Dear Highland Families, 2020-2021

I would like to express my gratitude to all of you for your support and great patience as important decisions were made this summer in determining how schools would open this year. I empathized with you because I knew these critical decisions impacted how you would juggle your job responsibilities and your childcare needs too. I can only imagine your struggle in also deciding to return your child to a school setting under current circumstances. I want to reassure you that we will do our very best to keep your children safe and learning here. We have a strong Emergency Management Team at Highland who will continuously monitor the school to ensure that all safety protocols are in place, are effective, and are being followed. This team has met many times this summer to create safety protocols for students and staff, and to order and place signs around the school to be ready to open our doors.

As a school, we will continue to work to help our students cope socially and emotionally using programs such as Choose Love, Zones of Regulation, and Second Step. These are wonderful programs to which students will have access. Second Step is a new program that will be taught to students who may be struggling in these areas. The PTA also purchased a program about Gratitude that can be done remotely and in person. This will go along with our Choose Love curriculum that uses the four tenets of courage, gratitude, forgiveness, and compassion in action. Mrs. Towne will be heading up the Choose Love and Gratitude school-wide projects.

For our academic pursuits, we will continue to work on our new math program, Ready Math. We will also move forward with project based learning, guided reading, and our staff will begin the process of working towards a competency based learning approach where students master skills at their own pace. This will help tailor instruction to each child’s needs. We are a Title 1 school and have a reading specialist, math specialist, and a Title 1 reading teacher who will be able to take intervention groups in order to support our students in the lower grades. We are also committed to making our in-person and remote learning experiences to be of high quality. District professional development will center around this for staff.

Several staff members, including myself, have been accepted to a program called the New Hampshire Universal Design for Learning. This program is an instructional framework used to provide teachers with a multi-year, job-embedded school based professional development program committed to empowering all learners. It is just part of our commitment to continue to learn and grow as an instructional school team.

We have one new teacher this year, her name is Jenna Bancroft. She is one of our English Language teachers who just transferred from Webster School. We have also hired two new paraprofessionals. We would like to introduce Kristen Merkwan and Catherine Goeman who will also be joining the Highland community. They are all experienced and are very eager to meet their students this year.

As many of you may remember from last spring, our students worked with our Unified Arts Specialists in creating a time capsule. Students and staff did an outstanding job on this project! It was hoped that we would be able to celebrate with a school-wide picnic to dedicate the time capsule as part of Highland’s 50th year celebration. Unfortunately, we are still in a holding pattern, but we hope to celebrate in the spring. We are also getting a new playground structure, which may also be ready for the spring. This will give us two very exciting things to look forward to this year!

After being the principal at Highland for many years, I know that the Highland School Community is like no other community! I know we will continue to rise above all of the challenges we will face this year, and we will work together to make this a special school year for our kids! I would like to invite you all to another year full of wonder, growth, and learning at the Home of the Huskies

With much gratitude,

Mrs. Matthews