Principal's Message - October Edition 2010-2011

LETTER FROM THE PRINCIPAL…
Dear JHS 13 Community

The 2009-2010 school year finished with almost a third of our students scoring at a level one in both the ELA and Math State Assessment. Compared to our peer schools, we were the lowest performing schools. In East Harlem, we scored the lowest out of all middle school programs. The sense of urgency to prepare our students for the ELA and Math State Exams in May has to continue to spread and must be targeted toward truly making a difference in our student learning. We must bring together all of our efforts and quickly find out what areas we need to support our children. We must move forward with topics that our children already know and repeat the areas they struggle with. We must focus on how we are supporting our children and teaching our children. We must put an end to strategies that have proven not to make a difference.

We have made incredible progress in the month of September in setting the tone for the school year. Teachers have stepped up to new expectations. Counselors and other staff have invested their more effort into the school to maintain or build new systems.

This year is going to be a difficult one. We have the responsibility of maintaining our learning environment by setting clear expectations to our children, providing interventions for struggling children, communicating with as many constituents as possible, and providing a rigorous education to all of our students. While this is taking place, we need to prepare our students for the state exams and continue to build systems.

It is my goal as the leader of Central Park East Middle School to keep us focused and make sure the ideas generated around our children and are research and evidenced based. It has to change from pockets of collaboration to a community effort. I know as principal of the school, I cannot do it without every single one of you. I need you. There are opportunities throughout to be a part of the process. If we all find a way to be a part of the solution for us to reach our goals then we can begin looking forward to a great celebration when we meet all of our goals in June.

Sincerely,
Jacob T. Michelman
Principal

CHECKING IN WITH THE SCHOOL GOALS

10% INCREASE OF STUDENTS MEETING PROFICIENCY IN ELA AND MATH

Each department has developed an action plan. As we continue to look at the state test data from last year, we are realizing that all departments will have to stress the importance of reading, writing, and problem solving. Our school focus across the departments was writing and problem solving. We will use the inquiry process within all academies to take a closer look at the achievement levels of our students, what we are doing in the classroom to support students with the knowledge we have, and collecting best practices to apply in future lessons.

Cabinet is exploring the inquiry process before implementing in the academies. We will also be putting together several initiatives to improve writing and problem solving. Our first initiative will be student goals. We will be manufacturing an action plan next meeting to set up a menu to choose one or two goals per student most likely with skills to support writing and/or problem solving. We will also put together a frame on how each teacher can participate in the selection process of the goals and how they can support the goals as well. We are currently researching Robert Marzano by reading “Designing and Setting Student Goals” to assist us in the development of the plan.

92% ATTENDANCE

After looking at the data, we noticed that our total number of students with 80-89% attendance reached up to 55 students last year. Several years ago, we invested most of our efforts to shave this population down. Although our excessive absence population was at the lowest in school history (33%), we know we must continue to cut down the number of students with 18 or more absences. We have built a partnership with Attendance Court, a community based organization, to help address these students. The Attendance Team is currently putting together an action plan and hope to complete it sometime in the next two weeks. In the meantime, we are reviewing our students who have 5 or more absences.

EXPANDING INTERVENTIONS TO PROVIDE ADDITIONAL SUPPORT FOR 15% OF OUR POPULATION
I am proud to announce that over 75% of our staff is using Teacherease to input grades, discipline and communication about interventions and repercussions. This will be essential when we begin looking at our students more in depth. Not only will we have performance inside and outside the classroom gathered in one location, we will also have behavior and lent support. The Child Study Team will be providing information to Academies as to the purpose and process of what they do. They will continue to expand and frame the responsibilities of what the Child Study Team addresses. Finally, with the direction of Mr. Foley, our mentoring program will be expanding to include City Year and staff members again. We are hoping to cover a larger percentage of students to provide the one-on-one support our students desperately need.

CITY-WIDE SURVEY ACHIEVING “ABOVE AVERAGE OR HIGHER” ON ALL 12 CATEGORIES
The School Improvement Team will be putting initiatives together to improve as many areas identified in the city survey. I gathered all of the statistics from the survey and flagged the areas I believe are of the highest importance. To make sure we remain focused, I have asked our school partners, Rossana Solaris and George Thomas, to take us through the process of developing a strategy plan (very similar to an action plan but more comprehensive). I am hoping this strategy plan will drive our efforts and help us in prioritizing our efforts.

In the meantime, the Crisis Management Team was created and has been meeting to set up communication to all staff when specific types of incidences or situations arise the school throughout the school day. We are hoping this closes some of the gaps of communication indicated on our city-wide survey while making sure the school is handling all occurrences correctly. We are currently reviewing the debriefing process to help improve the process.

Please continue to work hard toward our Destination of Excellence!
One School, One Future!