We will be celebrating Halloween that same day at the Dent site. The children and staff will be coming to school in costume. Halloween can be a lot of fun for children, as they love to dress up and make believe. However, it can sometimes be frightening for a your child to see familiar people dressed so differently. We would like all the children to enjoy it this year, so we are including an outline of our celebration and some guidelines we have set up for their costumes. Because it is hard for children this age to wait, and because we want to be sure that the half-day children can participate, our celebration will be in the morning. The children should come to school in costume, but send a change of clothes if they stay all day as we will be changing back into our normal selves after the party.

When choosing a costume with your child, make sure that it is comfortable and allows for freedom of movement. Make sure that it does not limit or obscure their field of vision. We do not allow masks at school as they often frighten the little ones and obscure vision. Weapons are also not permitted (even though they might seem to go with their costume), and will be confiscated. Costumes that are likely to promote violent or threatening behavior (i.e. Superman, Spiderman...) are also not permitted. We also would like to avoid costumes of cartoon characters (i.e. Pocahontas, Belle...). We cannot stress this strongly enough: If children come to school dressed in such costumes, we will remove them and give the children some other costume to wear. If you are having trouble coming up with non-violent costumes, come see us, we'll help! Be wary of those plastic costumes that tie around the neck, they tend to rip very easily, and if the cape gets caught on something, a child can choke.