Happy Friday to all our WB students, staff, and families. Here is our latest WB Wildcat Weekly Newsletter. We hope that it will provide you with information as well as insight into what is going on in the West Bridgewater Public Schools. There are so many great things going on and it is our pleasure to share information with you.

Below is a link to view the NEW BUDGET PRESENTATION. We hope families will review this google slides presentation. If you would like to review the past presentation you can find that on our website (under School Committee) or it is linked in our last newsletter (March 11th). We appreciate the WB families' support of our budget. If you have any questions please feel free to reach out. It is always our goal to be as transparent and open as possible with all budget-related questions.

The FY23 Budget process continues for the School Department. The School Committee approved the FY23 Budget on March 7th. We presented the FY23 Budget to the Board of Selectmen on Wednesday, March 16th. It is our goal to prepare and present a fiscally responsible budget that meets the needs of our students and staff in the district. Our final presentation will be on March 21st at 7:00 pm - Finance Committee Meeting

In each of our schools we are talking about Wildcat PRIDE. The PRIDE acronym stands for

• Passion
• Respect
• Ingenuity
• Determination
• Empathy

This started at the MSHS as part of the NEASC Decennial Visit as we talked about integrating our core values throughout our school programs. We have also integrated our Academic Expectaions into our Wildcat PRIDE. It is great to see Wildcat PRIDE being talked about and part of the culture in each of our schools. Here are a couple of videos created by students at the MSHS in Mr. Crays TV Production class. Thank you to those who worked on the videos and those who volunteered!

Officer Pope is starting the Drug education part of Wildcat Wellness tomorrow with Mrs. Wenzel's classes in 6th grade at the Howard School. He is going to cover Opioids, street drugs, prescription drug abuse, etc. Then over the next few classes, they will discuss alcohol, marijuana, and vaping.

West Bridgewater turned 200 on February 16th! We will continue to post old pictures with each newsletter. If you have any good old photos that you would like to share please send them in! Pictured to the right The Westdale Station was physically in East Bridgewater but known as the East and West Bridgewater station. Westdale is located where the Center Tree marker stands identifying the geographical center of Old Bridgewater. The Center Tree appears on the right of the postcard. The picture is taken in 1914 from the West Bridgewater side of the double tracks.

Newly qualified Abigail Adams Scholarship recipients. Congratulations!

BEN ASTOR

JOELLE CAMERON

HARRISON HAJJ

RYAN LeBARON

WILLIAM MAIDER

MADISON MORASH

NATHAN RAZZA

SOPHIE ROY

MATTHEW SULLIVAN

Ms. Warnock’s Biology class doing a lab using bubbles as a model of a cell membrane. In the lab, they manipulated the bubbles and made channels through them to demonstrate how materials can pass either directly through the cell membrane or through a special passage.

• Howard students and MSHS students participated in a unified basketball game on the 16th against Pembroke in the MSHS Gymnasium. The game demonstrated collaboration and teamwork amongst players on both teams.
• The students in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) are engaged in multiple projects. Currently, grade 4 is engineering under a black light, grade 5 is performing a research project and creating a project, and grade 6 is working on a forensics unit on how to ID different pieces of evidence.
• Howard Student Council will be selling student sunglasses in the coming weeks. Be on the lookout!

ST Math Buddies:

Ms Messina and Ms Alves have partnered up as ST Math Buddies. Looks like both first and third graders enjoyed themselves!!

RLM Student Council spent part of their meeting on Wednesday cleaning up around the MacDonald school. We all appreciate your work!

Kindergarten students had fun during STEM class making Oobleck! A huge
thank you to Ms. Sullivan, elementary STEM teacher for taking on this
messy adventure!

Mrs. Gillis’ class had a special visit from the Bassett family and their baby chicks. Mrs. Bassett read a story to the class about how baby chicks hatch and everyone had a chance to interact with them!

Mrs. Jenning’s class was treated to a visit from Miss Dawn’s daughter, Isabelle Waldron, who performed an Irish step dance for the class. She even taught the class a few steps!

Thank you to Mrs. Hamblin who brought in a couple of her baby goats to see the PreK students. I also heard they made an appearance at the MSHS (they loved seeing them too!) These "kids" were only 10 days old! Thank you for visiting and don't be a stranger!

• It's been wonderful to see so many students participating in WB's Lunch and Breakfast program! With so many students taking advantage of universally free school meals, it is no longer evident which children qualify for meal benefits and which do not. #HealthySchoolMeals4All has really helped break down so many barriers related to the stigma of school meals.
• For those looking for an update as to whether free school meals will continue for every student after this school year and what's going on legislatively at the National and State level, please check out Project Bread

***Congrats to the Mayflower Athletic Conference(MAC) Basketball All-Stars who participated in the MAC Basketball Classic last night, March 16th, at Holbrook Middle/Senior HS! Way to go!! Sophia Floria Jenella Jacobs Amanda Jacques Chase Ryan Ryan Hulme Nathan Razza

***Thank you to Jim Pereira, Athletic Director at Diman Reg., for coming to WB on Tuesday, March 15th, to present information on helping parents and athletes navigate the maze of College Athletics! Hope to have him back again this fall!

On Wednesday, March 16th we played our first game of the year against Pembroke. Congrats to both teams for participating and thank you to all who helped and supported our teams! #InclusionMatters All of our student-athletes and coaches did an amazing job. They were led by Moriah Winchell, Brianna Miller, Shane Nolen, Zeid Itani, and Jordan McMahon who combined for 16 points to lead the way. Nearly everyone scored and those that did not score had many assists! Thank you to Coach Sylvester and Coach Maloney. We also want to thank our amazing fans students, staff, families, and our community for coming out to support the team as the gym was packed! The players certainly shined on the court and we are so proud of them all! Check out the team picture (right)

Please see the newest Wildcat Write Up Newsletter below for more information. These newsletters are full of great information for WB Families!

Learning About Autism from Adult Autistics - celebrate ASD Awareness by making space for adult autistics to speak to you about their experiences. Here at Inclusion Matters, we're listening to autistics tell their stories. Instead of talking about autism, we'll be listening to autistics. We hope you'll join us for this not-to-be-missed way to celebrate autism in April. The Zoom link to join is here (or, always, on our FB event page or our website's event page): https://bridgew.zoom.us/j/95905350613 Hope to see you on April 5th!

The next Coffee Hour with Mr. Bodwell will be on Friday, April 8th starting at 9:15 am. The other building principals also continue to have Coffee Hours. We feel this is a great way to get information out to families and allow for people to ask questions and keep an open line of communication. Superintendent Coffee Hour. Apologies that there seems to have been an issue with the link provided for the March Coffee Hour. We have had these meetings virtually as many parents have said it works best for their schedules. I am open to also meeting in person so if you have any feedback on this please let me know mbodwell@wbridgewater.com

Mark Bodwell, Superintendent of Schools

Email: mbodwell@wbridgewater.com
Website: www.wbridgewaterschools.org
Location: 2 Spring Street, West Bridgewater, MA, USA
Phone: (508) 894-1230
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wbridgewaterschools
Twitter: @WBPSwildcats