January 11th, 2013

Dear Parents and Guardians:

I want to begin by wishing everyone a Happy New Year. I hope everyone had an enjoyable Holiday Season and I wish everyone the best in 2013. With second semester beginning this week I have several upcoming events and important pieces of information for you.

Next week we will hold our first semester recognition ceremonies. The ceremonies will be held on Wednesday, January 16th. Specific information for each grade level is listed on our website. We do hold a separate ceremony for each grade level. The awards include teacher recognition awards and our Honor Roll recognition for the first semester. The ceremonies take place in our gym and all parents and family members are welcome to attend.

This week we had all students sign up for second semester Knight Time classes. Students will begin with their new Knight Time classes on Monday. We will post the classes for the week in the hallways in the same places they were posted during first semester. We have worked very hard to get students into the specific enrichment classes that they have requested. We will repeat this process for the remaining part of the year in order to better meet student needs.

Our accountability committee is currently working on finalizing a community survey for parents. We conduct the survey every other year. Our goal is to have an electronic version of the survey available in early February. As soon as this information is available I will provide the survey link to you. Our goal is to have as many parents as possible participate in the survey. This is valuable information for our accountability committee and for me. We take this feedback very seriously and have made many changes to our programs in the past based on the information we receive.

Looking ahead we will hold our T-CAP testing in March. A specific testing schedule will be implemented for the testing. As soon as the testing schedule is finalized we will post that on our website. We will also begin registration for the 2013-2014 school year in early April.

Have a great weekend, if you have any questions or concerns feel free to contact me.

Respectfully,

James O’Tremba
Principal, Newton Middle School