September 13, 2018
Once again, we met outside the front lobby to welcome everybody back to school! Thanks to the PTA who provided refreshments. Please do join the PTA, as they do many, many things for our school! We are all excited to get the new year underway. To begin the new year, we have a few staff changes. We welcomed back Mrs. Hoitsma from maternity leave and Ms. Hubiak is now Mrs. Mitzak. Congrats to both of them! Mr. Chip Newhauser is our new full time custodian during the day. Welcome Mr. Chip! Unfortunately, we had to say goodbye to Mrs. Annunziata due to retirement, Mrs. Edsall, our school psychologist, and Mr. Weber, custodian, who are both now working full time elsewhere. We will miss them!
We will be holding an open house at the school on Saturday, October 13th, from 10am - 1pm as part of the townwide 100th Year Celebration! We look forward to seeing you there.
We purchased a brand new science program that follows the new Next Generation Science Standards. It is a well-balanced, hands-on approach to teaching science that will be engaging for your children. We were also able to incorporate more technology into our students’ weekly schedule, as well as more STEAM. We now have chromebooks at every grade level in the school, meaning we are a 1:1 device to student school utilizing chromebooks exclusively. Laptops are still utilized if necessary.
There are many factors that go into educating children. There is not only the instructional aspect but also the social aspect. Our teachers work hard to instill a positive attitude, and they stress making good character choices. There are many ways that students are assessed both formatively and summatively through homework, tests, quizzes, projects, presentations, and the like. In addition to periodic, internal benchmarks, they are also measured by the standardized PARCC assessment.
While I do not like to stress the PARCC assessment (it is only one measure in time of a child’s progress), I would be remiss if I didn’t mention it. Last spring, in both language arts and math, Califon’s scores were higher than both the state and the country across all grades. It is a true testament of both the hard work of our teachers and your children! We are very proud of them to say the least.
Once again, I am excited to begin a new year and look forward to seeing everybody!
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