A New School Year, New Faces, New Beginnings

September 8, 2010

Welcome to the beginning of a new, different school year! I hope you have enjoyed this wonderful summer and that you’re ready to join us and the students for our back to school routines. Please review the materials we’ll send home with your child this week. There are several yellow forms for our office and the nurse you’ll need to sign. We again ask that you review the Code of Conduct, Student Handbook and Student Planners(Grades 2-5) and return the form with your signature to confirm you have done so.

You may also notice the new format for our parent calendar of events and some special opportunities to join me for coffee or volunteer training. I hope to see many of you!
This will be a year of many changes for West Side. Our building and grounds staff are already well on the way to making the building sparkle and we’ll start the year with a new intercom in the office that will make life easier for everyone. We have several teachers using new smartboards, computer clusters, document cameras and interwrite tablets. I’m very excited about all the new technology in the building and the instructional choices they imply for our students.

You’ve already met some of the new faces who will be joining us due to our retirements last spring, but there are a few more you probably aren’t aware of. Here’s a list of everyone:

Mrs. Karleen Bognaski, Kindergarten
Mrs. Crystal McAllister, Grade 1
Mrs. Brooke Crump, Grade 3
Miss Amanda Chapman, Grade 5
Miss Ann Shatraw, Teaching Assistant in Reading

There’s also a welcome change for Mrs. Kathy Sovay. Kathy has been with us part time through BOCES over the last few years. She’ll now be full time at West Side as member of our district.

Student teacher Brittany Whitton will start out the year with us in Grade 1 with Miss Santamont as her cooperating teacher.

It will also be a year of many challenges. Perhaps you have read of the changes in practice at State Education over the summer. These changes will have strong implications for us as we continue to try and meet the standards and teach all our learners and they affect teachers in all grades. This will be a transitional year where we start putting together the framework to meet these new expectations. I am confident that we can do so. We just finished an excellent year, with record growth for many of our students and our goals for higher achievement met. We’ll take those strengths and apply them to the new tasks at hand. I will give you some information about these new guidelines at our first coffee meeting on September 17.

We will have another opportunity to share these new faces and ideas with you at our Open House on September 30. Our first volunteer training will be at 5:30, followed by visits to classrooms from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Until then, please stop by to say hello or express any questions or concerns. Have a great first week of school!