The Buzz @ HMS

HMS Families,

Our first semester is about to wrap up. We have completed the Winter NWEA tests the past couple of weeks. We are nearing the 2nd half of the school marathon. There have been lots of changes this year with staff shortages and changing of positions. Our staffing positions are now filled except for a paraprofessional opening and a daily building substitute. We welcome Mrs. Paige Rhodes, 6th grade ELA (newly emergency certified teacher!), Mr. Craig Smith, 7/8th social studies teacher (retired & now rewired!), Miss Andria Thomas , 6th grade science (newly relocated to Harrison from Florida) and in January, we welcome Mrs. Beth McClain as a special education teacher.

Academically, we changed our grading policy this year to pilot grading for equity where students are given a baseline of a 50 instead of a 0 (mathematically sound practice). Students are graded on their completion/learning of the content standards. As you have noticed, we have added "Employability Skills" to our report cards to report how your child is doing with their school work ethic. This is where late or missing work would be counted for a low score. Equitable grading gives students hope. Research shows the benefits of equitable grading are improved grades, accurate grades based on content, grading was more accurate and students felt less stressed and anxious (NSBA, 2020). If you have any questions on this, please don't hesitate to reach out.

Behaviorally, we are seeing a decrease in incident reports and defiance but an increase tardies/truancy. Social media and cell phones continue to be an issue. In order to combat this, we are giving students immediate consequences of losing their passing time the following hour and our cell phone policy change will occur upon our return on January 3rd (Letter link here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G4AM8PeRNbm2v4-HCljTT-bLzLMnTLh9/view?usp=sharing.) We are also excited to announce that we have added Ms. Gould as a Student Success Mentor for extra support. We will kick off January with the character trait "optimism" in our Positivity Project curriculum (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rlXxb_SAXAdEvf01RdYTl8CVYHUNGnxPfzYGErVAZKY/edit?usp=sharing).

On behalf of HMS, we wish you a very happy holiday season, however you choose to celebrate. When we come back from break (Wednesday, January 3rd), we will be closing out the first semester, rolling on to the the last semester of the year. Thank you for partnering with us to help your child be a kind and productive human. We BELIEVE in the growth of EVERY student!

Respectfully,

Jennifer L. Thrush, Harrison Middle School Principal

jthrush@harrisonschools.com

989.539.7194

The student leadership team is off to a good start. They just organized and ran their first activity day with great success. Their top goals were to focus on helping their peers, especially with behavior in being kind and grades by incentive/intervention days and homework help. Congratulations to all: Elena Abbot, Brynley Carlstrom, Leah Carey, Kennedy Golia, Jaylee Kennedy, Miley McGill, Bella Young, Jazmin Berthiaume, Otto Churchill, Alexondra Hayes, Parker Reames, Daniel Seefeld, Gavin Jansen, Khloe Keel, Kaylee Larion, Olivia Tiltman and David Vaughn.

The week before winter break students and staff were in festive spirits with many activities such as: door decorating contest, pajama day, ugly sweater day. Along with the decorated doors, Christmas trees and gnomes adorned our halls. 7th graders won the hot cocoa bar for best behaved class.

Bravo to our beginning & intermediate bands on a great performance on Thursday, December 14th. It's so rewarding to hear the progression of learning from year one and year two/three students! Shout out to our band director Mr. Vinciguerra and to his student teacher, Miss Ransom.

On Fridays, we have re-implemented sustained silent reading time to help build students love for reading, stamina and reading skills. For a little change in scenery, last Friday and Tuesday before break, we read in the hallways. Successful readers have the capacity to be more successful in nearly every other academic endeavor (Irvin, 2010). Reading for pleasure is more important to cognitive development in adolescence than parents' level of education (Jacobson, 2017; Sullivan & Brown, 2019). Upon returning in January, we will be participating in READBOWL 2024 (for more info: here: https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/review?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:9f8e7850-7d8c-34e1-8d8f-face0b082c21). The competition runs from Jan. 8 - Feb. 11 (Super Bowl Sunday).

This year we've added a book vending machine that was designed by some of our students last year! Students have been admiring the books in it. We love giving out tokens for positive behavior/goal achievements!

Congratulations to Robert Brand, Leah Carey & Ryder Devor!

Congratulations to our 6th graders who won the Kindness challenge in November! They celebrated with an ice cream sundae social on Tuesday, December 19th!

A new Chess Club has begun at HMS! Many students are enjoying this new club. Thank you Mrs. Cook for taking the lead and starting this club for students and Ms. Mead for helping!

Students in Mrs. Byce's social studies classes have been studying the Ancient Mayan civilization. They made war/funeral/celebration masks. We will be ordering more for a lunch time activity!

Basketball season was just completed this past weekend for our ladies! Thank you to Mr. Schoensee (8th grade) and Mrs. Hernandez & Miss Kayla for coaching this season. The girls worked hard and not only improved in basketball skills but also how to be a good team member, skills needed off the court!

The staff of Harrison Community Schools, in the spirit of a growing and changing community, pledge to educate all students by teaching the District Curriculum and beyond, ensuring the development of responsible learners prepared to take an active role in a complex society.