Dear Parent / Guardian,
Welcome to the 2019-20 school year!
We are committed to our students’ success. This year, we’re making some improvements in the classroom in line with our vision to ensure all students have access to high quality curriculum and instruction. Specifically, we’re going to focus on:
- Spending more time working on projects. We know that projects drive student engagement and we also know that working on projects helps students understand how what they’re learning in school applies to the world around them.
- Fostering lifelong learning habits like curiosity, self-awareness and resilience by giving students more choice in how they learn. That means that in addition to what their teachers will teach them, they’ll have access to a range of learning resources online so that they can go ahead if they’re ready or spend more time studying if they need to
- Even stronger teacher-student relationships by launching a mentoring program. Every student is going to be assigned to a mentor/teacher at school. They’ll then meet with their mentor 1:1 on a weekly basis to set goals, make plans to reach those goals, and reflect on what they’ve learned.
In order to successfully implement these changes, we’ve joined an education program - Summit Learning - that is providing us with support throughout the year, including free professional development for our teachers. In fact, we spent part of the summer in training, digging into teaching practices that will help us support the needs of each and every student. We’re truly excited to implement these improvements.
Our Commitment to You
We truly value each and every one of you as partners in this work, and we want to make sure you understand:
- What’s going on in our classrooms
- How to engage with us and provide feedback
- The many ways you can support your student at home
We are going to launch a monthly newsletter that we will send directly to you. Please look out for the first edition coming in September to your email.
We also plan to make more frequent updates on our website (dhhs.wvsd.org) and social media accounts at
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DishmanHillsHighSchool/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dishmanhillshs/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/dishmanhillshs
Next Steps - We Need You
We want to understand the questions you have so we can address them early on in the year. Change is never easy and we think it’s critical that you’re with us in this journey. We will be hosting a Coffee and Conversation event in September (more information to come). Families are welcome to stop in and grab some coffee and talk with school leaders to get updates on the school and provide feedback. These monthly meetings will be informal and the times will rotate with a morning and evening option.
In the meantime, you’ll be able to see everything that your student is working on by logging into the new learning platform. Using unique log-in details that we will send you (this will be mailed home on September 9th) you’ll be able to see the projects your student is working on, feedback they receive from their teachers and goals they are setting with their mentor. We’re thrilled to be giving you more visibility into what your student is learning.
Thank you for taking the time to read this letter, and please let us know if you have any questions. We are excited for the school year to begin.
Sincerely,
Lauren House