Dear Nichols Middle School Parent or Guardian:
I am pleased to direct you to the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (Click Here for the Nichols Middle School NCLB Report Card) to access our school “report card.” It contains information about student
enrollment, teacher qualifications, student achievement, accountability, how
our school is performing relative to other schools, and the progress our school
is making toward narrowing proficiency gaps for different groups of students.
Part I: Student
Enrollment and Teacher Qualifications
The first section of the report card provides information about
the students and teachers in our school as com‐pared to the district
and the state. If your child attends a
school that receives federal Title I funds, you also have the right to request
the following information about the qualifications of your child’s classroom
teachers:
Whether your child’s teacher is licensed in the grade levels and
subject areas they teach
Whether your child’s teacher is teaching under an emergency
license or waiver
The college degree and major of your child’s teacher
Whether your child is provided services by paraprofessionals and,
if so, their qualifications
Part II: Student
Achievement
The second section of the report card shows how Massachusetts’s
students are performing on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a
test that allows you to compare the performance of Massachusetts’s students to
students across the nation or in other states. You can also see how our school performed on
the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) tests as compared to
the district and the state.
Part III:
Accountability
The third section of the report card 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 because we did not meet all gap narrowing goals set by the
Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
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.
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 are working on many new initiatives, including:
- Studying
the school’s schedule;
- Working
with our Math teachers on Number Sense with Teachers21 Consulting;
- Establishing
school data teams;
- Continuing
to unpack and integrate the 2011 MA State Curriculum Frameworks for
English Language Arts and Literacy and Mathematics while preparing for the
2014 Science standards;
- Providing
research based professional development opportunities to all faculty and
staff; and
- Implementing systems and structures that positively impact teaching and learning.
I 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;
- Attending parent‐teacher meetings and other
special meetings;
- Serving as a volunteer in
our school or district; and
- Encouraging other parents to become involved.
For more information about what we are doing to improve student
achievement or to request information about the qualifications of your child’s
classroom teachers, please feel free to contact me at (508) 946-2020.
Sincerely,
Martin
R. Geoghegan
John T. Nichols,
Jr. Middle School Principal
