Greetings to visitors to our middle school website.

We hope that you will spend some time navigating around our middle school pages to find out more about us. Parent bulletins and the district calendar will give you information about upcoming events and activities. Teacher web pages provide parents and students information about class projects, scheduled lessons and homework assignments. The CIAC link will take parents to the sports calendar for scheduled games and activities.

We are very excited about the opportunities our physical space provides for our middle level youngsters. The open spaces in team clusters and the expanse of the student commons and field house will provide brightly lit spaces conducive to the active learning style of our adolescent population. Wireless technology throughout the building permits ready access for our students and staff to access the information beyond our walls. Easy access to laptops has our students using computers in daily lessons in their classes and media center. Students produce videos for our morning news show in media production class, write music in their general music lab, email French pen pals in world language class. The middle school staff is honored to teach in this magnificent facility.

An important focus this year is to improve the performance of all of our students on the Connecticut Mastery Tests administered each March. Our most recent scores (March 2008) indicate that our students have not demonstrated appreciable growth in mathematics, reading and writing. This does not mean that our students are not successful. In fact, over 92% of our students have met the federal standard of proficiency in mathematics and 86% of our students were proficient in reading. There is room for improvement however, and our teachers are committed to provide our students with focused instruction that will result in higher scores. This year we will train all staff in differentiated instruction which will help our teachers develop strategies to tailor instruction to meet the needs of all students in the classroom.

Our middle school community prides itself on celebrating the “whole child”. There are many opportunities for your child to develop a wide variety of talents in our after school programming. These include but are not limited to marching band, drama, math counts, art honor society, intramural sports and our athletic sports program. Please check our daily announcements for up to date news on try-outs and club meetings.

Our teacher teams also meet daily to plan for instruction and discuss student needs. Parents are welcome to join the daily team meeting to discuss their child’s program. If you have any concerns about your child, please call your child’s guidance counselor at 860-663-1797 (Elizabeth Young, grade 5; Alan Fortin, grade 7; and Joan Hill for grade 6, 8).

Sincerely,