3rd graders traveled to Raleigh by train to complete their unit of study about North Carolina. While in Raleigh, they visited the State Capitol, NC State Legislative Building, and North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. Each year, through the generosity of the Charles A. McLendon Faculty and Parent Education Endowment, the school is able to bring in a speaker for faculty and parent education. On April 26, we hosted Dr. Catherine Steiner-Adair as our 2017 McLendon speaker. She spent the day with students, faculty and parents discussing how technology is affecting our brain functioning and our family relationships. Dr. Steiner-Adair is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist and Research Associate at Harvard Medical School. In her award winning book, The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age (HarperCollins), she identifies digital age challenges for parents and educators, and ways to strengthen children’s social and emotional development to help them grow to be responsible, resilient, confident, and capable young adults. When speaking with our parents, Dr. Steiner-Adair reported that 75% of children say that their parents are distracted by their cell phones while Dr. Catherine Steiner-Adair teaches us about the appropriate use of technology By: Dr. Dana Smith, Director of Educational Technology driving, and this upsets them. She also explained that our children are struggling with increasing levels of anxiety as a result of being overwhelmed by information on the internet and via social media that they are not developmentally prepared to see or read. Dr. Steiner-Adair gave our parents some recommendations for technology use in their households such as no technology in the bedroom and increasing “no- tech” time to strengthen family ties. All members of the GDS community enjoyed having Dr. Catherine Steiner- Adair on campus and appreciated the wealth of information that she shared with us. Nan Perry ’17 with her father, Dr. John Perry Katie Glaser ’16 crowns Nan Perry ’17 GDS Magazine | 11