McHenry High School District 156

Dear Warrior Family,

We had a wonderful homecoming celebration last week. I hope you and your family were able to participate in all of the festivities. Please enjoy the homecoming photos we’ve included along with other important messages in this newsletter.

In partnership with our community first responders, MCHS is transitioning to the nationally recognized Standard Response Protocol (SPR) to manage the response to emergencies or situations that may occur inside and outside our school buildings. The Standard Response Protocol provides a common language that schools and first responders will use to ensure clear and concise communication during an emergency or situation in the building.

We have already trained with the local first responders, our teaching staff, and we are now in the process of training our students. Administrators have been training with local first responders for more than a year with the I Love You Guys Foundation and the University of Illinois Fire Service Institute. We have attached a Parent SRP Handout to this message for your information.

With the proactive leadership of our Board of Education, the district has made significant investments (exceeding $1 million) over the past few years to strengthen our security infrastructure and harden our primary entrances. This includes investments in state-of-the-art video camera systems, emergency notification software, continued emergency management training, and more security personnel at each building. We partner with the McHenry Police Department to provide School Resource Officers at both campuses and meet regularly with all community first responders during our Community Safety Meetings.

We always encourage any student or parent to notify the school immediately if there is a concern about a potential threat to our safety or security. As an added safety measure, we also have an anonymous online communication system for our community to report unsafe or suspicious incidents at school, or involving our students. Please visit our website to learn more about our MCHS Tip Line.

As always, we appreciate your support in maintaining a safe and secure learning environment for everyone.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ryan McTague

Superintendent of Schools

McHenry Community High School District 156

See the Warrior Weekly and The McHenry Messenger for more homecoming photos, articles and videos.

We are excited to announce that we will change our communication alert platform (phone, email, text) to SchoolMessenger as part of our transition to PowerSchool for our student information system.

Our students, families, and staff must opt in to the new platform to receive text (SMS) messages from the district and schools. Please make sure your mobile phone numbers are listed in PowerSchool. Then, to opt in, simply text “Y” or “Yes” to our code number 67587.

On Thursday, we celebrated the new lab space created exclusively for our new Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) program. Several students in our first CNA course spoke during a ribbon-cutting ceremony that included students, biomedical science teachers, District 156 board members, administrators and officials from Northwestern Medicine and The Courtyard at McHenry.

We are excited to offer this new program to our students interested in pursuing careers in health care. Read more about the CNA course as well as other biomedical science programs on the district's website.