Island schools open doors on a new school year
Published: September 4, 2008
Schools chief highlights new programs
As we start the 2008-09 school year, the Martha's Vineyard Public Schools will begin several important programs and initiatives. First, our new Bridge program will be located at the Edgartown School and will serve students entering kindergarten or first grade in need of a more intensive and supportive approach to learning. The two Project Headway classes that had been located in Edgartown will now move to the West Tisbury School and will continue their outstanding work with pre-schoolers.
Photo by Ralph Stewart
Second, our staff will begin to work with a new supervision model called the Professional Growth System, or PGS. This new model, which was developed over the past year, will help teachers to continually improve their practice and encourage them to become a member of a professional learning community - a group of teachers who truly focus upon student learning.
Third, our successful Grade 8 honors algebra program will expand and work with students in all four of our middle-level buildings. Last year this program was piloted at the Oak Bluffs School, and a limited number of eighth graders from across the Island traveled there each day to have their math instruction.
Finally, as we begin to develop the budget for the 2009-2010 school year, we will work to provide more easily understandable information to our local citizens and the finance committees throughout the process. At last year's town meetings, citizens asked for more information, and we will answer their call.
James Weiss is superintendent of Vineyard schools.
Photo by Ralph Stewart
Martha's Vineyard Regional High School begins 50th year
As we begin the 2008-09 school year at Martha's Vineyard Regional High School, we are all excited at being part of a new era. This year we will graduate the 50th class in the history of our school and, with that in mind, I feel our theme of moving forward to be: bringing with us the foundations from the past, using the best of the present, and working toward an even more rewarding future.
I am privileged to be taking over the helm this year and realize, being only the fourth person to ever hold this position, that I have some big shoes to fill. What this school is today is the result of the hard work of those who came before. We have always been blessed with strong community support since the inception of the Regional High School, and that is the one constant on which we can always rely. At times, like any large family, we may disagree as to how we should arrive, but we never disagree on the destination: the success of our young people.
There will be some new innovations this year, such as: Edline, the electronic portal that enhances parent contact with the school by allowing them to access important school records and information about their child; 30 hours of increased time on learning by the elimination of daily (Tues-Thurs) homeroom; the addition (in October) of an electronic payment system for our cafeteria; and presentations at school committee by each of our departments throughout the year to keep the public abreast of some of the exciting things and innovations going on at Martha's Vineyard Regional High School.
My goal for the future of Martha's Vineyard Regional High School is to make this school a cutting edge educational center that other schools will wish to visit, in order to model. We have the students, the staff, and, most of all, the community support to make this happen. In these difficult financial times we realize our responsibility to be fiscally vigilant, but we also understand that that must be balanced with our main responsibility of equipping our young people to be successful in life. I cannot do this alone; the school cannot do it alone. We ask all of you to become members of our school family, even if only in spirit, and together we an continue to be proud of our outstanding educational system on Martha's Vineyard, but most of all we can continue to be proud of our wonderful young people.
Stephen Nixon is principal of the Regional High School.
Photo by Lynn Christoffers
Tisbury School continues to excel
Our school continues to excel academically, socially, and athletically. It is truly a privilege to work with a staff and group of children that represent the best of this Island. I believe we have the finest staff assembled and continue to recruit new members that will only enhance the growth of our children and our professional expertise and collegiality.
Our PTO has energized our efforts to reconnect with the community at large. In athletics, the improvement of our sports programs demonstrates a renewed commitment and spirit among our student/athletes, parents, and coaches.
Academically, we remain on target in our improvement rating, as we have for the past 9 years. Though we did not reach AYP goals in math and ELA subgroups of low income, our overall aggregate scores continue to improve as our "Very High" performance rating in language arts and our "High" performance rating in math indicate.
Our MCAS scores among our special needs students have improved dramatically, as a result of an increased focus with this subgroup of children. I believe an increased focus on our low-income population will result in similar improvement.
Overall, I believe that we need to continue to reorganize our efforts and staffing to address an ever increasing AYP improvement standard and continue our excellence in the context of a standards-based climate of accountability. What does this mean for our budget? We remain very appreciative of the town's support. As a steward of Tisbury School, I will continue to keep our budget manageable, in the face of changing mandates and needs.
Our overall student numbers have increased over the past two years, despite projections of a declining enrollment. I believe this is due to the excitement generated over the continued success of our children and the promise of the future direction of Tisbury School as a whole.
Best wishes for the coming year.
Richard Smith is principal of the Tisbury School.
Oak Bluffs will focus on culture and achievement
Oak Bluffs teachers and staff actually begin to plan for a new school year before the prior year has even finished. Many plan for and attend workshops and conferences over the summer to aid in their own professional growth, acquiring knowledge and skills that better help them jumpstart their teaching in September.
The building receives tender loving care and attention from our custodial staff as well as the town parks and highway department.
There are several important program or faculty changes. After more than three decades heading our guidance department, the esteemed Bill Jones will retire. We hired Will Donley of Falmouth to be our new guidance counselor. We have also hired a new fourth grade teacher, Jaime Langley.
The greatest current challenge we face is to improve the achievement gap (AYP) demonstrated by our special education and low-income students, as measured by the state's MCAS assessment. Though our overall student scores in both Math and English/Language Arts continue to rank in the very high and high levels, our focus for this year must be in improving achievement scores for these important subgroups.
The year will not be free or problems. The economy and school budgets tend to be closely linked; thus, our ability to develop, present, justify, and pass a school budget which meets the needs of our students and families, while reflecting the fiscal concerns and considerations of our greater town community, will be our greatest test and task this year.
One of my goals for this school year is to increase awareness of Brazilian culture. Having spent six months in Brazil traveling and studying their school systems, I wish to share with staff what I have learned regarding Brazilian way of life, mores, and traditions, especially in how these cultural attributes relate to our own Brazilian student population.
I plan to share with staff impressions, observations, and reflections from my time in Brazil, especially our visits to schools, both public and private. I also plan to create and offer to staff a Portuguese language class after school, in which I personally plan to participate. The intent would be to train staff, especially those with ELL responsibilities, in not only developing a rudimentary understanding of the language, but also of the customs and culture of our Brazilian students and families.
Evidence of progress toward this goal would be seen in an increased fluency by staff in the use of Portuguese with our Brazilian students and parents, as well as a stronger connection to our Brazilian community, the intent being to better educate and establish stronger relationships with our Brazilian students and community.
Photo by Lynn Christoffers
Another goal is the Response To Intervention (RTI) model. This goal is a reflection of our continuing work with promoting evidence-based assessment and instruction in our primary grades. This has been an established goal by our SAC regarding the development of our school improvement plan. RTI represents our desire to continually proactively address what is a promising alternative to the traditional IQ-achievement discrepancy model for identifying students with learning disabilities and improving classroom instruction for these students, most importantly at the K-2 grade level.
My experience in Brazil has provided me with some personal enlightenment regarding our world's environment and our own impact on it - our carbon footprint, if you will. To both reduce that imprint on behalf of the school, and to assist students in understanding their own impact upon the world's fragile ecosystem, I wish to incorporate models and tools for both adults and students to better understand how they may reduce and offset our school's carbon footprint through offsetting activities and projects. This initiative may also help to reduce our school's energy consumption, thus contributing to lowering our monthly electricity and fuel bills.
Laury Binney is principal of the Oak Bluffs School.
Photo by Ralph Stewart
Personal touch exemplifies West Tisbury School
The West Tisbury School has a wonderful reputation for the personal connections that exist between our faculty and our students. School begins each day for most students with a personal greeting from Sue Merrill, our school secretary, who knows every child by name. Each teacher also allocates a portion of the start of the school day to help build and strengthen a true sense of community in their classroom.
At the West Tisbury School we emphasizes social, emotional, and academic growth in a strong and safe school community. Small class sizes plus active project-based learning with interdisciplinary support are the hallmarks of our school. Field trips, extra-curricular opportunities, and enrichment activities help make our educational programs come alive for our students.
For the 2008-2009 school year we have made several staff and curricular changes that we are very excited about. In the lower level elementary, we have made some changes in response to our current enrollment. Since this year's kindergarten class is smaller than in years past, there will be only one kindergarten class, taught by Teri Mello.
In addition to our outstanding 1st and 2nd grade classrooms, taught by Susan Huntington and Michelle Mayhew, respectively, we will expand our multiage classroom offerings, and have two multiage classes for students in the first and second grades.
Maggie Chianese will move from teaching kindergarten to our new multiage classroom and Elaine Barnett will again lead the other multiage group. This year will also be Elaine's last year with us. As many of you know, Elaine has been a valuable member of our teaching staff for the past 30 years. I hope you will join me in celebrating her incredible accomplishment all year long.
Another important change is that we will be hosting two Project Headway classrooms at the West Tisbury School. Project Headway is an island-wide public preschool that is designed to service students with and without special needs. The program brings energy and excitement that will have a positive effect on our entire school. Funded by the Superintendent's budget, we are delighted to welcome the Project Headway staff and program to our school community.
We are also pleased to welcome several new professionals to our staff. Kate Lefer-McCormick will be our new 3rd grade teacher. Kate taught here briefly a few years back and for the last several years has been teaching at the Jordan School in Rhode Island. Barbara Bernstein will be taking Molly Cabral's place as our elementary Guidance Counselor while Molly is away on a one-year leave of absence. Barbara has been the Guidance Counselor in Chilmark for many years. She has also worked at both the Oak Bluffs and the Edgartown Schools. Barbara brings a wonderful wealth of experience with her that I know we will all benefit from.
In the middle school, Donna Bishop will be joining our team as a teaching assistant for our 6th grade students. We are also happy to have Ann Nelson return as our Math Resource Specialist. Ann will primarily work with selected students in grades 6-8, but she will also be a tremendous resource for all of our teachers throughout the school.
This year, we are pleased to be able to offer a Grade 8 Algebra class. While we are excited to be able to offer this program to students who have demonstrated an ability to truly excel in math, we remain committed to ensuring that all students who take our traditional Grade 8 Integrated
Math class continue to receive the same solid mathematical instruction that has always been the hallmark of the West Tisbury School.
The Federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation requires schools to test and track student performance with great specificity. We are proud that our students continue to perform well on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) test. All schools in the Commonwealth were rated in performance using the terms: Critically Low, Very Low, Low, Moderate, High, and Very High. We are proud to report that our school earned performance levels of Very High in English Language Arts and Math.
In many ways, the West Tisbury School is the perfect microcosm of our island. The beauty, charm, and the special connections that exist across our island are honored and celebrated everyday at our school. One of the biggest challenges that we face in school today is the same problem confronting most island residents: the soaring cost of island life. This year I look forward to working closely with the School Advisory Committee and various community groups to develop and deliver a school budget that continues to fund the excellent services our students need and deserve.
On behalf of the entire faculty and staff of the West Tisbury School, I would like to welcome everybody to the start of a great new opportunity. I hope your school year is everything that you want it to be.
Michael Halt is principal of the West Tisbury School.
Chilmark School welcomes veteran staff
The Chilmark School is ready to open its doors for the new school year. With only one staff turnover, this will be a year of familiar faces, as we welcome the return of Susan Larsen, the grade four/five teacher's assistant, who just completed a two-year teaching hiatus. While we prepare for an awesome and productive year ahead, I am encouraged, knowing that our highly qualified teaching staff is in place, ready to meet the academic challenges awaiting us.
Members of the Chilmark School community are partners in the exciting task of preparing children for the future. We believe in positive, working relationships between home and school and the greater Island community. The sincere coordination of our efforts will ensure success for each child.
Our multi-age program is organized into K/1, 2/3 and 4/5 classrooms, allowing us to recognize and plan for a wide range of student abilities, which provides for differential rates of progress, while adjusting to the individual's emotional, cognitive, and social needs. We continue to stress the basic skills by offering students a project-based curriculum that supports them in achieving their maximum, while fostering a healthy respect for learning.
The Responsive Classroom is our social curriculum of choice. This approach to building a learning community is built around six central components that integrate teaching, learning, and caring in the daily program. These components are set in the context of commonly shared values such as honesty, fairness, and respect. They are implemented throughout the development and strengthening of social skills.
Our primary goal is to ensure children will love to learn. In the process, we strive to have students gain the kind of self-esteem that will enable them to act throughout their lives as responsible, concerned, and caring citizens.
A challenging goal this year will be constant vigilance by us to of ensure that each of our 38 students works toward proficiency in math and reading by 2014, as mandated by NCLB. This goal can only be met by providing the students with the best in educational and instructional practices. With this in mind, the Chilmark teaching staff will be engaged in a variety of professional development activities, which will support them in becoming a more finely tuned community of learning leaders.
I am encouraged by the enthusiasm of the Chilmark staff and parents and look forward to an exceptional year ahead.
Diane Gandy is principal of the Chilmark School.
Photo by Lynn Christoffers
Facing challenges, steering a steady course, at Edgartown School
Amidst the challenges that face public education, the Edgartown School continues to offer balanced instruction with attention to the arts, physical education, enrichment programming, computer science, Spanish, music, industrial arts, consumer science, health education and extra curricular activities - both on and off the Island - all within a very supportive community.
The Edgartown School also continues to make academic gains, demonstrated by the recent news that the school achieved adequate yearly progress (AYP) based on last spring's Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) scores. AYP is a provision of the No Child Left Behind Act, which directs schools to ensure that all students advance in math and language arts.
Significant progress in math, grades 3-8, was made while language arts showed steady growth in the same grades. One of the major challenges for the school is to continue to show improvement on the MCAS. Certainly, a major focus of the faculty will be to raise test scores while offering rigorous and relevant instruction to all the students.
Another challenge this year will be to operate within the budget. With fuel prices soaring, which impacts so many commodities purchased, most parts of the school budget are influenced and will have to be monitored closely. A concerted effort must be made to keep spending and budget in check with revenues.
The door is always open to our community. We'd love to see you attending a principal's coffee, volunteering as a guest speaker, or cheering on the Eagles at a sporting event, with our new mascot.
John Stevens is principal of the Edgartown School.
Photo by Lynn Christoffers
Charter School remains focused on its mission
The Martha's Vineyard Public Charter School opens today for its 13th year. The school opened in 1996 with 75 students in grades 4-8 and now the institution serves 179 students in grades K-12. There are 145 students on the school's waitlist. The Charter School has had eight graduating classes totaling 40 students, of which 31 have gone on to institutions of higher education.
The Martha's Vineyard Public Charter School is committed to continuing the standards of excellence set forth by its founders 13 years ago and maintained by the parents, students, and faculty during the school's first 12 years. The school is committed to hiring and retaining a high quality staff to serve the Charter School community. The Charter School community is blessed with a highly qualified and committed faculty for the 2008-2009 school year. The faculty and administration are committed to serving the students and families of our community and recognizing and celebrating the talents and passions of our students.
The Martha's Vineyard Public Charter School has been, and continues to be, a responsible steward of public funds. The 2009 fiscal year budget is $3,000,000, which represents a five-percent increase over fiscal year 2008. The school continues to be prudent in its budgetary decisions, and it continues to follow the mandate of its founders in maintaining small multi-age classes in a project-based classroom environment.
The summer months have been busy with the construction of four new classrooms, a renovated science lab and the installation of the school's sprinkler system. We continue to make improvements to our facility to best serve our increased enrollment (the highest in the history of the school) and the 25-percent increase in our high school population. The school community is excited about the continued interest in the school and meeting the challenges of the next 12 years.
The plan the school is putting in place to meet those challenges includes early interventions to assist all of our students, web-based education to link students, teachers, and families through networks, an expansion of the art offerings to our students, and an update of the school's five-year Strategic Plan. The school will share these plans with the Massachusetts Department of Education in May, 2009 when representatives from the DOE visit our school as part of the five-year charter renewal process outlined by the State Legislature. The Department of Education visits the school during year 2, year 3 and year 5 of its five-year charter to ensure that the school is academically successful, financially viable, and true to its mission. Our present five-year charter with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is due for renewal during the 2010-2011 school year. The Charter School teachers, students, and parents welcome these site visits as we appreciate objective feedback on our work and the opportunities these visits give us to talk about the Charter School on Martha's Vineyard.
As the doors open for the 2008-2009 school year, it is our responsibility to ensure that all of our students enjoy success, the school environment allows each member of the faculty and staff to achieve their goals, and our families feel welcomed and engaged in the education of their children. We make that promise to the Island community. And we extend an invitation to all members of the Island community to feel free to call for information about the Martha's Vineyard Public Charter School and/or stop by for a visit and tour of our school.
On behalf of the Martha's Vineyard Public Charter School's Board of Trustees and school community I wish all Island students, teachers, and families great success during the 2008-2009 school year.
Robert Moore is the principal of the Martha's Vineyard Public Charter School.
