Special Event - Valley Center High School's Varsity Baseball team will visit Petco Park this Saturday May 8th to face the Bulldogs from Ramona.  Game time is at 10:00 am and tickets are available at the Petco ticket office.  Good luck Jaguars!

With technology moving so fast it is very hard to keep up and with iPods, iPhones, iPads, Netbooks, Tablets, Google, Yahoo, Bing, Macintosh, Microsoft, Dell, Gateway, and so many other tech terms it is easy to see why?  Maybe your family even owns an iPod Touch or iPhone… Well below you will find some useful applications to use at home to keep pace in this 21^st Century of Learning.


 The Dictionary.com app delivers world-class reference content from Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com including more than 275,000 definitions and 80,000 synonyms. No Internet connection is needed. The app also features audio pronunciations, similarly spelled words and Dictionary.com’s popular Word of the Day that is enjoyed by more than a million users.

 Dragon Dictation is an easy-to-use voice recognition application powered by Dragon® NaturallySpeaking® that allows you to easily speak and instantly see your text or email messages. In fact, it’s up to 5 times faster than typing on the keyboard.

 SAT* Word Lite is SAT* includes a sample set of 26 SAT* words to help prepare students for the SAT exam.

 Hold the world in the palm of your hand. With Google Earth for iPhone and iPod touch, you can fly to far corners of the planet with just the swipe of a finger. Explore the same global satellite and aerial imagery available in the desktop version of Google Earth, including high-resolution imagery for over half of the world's population and a third of the world's land mass.

 Memoreasy is new and fresh vocal flash card application that incorporates a highly capable memory spacing algorithm. The main difference between Memoreasy and regular flash cards is that you don't have to read long texts; just listen, without any effort. It helps you to remember your material in an optimal way, so that it can be recalled.

I am writing this with a heavy heart for the families of Amber Dubois and Chelsea King. In light of these tragedies the administrative team at the high school would like to remind parents of a few precautions they can take to help increase the safety of their children and provide an opportunity for students to learn some basic self defense strategies.  

We will be hosting two self defense workshops for our students. The first workshop will be held this Saturday from 8am to 12 pm. The second workshop will be on Saturday March 20^th, 8am to 12pm.  These workshops will be part of our Saturday school offerings at no cost for our students. The curriculum for the workshop will not only include how to physically fight off an attacker but also   strategies students can use to keep themselves out of harm’s way. (If your student would like to attend either one of the workshops please have them RSVP in the counseling department the Thursday before the workshop they will be attending)  

We would like to encourage parents to research cell phone tracking. Real time tracking of your child via their cell phones GPS chip is a great way to make sure your child is safe. Most providers have their own service such as Verizon’s Chaperone, Sprint’s Family Locator, and AT&T’s Family Map. There are also several free programs you can find if you do a Google search for “cell phone tracking”.

We have requested that our staff familiarize themselves with the Megan’s Law web site and then periodically check the site. We would encourage you to check this site yourselves and share pertinent information with your student.

For more information on the items listed above, please call Valley Center High School at 760-751-5500.

Also feel free to respond with any other ideas on how to keep our children safe.

Sincerely,
Ron McCowan

It takes an exceptional educator to help lead high school students to success. One such educator is our very own Valley Center High School Assistant Principal Dennis Zabinsky.  Mr. Zabinsky was recently named ACSA's Secondary Co-Administrator of the Year. Congratulations on a job well done!