Mission:
The Van Wyck Junior High School faculty, staff, and administration, in partnership with the parents, students, and community, will provide a safe and disciplined learning environment that promotes the academic, intellectual, personal, and social development of our children.

1. Provide a learning environment that is comprehensive, challenging, purposeful, integrated, and standards based
2. Inform and involve parents of middle-level students in their children's education by helping them understand the learning standards their children must meet, the instructional program, their children's progress, and how to help their children at home with schoolwork, school decisions, and successful development through adolescence
3. Integrate technology in the instructional program so that it supports student learning
4. Have teacher teams sharing responsibility for the education and personal development of a common group of students. Have communal planning time for those teachers and teaching teams sharing responsibility for a common group of students
5. Provide opportunities for students to participate in communal service activities
6. Create a school culture of mutual support and collective responsibility for the educational and personal development of every student

Purpose:
To strengthen teacher, student, and administrative capacity across all disciplines and grade levels to improve school-wide performance on state tests.

Goal:
To create opportunities for teachers across all grade levels and disciplines to dialogue wise practices and implement building-level initiatives designed to improve state test results based on student performance data.

A. Professional Collaboration
Teachers and administrators will share knowledge, skills, and competencies across disciplines, teams, and departments in the following ways:

• Interdisciplinary Projects-One interdisciplinary unit per marking period
• Teachers and student use of test prep books and materials
• Use of charts and graphs
• Incorporate listening skills into lessons
• Use of common set of vocabulary words derived from previous state tests
• Assign class and homework assignments that model state tests
• Extensive use of graphic organizers
• Use of rubrics for grading across grades and subjects
• Critical reading, writing, and thinking across grade levels and subject areas
• Lesson plan formation by incorporating state standards and performance indicators
• Use of readability formulae that model difficulty levels of state test in the development of teacher-made materials
• Use of TerraNova test results in the identification of potential level 2 students and low level 3 students for support

Use of Previous ELA and Math 8 exams for practice

 

• Theme-Based Learning - Full implementation of theme-based learning at each grade level 6, 7, and 8. These themes are:

• Project Achieve-After school academic support program in math, ELA, social studies, and foreign language
• Skill of the Week-Program to begin in October 2002, by "front-loading" basic skills through January in preparation for the ELA exam this year. The other basic skills to follow. 
• Pilot Multi-Sensory Reading as Support in an Inclusion Setting 
• Investigate the operation and effective practices of schools with successful house plans through visitations and other available resources 
• Continue implementation of the "Essential Elements of Middle Level Education" as it pertains to Van Wyck Junior High School 

 
SKILL DEVELOPMENT

• For a complete report card ... go to http://www.emsc.nysed.gov/3-8/