Principal's Message

Thank you for visiting our elementary school web site! We appreciate you taking the time to view our web page and hope you find it informative. If you need additional information please feel free to contact the elementary school office.

This is truly an exciting time for our community, district, staff and students. Our new K-12 building is under construction and scheduled to open for the 2014-2015 school year. These updated facilities will be extremely beneficial to the education of our students and the ability to service our community.

At Green Local Schools we have so much to celebrate. The district recently received the designation of “Excellent” on the 2011-2012 school district report card. Both elementary buildings were also rated as “Excellent” meeting 5 out of 5 indicators. In addition both buildings met AYP which indicates that our students are making adequate progress to meet state requirements. Our performance index is based on the number of students that are proficient and above and was 102.1 at Marshallville Elementary and 99.4 at Smithville Elementary. We are very proud of these results and appreciate the hard work of all those who contribute to the education process.

Our staff is very proud of these accomplishments but realize we still need to continue to move forward. This school year teachers will continue to meet on a monthly basis to complete their curriculum maps. These maps will be used to develop teaching units, common as well as formative assessments. Using information from these assessments will further allow our teachers to differentiate their instruction to meet student needs.

Each elementary building will be providing a systematic Response to Intervention (RTI). An RTI team was selected and received extensive training last school year. This year they will continue to be an important part of the direction we move as a building, the professional development teachers receive and the intervention process to support all learners. A list of “non-negotiables” were developed by the RTI teach which will focus on best practice instruction. All teachers will be using these guidelines to provide a consistent educational program for all students.

We have also implemented consistent behavior expectations that will be used at both elementary buildings. These expectations are:

Teachers will continue to use the color system to track student behavior; however the steps have been changed to the chart below. All students will begin on green which indicates they are ready to learn. They have the opportunity to move up to orange or purple by displaying outstanding behaviors and/or extra effort. Think About it is a warning to the student that they need to change their behavior. Teacher’s Choice would be if the behavior did not change after the warning. This gives the teacher flexibility in how they would like to address the situation. Red or principal will be a visit to my office. This would include a conversation on how we make better choices and a phone call home. Students have the option to move up and down on the chart. This means that is a student makes a bad choice but corrects their behavior they have the opportunity to return to green or better. This new system will allow teachers to recognize student showing extra effort or excellent behavior.

We will also be using the School Wide Positive behavior program. Students meet with the principal and guidance counselor on a monthly basis and review what good behavior looks like. Students caught being good receive a ticket and the student with the most tickets in their classroom each month is recognized at Student of the Month.

I am excited to be the principal at both elementary buildings this year and look forward to working together to make this an excellent year. Please let me know if I can provide you with additional support in any way. I look forward to working with you to do what is best for our kids!