SRHS Update: Week of July 16

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Dear Parents, Students, Staff, and Friends of Sanborn Regional High School,

I hope you are enjoying the “dog days of summer”. Tomorrow it looks like we might finally get a break from this hazy and hot weather.

Summer Update

At Sanborn, we the administrators (Ann Hadwen, Michelle Catena, Vicki Parady-Guay, Michael Turmelle, and I) have been busy preparing for the start of another fantastic year. Here is an update on how we have spent our summer:

At the end of June, we shared some of the work of our Freshman Learning Community model with administrators from around the State at a regional conference up in the White Mountains. We also had four different teams of teachers who spent some time working together on various projects: This included the FLC, Sophomore Teachers, Math Teachers, and an Anti-Bullying summit. We are very excited about plans for a new sophomore “experience” for our students that will begin this fall. In future emails you will be hearing more about this, but for now, I can tell you that we are developing a project-based learning experience for students that will connect  the areas of Biology, Civics, and Language Arts with one (or several) community-based projects or explorations. This model is being designed in such a way to help personalize our curriculum for students and help engage them at a deeper level in their studies.

At the end of this month, a small team of administrators, teachers, and students have been invited by the Department of Education from the State of Iowa to share our work with redesign, specifically the work around our competency-based models in the freshman and sophomore years through a videoconference session. We are excited to work on behalf of all of you to help put our small Sanborn community of Fremont, Newton, and Kingston NH on “the map” around the country.

Finally, we have been busy filling some vacant positions on our staff. Next fall, we expect to welcome nine new teachers to our community: Nicole Brush, Devin McNelly, and Phil Curtis for Math; Greg Connors, Sarah Sallade, and one additional “yet to be named” teacher for Science; Joab Owen for the wood/welding/automotive program; Colin McQueen for World Language; and Donna Harvey-Moseley for Social Studies. Donna is finally “graduating” from our middle school!

The Guidance Department is preparing to mail student schedules home by the end of this week, so please look out for them in your mail. We had an extremely successful master schedule build, and in many cases we were able to accommodate anywhere from 95%-100% of all course requests. When you receive your schedule, don’t be surprised if some room number or teacher names are missing. Some of these have not yet been assigned, but will be prior to the first day of school. Accompanying the schedule will be instructions for how you can go about requesting a schedule modification with the Guidance Office, if necessary.

Sometime in mid-August, I will be mailing out (and emailing) our official “back to school packet” which will include the important forms that will need to be completed prior to the first day of school. School starts Tuesday August 28 for freshman and Wednesday August 29 for all other grades. Students attending SST should plan to come to school beginning on August 27 to catch the bus to SST. Report times for that are 8:50 for the mid-session program and 11:50 for the PM session on the 27th and 28th.

Odds and Ends:

We have a group of students raising money for a trip to Ecuador. They will have a table set up at Kingston Days to do some fundraising. They will be selling bracelets made in Nicaragua from a project called Pulsera, where Nicaraguan teens make bracelets under fair trade regulations.  They will also sell Tres Leche (three milk) cake which is an Ecuadorian tradition, and possibly fried plantains. If you can’t make Kingston Days, the Ecuador-bound students will also be running a car wash on Friday the 11th at the Kingston Fire Department on the plains from 2-6pm.

Student artwork contest: This fall, I will be announcing a contest open to all students to design some banners that will be permanently installed around the outside of the campus on light poles that can display our Sanborn Pride to the entire community. More information will follow on this contest in the fall.

I have attached two tentative “events calendars” for the upcoming 2012-2013 school year. These may be adjusted slightly before the start of school, but for your planning purposes, I wanted you all to have these now so you could begin to save the appropriate dates in your calendar.

Meanwhile, I hope you all continue to have a nice and enjoyable summer season. Perhaps I will see some of you out and about in the community. I’m now signing off so I can go begin my (short) vacation week with my own family, who may have started to forget what I look like!

Take care all, and see you all soon!

-Brian Stack

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