MIDDLEBOROUGH STUDENTS
CAN AND WILL
ACHIEVE
SUCCESS
Receiving Your Child's Spring 2015 MCAS Score Reports
You should be receiving all NMS (grades six through eight) students' Spring 2015 MCAS Score Reports, which were mailed home this past Friday, October 9; please keep an eye out for them.
In the report, parents will find a letter written by Dr. Mitchell Chester, Commissioner of Education for the Commonwealth. Commissioner Chester explains the report, how to read the report, and steps parents can take in terms of your child's scores.
If you have any questions about the report or what you could do to help your child, please do not hesitate to contact the school, your child's guidance counselor (last name A-J, your counselor is Ms. Buron buronl@middleboro.k12.ma.us or last name J-Z, then it is Ms. Creditor screditor@middleboro.k12.ma.us), or me.
Improvement of our MCAS scores is something we as a school community know and understand we need to do; for success to us will only be when we have 100% of our students in the Advanced and Proficient range. Whether it is the MCAS or the PARCC, or even something new, this is our mission. We don't know yet what test our students will be taking this coming spring, 2016, but whatever it may be, we will strive to making our students achieve more.
Each and every day we are working to make this a reality. We teach to the Common Core standards and it is those standards which will be tested on the standardized test of choice for the Commonwealth. We are working diligently as a faculty and school community to make sure our curriculum and instruction are where they need to be. A couple of years ago, we changed the schedule, how we deliver instruction, and many of our courses' overall curriculum.
Specifically for our tested areas we made great changes. For math instruction, we purchased the Digits math program, which puts student learning in the forefront. Many of our students have had a difficult time with Digits (to start with), but we know it is a program which will make sure our students are prepared in the Common Core, for high school and beyond.
For English Language Arts (ELA), we moved from a double-block class to two separate courses, which key into the standards we need to focus on as a school as well as understanding the 21st Century world we are preparing our students for.
For STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), we created a whole new course, entitled STEM, where students experiment with the design process and project-based learning. In our science classes, we are utilizing the Discovery Education series in greater frequency with our students which shows how science preparation is used in real-world applications. We also changed our Tech (Instructional Technology) class, which now incorporates more cross-curricular work for students to complete through technological means such as Google classroom, the Google Apps for Education suite, and other advances.
We, as a school, hold ourselves to a high standard in making sure we do the best we can with everything we do each and every day for all of our students. We understand the work we need to do to in having all students become Proficient or Advanced. We believe this is attainable and we will continue to work towards it. Our early release professional development days and our PLC periods during the school day center on creating better means to support our students. Our DIAL period is one of those places where we are looking at our MCAS data and figuring out better ways to support the students' learning particularly with some of their weaknesses. In the end, we are utilizing this MCAS data as a way to help our teachers help your children be successful.
Again, if you have any questions about the MCAS report, the scores, what we are doing about them, or our mission and vision for NMS, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Thank you,
M R Geoghegan
