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October, 2009
News from Principal:
We are in full swing at Meridian Park! Thanks for such a
wonderful start to the new school year. Classrooms are
buzzing with activities, field trips have begun and we are off to a
great start!
Our school goals are focused around the improvement of our
students’ academic achievement in math, reading and
science. We have a lot of exciting work ahead of us as we
continue our journey as a professional learning community at
Meridian Park. You may have heard some of the buzz words or
phrases all around the district this year. These include
acronyms or phases such as Professional Learning Community (PLC),
Response to Intervention (RtI), Power Standards and more.
Systematically, all across our district, we are looking at our
state testing results and the achievement gap that has grown in
Shoreline. We are putting our heads and our hands together to
work on this and make improvements. By increasing our
collaborative work together as a professional learning community
and responding to student needs with intentional interventions, we
will increase student achievement from the elementary level on
up.
At MP, our teaching staff is beginning to read the inspirational
book, Whatever It Takes by Dufour. We are supporting teachers
with new ideas around intervention planning within the classroom
with the help of some Title I and Stimulus funds from the federal
government. This work also comes with much support from the
district-level Response to Intervention (RtI) coordinator as well
as from within MP – from Sandi James and Erin Kirkpatrick,
our own fabulous RtI coordinators at MP. They are
fabulous!
Over the past five weeks, our teachers worked hard at assessing
students each grade level in math and reading. At
conferences, you may hear the words DIBELS or EASY CBM or SRI or
DRA… these are some of the many screening tools/ assessment
we use to help us understand where are students are in terms of
reading and math. They also help us to better guide our
instruction for our students along the way and ensure that progress
is happening.
As always, I look forward to seeing many of you next week during
conference week and as you volunteer at MP. Thank you again
for all of your help with this new school year. We appreciate
the time and energy you give to your child at school and at
home.
Here’s to a fabulous fall!
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