Joe Menendez
High School Principal
Senior Sofia Andrade and her party won a close election this past Wednesday in the High School. All four campaigns competed well with each other as they worked to garner support for their ideas and leadership. Congratulations to Sofia and MICA for being elected to Student Council. I am looking forward to working with them in meeting their goals for the year.
Thank you to those parents who came out Tuesday morning for our HS parent meeting. It is always great to have an opportunity to speak with parents and hear how school is going from their perspective as parents. We spent some time discussing our new English and Math curriculums and how we are getting students’ feedback and adjusting our practice where needed.
We then spent the majority of our time together talking about stress in students. We discussed ways in which students are stressed as well as ways to help educate students about stress and how we can promote a more well-balanced student and school. It was a great conversation and I left with some thoughts on how to bring our students into the conversation in order to give them voice to this issue. I plan on creating a student advisory board made up of 9-12 grade to help me listen, discuss, and strategize ways to mitigate stress at school.
Below are some links that I shared with everyone at the meeting.
http://www.challengesuccess.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/DYK_High-School_Dec2015.pdf
http://www.challengesuccess.org/resources/research/publications/
On October 16th, all students in grades 9-12 will participate in taking the PSAT. The PSAT is a standardized test that gives in the format of the college entrance exam, SAT. 11th grade US citizens take the PSAT as the National Merit Scholarship Qualification Test. Students in 11th grade who are US citizens and whose score is one of the top 16,000 scores in the country qualify as a semifinalist for the scholarship.
All 9th grade students will take the test with no accommodations as this test in 9th is our baseline for us and students to see how they fare on their first standardized test of this caliber. Students in 10th and 11th grade who have documented and approved accommodations with the CollegeBoard will be able to use their accommodations on the test.
Taking this test is mandatory for all students in grades 9-11. There is no make-up day to take the PSAT. Students will be dismissed at noon that day to go home.
Seniors will have the day off to work on their college applications! All other students
Fernanda Balzaretti kicks off Senior Speeches
Senior Fernanda Balzaretti kicked off our senior speeches this past Thursday and she set the tone for the rest of the seniors to follow! Fernanda spoke about her love of music and songwriting. She also sang one of her songs that she wrote which was fantastic. I’m still singing the tune in my head. The song is called Feelings and you can listen to it on Spotify. Here is a link to her song. It’s pretty catchy and the words are pretty powerful.
"Feelings" by Fernanda Balzaretti
