Principal's 2nd Semester Letter

February 19, 2016

Greetings Hill Families and welcome to Semester 2!

Third quarter is now underway! We have just finished up our benchmarks and now that we know where we stand, we are gearing up for what we know will be a rigorous final half of the year.
We welcome this second semester with great enthusiasm for all that awaits us. Between now and year’s-end, you can expect us to continue our pursuit of excellence, one child at a time. Our talented faculty is committed to pushing students to new heights while shoring up learning gaps. We know we have your support, but now we must motivate students to invest in themselves with the same depth that we have. During this half of the year, we look forward to continuing to see the tenets of Paw Pride reflected in every learner. While our talented team continues to work at that effort, we look forward to the many ways to celebrate and recognize the good works of our students; and we invite you to join us. We have our annual Science Fair, Black History Program, Poetry Night, Tiger Rallies, field trips, and Grade 8 Senior Week to look forward to.

On the academic side, we plan to further develop our readers with a school wide read anywhere campaign and an AR book challenge. In math and science, we are going to work harder at building computational fluency, while building in opportunities for students to strengthen number sense and reasoning skills. This is going to be important in these two content areas, especially math, because this year, the math test is a computer adaptive test in all grade levels. This means that questions given to students are based on how a student responds to a question, which then determines the difficulty of the next item. A correct response leads to a more difficult item, while an incorrect response results in the selection of a less difficult item for the student. So, practice is going to be critical! Therefore, I have asked teachers to increase the homework load, still making it reasonable, to give students an opportunity to really practice both complex and rote skills.

In sum, we have our work cut out for us. I will continue to call upon you to partner with us to ready our students for the rigor that awaits them; and I know I have your support. Therefore, I thank you in advance and look forward to sharing this second semester with you and your children.

Regards,

Shante’

The original letter in PDF format can be downloaded here.