Principals Message - March 2012 Edition

Dear JHS 13 Community,

I hope you had a wonderful break. It was our first one where the state exams are right when we return to school. It should not have stopped us from catching up with family and friends. It should not have prevented us from taking care of our own needs such as catching up with sleep or even getting outside to relax or workout. We did offer Test Prep over the break. Great attendance would have been the entire school showing up but we did have a good number of students who went above and beyond to get a few days of test preparation in during break. Thank you so much to the wonderful staff who hosted the students such as Dr. Phelps, Mr. Demant, Ms. Ruiz, Ms. Murphy, Mr. Edgar, and Jacob Scott. Thank you to the parents who supported their children in sending them to the Test Prep sessions.

I am making the focus of this Principal’s Message the recent State Quality Review. There is so much we can take away from the preparation we invested into the process and the preliminary feedback we received from the reviewers. For starters, besides the assembling of binders which we all agreed was not the best use of our time, we had to do even more preparation in gathering evidence of the work we do with our students. In addition, we needed to re-launch some initiatives we put together last year with the improvements we gathered in the hibernation process. These responsibilities left us three weeks to do about three months worth of work. The cabinet agreed we were only going to commit our energies toward areas in which the school was going to be forwarded (not including the binders – as this was a requirement from the state in getting the quality review in motion).

The evidence gathering needs to transfer to our day-to-day work. We live in the great city of New York. There is no other system that has more accountability. If we are going to be successful here than we need to hold ourselves accountable with the day-to-day gathering of evidence that we are meeting the needs of our students. A huge catalyst for this is going to be the student goals we re-launched recently. It is going to be a tremendous amount of work that will be the connecting piece to teacher goals, progress grades, targets, differentiation in the classroom, and gathering evidence of meeting the needs of students.

In order for this to happen, we need to align the student goals to the pre-assessment results and develop targets accordingly. The key part to this is communicating those targets to the students and parents and creating a plan with the student on how to reach the targets. Ideally, parents are going to want to be a part of the development of the plan. From there, it is about assessing student progress toward meeting their goals. Then we fall into the continuous cycle of assess, target, and teach. With the amount of resources we have available, additional support can be provided through test prep classes, through one-on-one or group tutoring, through our afterschool programs, and through our collaborative in the classroom partnerships. The assessments and progress are tracked on a goal sheet in the classroom portfolio and in the online gradebook, which is accessible to students. Parents and students can monitor using the online access to the gradebook or by simply viewing the students’ portfolio.

Here is where it all comes together. If students meet their targets, then teachers meet their goals, students receive 100% on 35% of their grades, and students are one more step toward reaching proficiency as the goals and units are aligned to the common core standards or the state exam. The efforts have to be made in grading the assessment results in a timely manner (especially the pre-assessment), setting goals and communicating the goals, developing a plan with the students to meet those goals, and building lessons to forward all students in meeting their goals (differentiation and conferencing has to be eventually be built in to improve a teacher’s ability to meet the needs of his or her students).

The State Quality Review (SQR) determined we needed to improve our teacher management of behavior issues, expand the amount of opportunities teachers have to outside professional development, and to improve the number of strategies teachers have to meeting the needs of our students. Again, when the student goals are fully implemented, we will be able to identify a population of students who we struggle to help meet their goals. From there, we will need to expand our repertoire of strategies to meet those students’ needs. Colleagues or administration will offer some of those strategies, but a good number of strategies will have to be accessed through outside support. Some of those barriers for certain teachers will have to be management strategies for specific behavior issues. Regardless, the main component allowing us to measure progress but also identify staff needs would be the student goals.

I am truly grateful for the State Quality Review process. We were asked a great number of questions encouraging us to reflect on where we are today. It also gave us feedback (that will be elaborated on later down the road), which is a key element in improving in education in all capacities and levels. The SQR process gave us great feedback on how important student goals are to the success of our school. It is our responsibility to invest our efforts in using them to improve student achievement and close the gap of communication that exists between staff and students. Lets work together to put student goals at the forefront and align it to all of our responsibilities so we can ensure success for everyone. Two Tests! One Dream! To be the best, we must be a team!

Yours Truly,



Jacob T. Michelman
Principal