Narragansett Regional School District

Superintendent's Corner

	A message from Dr. Roseli Weiss, Superintendent of Schools

SUPERINTENDENT’S  CORNER

AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2010

Welcome to the 2010/2011 school year!  I hope that the lovely summer weather has allowed for relaxation, activities, family time, and many other summer pastimes.  It seems that summer months pass by so quickly.  Here we are ready for a new school year.  I welcome back all of our families, welcome to new families, and welcome back to all of our staff members.

As always, we have some new staff members to introduce and some new classes, opportunities and ideas to share.  This year our goals are building-oriented, based upon our continuing journey as a “Professional Learning Community”.  Administrators spent two days at our second annual retreat where we discussed ideas, goals, and set 2010/2011 as a second year for building based work.  Our shared objective continues to be, “To develop a shared belief system and gain meaningful information regarding a culture of learning”.  Our essential question continues to be, “How does my/our work impact student learning?”  We continue to discuss what we expect students to learn, how we will know when they learn it, how we will respond when they don’t learn it, how we will respond when they already know it, and how each student will be guided toward a meaningful and valuable education.

To these ends, despite difficult economic times, we are :

1. starting full-day Kindergarten for all students
2. offering six Advanced Placement courses under a three year grant.
3. offering one section of Mandarin Chinese ( made possible through a retirement and new hire) adding Chinese to two Romance Languages already in place (Spanish and Italian) at the High School.
4. celebrating the first Freshman Academy during the week of August 16^th-19^th to orient the freshman before the start of school.  We had almost 50% of the grade nine class participate and many upper classmen to mentor them.
5. We have had extensive professional development for Middle School Team Leaders during the 2009/2010 school year which will continue thoughout 2011.
6. offering a health class to Middle School students.
7. continuing professional development for elementary teachers in the areas of reading and writing, leadership for middle school team leaders, furthering a professional learning community for high school teachers.
8. improving our bus transportation efficiency and on-time performance with safety as a number 1 priority.

As the year begins, we will contact our community to participate in a series of  anti-bullying meetings to discuss ways to negate the effects of such anti-social behavior.  Please watch for invitations to attend and participate.

While the economy continues to be an issue for funding, we continue to educate children regardless of the state of the budget.  Join us in this most important mission.  Communicate through your child’s teacher, principal and Central Office in that order and let us hear from you.  Strengthening our partnership is essential to strong vital schools.

Best wishes for a wonderful school year for your child(ren).

Roseli Weiss