From the Principal

Dear Parents,

Please mark your calendars for Back to School Night, Wednesday evening September 21st beginning at 6:30 p.m. At this time, teachers will review the curriculum expectations for the year with parents and answer any questions you may have about the curriculum or the children’s routines. This is an opportunity for parents to learn about expectations for your child. We ask that children do not attend this event. Below is the schedule for the evening. We look forward to seeing you all next Wednesday evening.

6:30-6:45  Welcome and staff introductions

6:45-7:20  K-2 parents go to classroom for teacher's curriculum presentation

7:25-8:00  K-2 parents go to gym for presentation from art, music, PE, and technology teachers

6:45-7:20  3 & 4 parents go to gym for presentation from art, music, PE, and technology teachers

7:25-8:00  3 & 4 parents go to classroom for teacher's curriculum presentation

I am pleased to announce to you that the elementary schools have revised our standards based report card that will align with the 2011 Massachusetts State Frameworks for ELA and Mathematics. An important part of the work completed was identifying the power standards (or the building block standards) that are tightly aligned grades K-4 that we believe were important to report out to families.
 
As the report card committee identified changes to the existing standards based report card administrators were asked to vet the draft report cards out to their School Councils (that represent parents and teachers), School Leadership Teams and staff members for feedback. We made adjustments throughout the drafting of the report card based on feedback from these groups.  

A shift in the new standards based reporting system will be the way we are communicating student progress to families.  We will provide a written report card two semesters during the school year, one in January and the second in June.  We will use fall and spring face to face conferences to report student progress toward standards. In this way, families will learn about how their child is progressing every 45 days throughout the school year. The Committee thought using report cards in January and June would allow time to have more information about how students were progressing toward meeting end of year standards.  Academic Performance Skills Indicators have been changed to provide parents with more meaningful information about how their child is progressing toward the standards. The goal will be to electronically submit report cards to families through IPASS so that we can reduce the volume of paper and the time it takes to print and stuff envelopes. This is another reason why it is important for families to register on IParent! 

We will offer a district wide information night for parents to learn more about the revised standards based report card Thursday evening October 27th at 6:30 - 7:15 pm at the Woodville School.  We will share samples of the grade level report cards and answer any questions families may have regarding the revised report card.

Parents please try and label all your children’s clothes, lunch boxes and water bottles so that we may quickly return them versus having to pile things into our lost and found bin.  Thank you for your assistance with this request.

As always, I can be reached via email at Deborah.collura@wpsk12.org anytime or by phone. Have a wonderful week.

Regards,
Deb Collura