The Falcon Flyer is a weekly digital newsletter with important sign ups and announcements about events and opportunities. It is filled with colorful photos and animated GIFs, and is organized neatly, offering a simple and eye catching experience to its readers. Students can access it in the “US Student Stuff” section on Veracross. The Falcon Flyer team sends out email bulletins on Mondays to make students aware of new editions. The process of submitting notices to the Falcon Flyer is easy: students and faculty can email falconflyer@riverdale.edu and include the information they’d like to share and any picture or GIF they’d like to include.
The team behind the Falcon Flyer has so far been a secret to students, but the masterminds behind the newsletter are Ms. Phyllis Dugan and Ms. Julie Choi. Ms. Dugan came up with the idea, drawing on her personal experiences with sending emails. As the Coordinator of Experiential Learning, Ms. Dugan explained, “Last year there were tons of different experiences and opportunities that we had for students, and I noticed that one day I literally emailed the entire Upper School at least six times.” She realized that she was sending too many emails, and that other members of the faculty were having this issue, too. Junior Marie Shpilrain explains, “I always have so many emails in my inbox.”
Ms. Dugan was also aware of the fact that students can sometimes have trouble keeping up with all of their emails. She noticed, “When I would email students, it would kind of get lost in the sauce of their inbox, and I would have students reach out to me like, ‘Can I still apply for this? Is it too late?’ and it was like a month ago.” Dugan wanted to create a place where students could always go to check on important information without searching through their inboxes. She spoke with other faculty members that often send emails about events, and the Falcon Flyer was born.
Originally, Ms. Choi and Ms. Dugan did not plan on releasing the Flyer so frequently. They originally planned on updating it monthly, changed to every other week, but they both eventually decided on making the Falcon Flyer a weekly newsletter. Ms. Choi explains, “Weekly is really the best way to do it because there really is so much information that comes out, and that information will include sign-ups, it will include surveys, it will include important links to pages that you have to have — lots of different things.” Despite the Falcon Flyer being a weekly newsletter, students have already received a couple Falcon Flyer Flashes, just because there is so much important information to disseminate, and the Riverdale community has not quite adjusted to sending it directly to the Falcon Flyer by the start of the week.
Some students have struggled with following up on the information they read in the Falcon Flyer. Others have also had trouble noticing bulletins that were not right at the top. Ms. Dugan explains, “Currently, I think the downsides are that even though emails are a pain, that’s what students are used to. It’s a learning curve with any type of new workflow.” However, Ms. Dugan is confident that the Riverdale community will get used to receiving information through the Falcon Flyer.
Ms. Choi, too, has high hopes for the Falcon Flyer’s success, and her “goal is by the end of this year that nobody does those singular emails unless its an emergency.” She strongly believes the Falcon Flyer can accomplish this because “it’s easy to use, kids are already talking about it, they’re reading through it, [and] everyone agrees that it’s a good idea.”
However, not everyone agrees that the Falcon Flyer will do what is intended. Junior, Marie Shpilrain explains, “I don’t think the Falcon Flyer will necessarily provide solvency for all the emails in my inbox. It creates an extra step for accessing my information.”
Only time will tell how successful the Falcon Flyer is.