On Friday, January 29, our NMS MCAS Report Card Overview is going home to parents in the form of two handouts to the students.
I have attached here the letter as well as the overview from the DESE website, which will be coming home.
The link here to the DESE will have the Overview as well as other links, parents may want to check out.
As I have stated before, we are not where we want to be yet with our MCAS scores or our achievement overall. We are not going to be satisfied until every single student scores Proficient 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 is right 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
January 27, 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 30.
This means that our school is performing higher than 30 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.
- 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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