2016 Department of Education Report Card
On Friday, December 16, our NMS Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education School Report Card Overview is going home to parents in the form of two handouts to our students with their First Trimester Report Cards.
I have attached here the letter as well as the overview from the DESE website, which will be coming home in paper-form.
The link here to the DESE will have the Overview as well as other links, parents may want to check out, such as comparisons to past years and other important information.
As I have stated before, we are not where we want to be yet with our PARCC or MCAS scores or our achievement overall. You will see improvements on almost every single data point, but we are not going to be satisfied until every single student scores in the proficiency range or higher. This is our mission at the Nichols.
We understand that these are high expectations for ourselves and for our students, but we know that is what we work towards for our students.
If you have any questions about any of this, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Thank you,
Martin R. Geoghegan
JOHN T. NICHOLS, JR. MIDDLE SCHOOL
112 Tiger Drive, Middleborough, Massachusetts 02346
Telephone (508) 946-2020 Fax (508) 946-2019
Martin R. Geoghegan, Principal
Stephanie Rae, Assistant Principal
Gregory Thomas, Assistant Principal
December 15, 2016
Dear Parent or Guardian:
The John T. Nichols, Jr. Middle School is
pleased to enclose an overview of our school’s “report card.” Report cards
answer important questions about a school's overall performance and contain
specific information about student enrollment and teacher qualifications,
student achievement, accountability, how a school is performing relative to
other schools in the district and the state, and the progress made toward
narrowing proficiency gaps for different groups of students.
In this report you will find the following
important information about our school:
Student
enrollment and teacher quality: This section of the report card provides
information about the students and teachers in our school as compared to the
district and the state.
Assessment
results:
This section of the report shows how our students are performing on the
Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) as compared to the
district and the state.
School
and district accountability information: This section of the report contains three
important pieces of information:
- Accountability and
Assistance Levels: Schools and districts are placed into one of five
accountability and assistance levels (1-5), with the highest performing in
Level 1 and lowest performing in Level 5. Our school has been placed into
Level 2 for “Not meeting gap narrowing goals.”
- School Percentiles: A
school percentile between 1 and 99 is reported for most schools. This
number shows the overall performance of our school relative to other
schools that serve the same or similar grades. Our school percentile is 32.
This means that our school is performing higher than 32 percent of the
middle schools in the state.
- Progress and Performance
Index (PPI): The PPI is a number that indicates our school’s progress
toward narrowing proficiency gaps, or, in other words, helping all students reach proficiency and
be prepared for success after high school. Massachusetts has set a goal of
reducing proficiency gaps by half between the years 2011 and 2017. For a
group of students to be considered to be making sufficient progress toward
narrowing proficiency gaps, its cumulative PPI must be 75 or higher.
To improve student achievement in our school,
we continue to implement the following:
- Use of student
assessment data to inform decision-making and professional development
activities.
- Better utilization of
technology in the building as we went one-to-one with Chromebooks this
school year.
- Increase our integration
of 21st Century Learning (Communication, Collaboration,
Critical Thinking, and Creativity) into our day-to-day instruction and to
continue to educate our student body for the world they reside.
- Improve our
instructional strategies, especially in terms of personalization and
differentiation, with our students within core classes as well as in our
support/enrichment periods of DIAL.
We encourage you to become involved in helping
us improve our school. Some of the ways you can become involved are:
- Encouraging your child’s
learning at home; keeping up with their agenda.
- Attending parent-teacher
meetings and other special meetings.
- Serving as a volunteer
in our school or district.
- Encouraging other
parents to become involved.
For more information about our school’s report
card or to request information about the qualifications of your child’s
classroom teachers, please feel free to contact us in the Main Office.
Sincerely,
Martin
R. Geoghegan
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