Principals Outline Some Goals For The Coming School Year

By Steve Bonanno

The first day of school, August 28, is just around the corner and people around the district are preparing for the 2012-13 school year.

Some of Newtown’s principals reflected this week about their goals for the coming school year.

Newtown Middle School Principal Diane Sherlock said her school will be welcoming in some new faculty members this fall. Among them is the new Assistant Principal Anthony Salvatore, who was the assistant principal at Sandy Hook Elementary School last school year and worked at Reed Intermediate School before that. Dr Salvatore is also returning to NMS after roughly ten years spent at the other two schools in the district.   

NMS will also be welcoming a new French teacher, Stephanie Makowski, and a new eighth grade mathematics teacher, Michael DesRochers, according to Ms Sherlock.

“We are excited to have 453 new seventh graders coming to us and we are busy planning so their transition to their new school can be a smooth, happy one,” said Ms Sherlock. “Our goal is to challenge each of our 900 students to learn as deeply, as independently, and as creatively as possible while we simultaneously work to provide a nurturing, accepting, fun environment for these changing adolescents.” 

Newtown High School Principal Charles Dumais said his school has three main goals for the upcoming school year: to improve student learning; to create and improve connections between students and adults; and to diminish and eliminate mean and cruel behaviors.           

Sandy Hook Elementary School Principal Dawn Hochsprung said that this year her school will focus on the common core state standards and increase the complexity of text that is studied.

“A significant percentage of our classroom teachers have participated in a five-day training on readers workshop, where they learned techniques in building independence and reading skills in students,” said Ms Hochsprung. “We are really excited about bringing a readers workshop into the mainstream of the program.”

Readers workshop, according to Ms Hochsprung, is an approach to reading that meets students at their own individual level of comprehension and gets them to push themselves in genres in which they have great interest.

“We capitalize on their love of reading and use that passion to advance their achievement,” said Ms Hochsprung.

So with the principals hard at work, the schools are getting ready for the year’s first bell.