should you come across any interesting virtual learning resources you think we should share via our social media networks, we would love to hear from you. We too are always learning, and we would love to share what you find out there.

Check out our monthly events on our website. We update this calendar as events are added.

August 2 – Heritage Day (Statutory holiday)
August 6 – Summer semester exam completion deadline
August 8 – International Cat Day (really!)
August 9 – International Day of the World’s Indigenous People
August 9 – Islamic New Year (begins at sundown)
August 12 – International Youth Day
August 15 – Feast of the Assumption
August 19 – World Humanitarian Day
August 23 – International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition

Let’s face it: unless you’re an incurable morning person, we all enjoy a good sleep in now and again. And no time of year is this truer than in summer, where, for most children and youths, the pressure to get up early in the morning is off, while in latitudes like ours the allure of warm, sunny evenings keeps many of us awake later than we normally world be during the rest of the year.

For many families, the temptation can be strong to simply move bedtimes and wake-up times back an hour or two. While there is nothing in principle wrong with this (provided people are getting sufficient hours’ sleep), this can cause problems when it comes time to readjust to fall schedules. For many teens, poor sleep habits can result in Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, making it virtually impossible to get to sleep until the wee hours of the morning, and making mornings an absolute nightmare.

Of course, Vista Virtual School is, as always, a bit of a different story, and in theory VVS students can operate on whatever schedule they see fit to operate on. Nevertheless, there is no shortage of arguments for keeping to an early-to-bed, early-to-rise schedule. Exposure to sunlight increases the brain’s release of serotonin—a hormone closely linked to mental health and cognitive functioning, while vitamin D plays an enormous role in bone health.

That said, getting to sleep early in summer can be easier said than done. On a chemical level, the bright evenings delay the body’s release of melatonin, the hormone responsible for making us sleepy. Further, exposure to light late in the day can impact the quality of sleep, decreasing the amount of deep sleep (also known as slow-wave or delta sleep) we get and increasing night-time wakefulness. In addition, the summer heat can also be detrimental to both falling and staying asleep.

If you live in northern latitudes, some degree of summer impact on your sleep is probably inevitable. Nevertheless, there is much you can do to enhance your sleep hygiene during the summer months. Here are a few tips.

1. Stick to a schedule. This is probably the single most helpful thing you can do to ensure healthy sleep, regardless of the time of year. Decide on a bedtime, put it in your schedule (making sure to include sufficient wind-down time), and stick to it, regardless of your level of tiredness at that time. Even if this results in a few nights of prolonged wakefulness before falling asleep (and fatigued mornings), your body should eventually adjust.
2. Decrease your exposure to sunlight in the evening. Sunlight is wonderful for your mental health, but within limits, and in the evening you want to give your melatonin a chance to kick in. It can help to close curtains and blinds in the evening, even though it’s still bright out, in order to give your system a chance to adjust for sleep.
3. Keep the temperature down in the evening. The optimal temperature for sleep is believed to be 18.3°C, which can be hard to achieve in summer. In addition to reducing sunlight, you will also want to ensure that your bedroom is a nice cool temperature ahead of going to bed, with the help of open windows, fans, or air conditioning.
4. Darken your room before bed. The darker your sleeping environment is, the more likely you are to have a deep, restful sleep. Consider installing blackout curtains in your room. Alternatively, you can opt for a sleep mask.
5. Use lightweight fabrics. Are you sleeping with the same bedclothes as you were during winter? You shouldn’t be. Heat-wicking fabrics like silk, satin, or bamboo are best for summer sheets, comforter, and pillowcases, as are lightweight pajamas. If the weather is particularly hot, you might even want to try putting your pajamas in the freezer for a few hours before bed.
6. Turn off your devices 30 minutes before lights out. This is a good rule of thumb for the whole year, but especially true of summer, where you will want to banish all extraneous light.
7. Try sleep meditation/self-hypnosis. You don’t even need to subscribe to a service like Headspace, although these are wonderful. YouTube has a plethora of guided meditations and hypnotherapy audio recordings designed to guide you towards a good night’s sleep. A comfortable pair of sleep headphones can be a very helpful tool to combine with this.

These days the word “vaccine” is on everybody’s lips. As of the end of July, a full 86 percent of Canadians have either already received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine or plan to do so as soon as possible. Worryingly, a full one in five Albertans (22 percent) remain vaccine-hesitant, more than twice the national rate, although this rate is down considerably from the 45 percent of Albertans who were reluctant to get the jab back in the end of January of this year.

While most people have either received or plan to receive the vaccine, it’s safe to say that most of these people are probably unaware of the origin of the word “vaccine” itself, and the fascinating history behind it. Would you be surprised to learn that the word comes from the Latin vacca, meaning “cow”? Indeed, it’s very close to the French and Spanish words for cow, vache and vaca respectively.

So what on earth do vaccines have to do with cattle? Historically, quite a lot, it turns out. The world’s first successful vaccination campaign was against smallpox, a deadly infectious disease that killed more than 300 million people in the 20^th century before it was successfully eradicated in the late 1970s. The first smallpox vaccine was developed by Dr. Edward Jenner in England in 1796, who demonstrated that deliberately infecting people with the much milder cowpox virus (a virus typically caught by farm workers by milking infected cows) provided protection against smallpox.

While smallpox vaccines evolved considerably over the subsequent centuries, the name stuck—not just for that particular inoculation but for those for all sorts of illnesses. The lesson of the very effective campaign to eradicate what was once the world’s deadliest diseases is also a powerful lesson in policymaking and science communication. Indeed, anti-vaccine paranoia has been with us for nearly as long as vaccines have, and anti-smallpox campaigners had to deal with much of the same skepticism and science denial that today’s health educators have to deal with.

Something to think about as we (hopefully) approach the end of the COVID-19 story.

Contacts

Principal	Steven Kaplan
Associate Principals	Treena Bradbury	Frank McCallum
Academic Counsellors	Jessica Luciuk	Loya De Clercq	Christie Borle (Inclusive Ed.)
Adult Academic Counsellors	Frank McCallum	Treena Bradbury	Steven Kaplan
School Hours	8:00 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. (teachers' hours are 8:30 a.m. - 4:00 p.m.)
Campus Location	341 58 Ave. SE Calgary, AB T2H 0P3
Phone	P: 1-855-974-5333	VVS Support x5317
School Website	vvschool.ca
School Email	vvsupport@pembinahills.ca	vvsadults@pembinahills.ca
We're Online	Twitter @VistaVirtualSch	Facebook VistaVirtualSch	Website vvschool.ca
Connect With Us	Please follow us on Facebook and Twitter for updates on events and activities throughout the year. Our website is also a valuable source of information.	Do you have a story to tell, or a typo to report? Email Ben Freeland.	The newsletter is published monthly and sent to students, parents and guardians by email.