Weekly Letter June 12, 2009

June 12, 2009
Dear Parents,

Well, testing season is almost over. 8th graders have the Living Environment, Integrated Algebra, and Spanish Proficiency Regents Exams remaining. The results from the State Assessment exams are impressive.
The State’s goal is for all students in the State to receive a score of 3 (Meeting State Standards) or 4 (Meeting State Standards with Distinction). Congratulations to our students and staff for a job well done!

SUBJECT GRADE % ACHIEVING
LEVEL 3 OR 4

ELA Grades 3 – 8 91 %

Math Grades 3 – 8 98 %

Science Grades 4 & 8 100 %

Social Studies Grades 5 & 8 100 %

I have been working on next year’s student class schedule. For the elementary grades, we will continue to offer the Science Initiative and Spanish. The school day for elementary students will start at 8:05 am and end at 2:25 pm. Although this may seem like a trivial change, it enables us to make our special classes 40 minutes instead of 38 minutes, thus adding 6 additional hours of instruction in each class for the year.

In middle school, all 5 -7 students will attend school from 8:05 am until 3:00 pm. Similar to the elementary grades, classes will be 40 minutes in length. The major change is our ability to offer four elective classes to our students during the school day. All 5-7 students will have the opportunity to enroll in Chorus, Newspaper, Yearbook or the Science Club. These classes will meet once a week, with the Science Club and Newspaper meeting once every other week. All 5th, 6th and 7th graders will also be taking a research and data base class once a week.

I will not be writing a weekly letter next week. Instead, I will be working on writing a letter for the week of June 22nd that will focus on the changes/ accomplishments as well as the unresolved issues that we faced this year.

Congratulations to our Nursery, PreK and Kindergarten students on a very successful year. The PreK/Kindergarten Celebration was beautiful. Thanks to Nancy Ritzell, Kelly Law, Mary Hannan, Maureen Wahlberg and Meena Conant for organizing and preparing our students for this event.