8388_LGP_MechanicFalls_2022AnnualReport_Web

To the Citizens of Mechanic Falls,

January 1, 2023

As we turn the calendar to 2023, it is always great to spend time reflecting upon the almost five years that I have spent as Principal of Elm Street School. Elm Street School and the Mechanic Falls Community continue to impress me with their commitment to education, their support and love of our students, and the resilience we continue to show as we recover from the implications of the pandemic. When the leadership team came together this summer to reflect upon last year and to begin setting goals for the upcoming school year, we knew we wanted to continue to focus on improving the math and literacy skills of our students, to support the recovery of regular school attendance back to our pre-pandemic averages, and to continue to support the social-emotional learning of our students and staff. Our theme for this year has been, "Community, Connecting, and Thriving in 22-23". We have prioritized efforts around continuing to build community within our school, helping rebuild staff connections, and helping our students and staff continue to thrive this year, both in and out of the classroom. In the past year, we have had plenty to celebrate with our Wildcat Family. Our students have been back to in-person learning, five days a week since September of last year. We continue to see growth academically, socially, and behaviorally as students ’ routines and expectations have returned to where they were prior to the pandemic. We have been working with our literacy coach to continue to implement our newly adopted reading, writing and phonics programs with our students in grades K-6. Our title team, led by Erin Grindle and Jacque Russo, transitioned from a targeted title program to a whole school title program last year. The transition to the whole-school model has allowed us to increase our intervention team and it allows us to serve all of our students in grades K-6 with targeted intervention programs in both reading and math. We have been able to use our title funding to purchase targeted reading and math programs to provide small groups of students with critical time to build and develop their reading and math skills. In addition to our focus on improving our reading and math skills within the classrooms and through our intervention programs, we utilized our ESSER funding to provide students with their own technology and an online learning platform called i-ready. The program allows us to assess our students throughout the year to monitor growth in reading and math, and it provides students with instruction that targets building grade level skills and helps to fill in gaps in their learning. We also celebrated our Androscoggin County Teacher of the Year, Elm Street School's second grade teacher, Jessica Harvey and her year of service with the Teacher of the Year Program. This year, our ESS team of educators consists of 16 classroom teachers, 1 SEL teacher, 3 special education teachers, 2 Title intervention teachers, 3 specialist teachers (art, music/movement, physical education), 1 part-time school counselor that we share with Minot Consolidated School, 1 special education social worker, and 1 speech/language clinician. In addition to our teaching staff, we have 13 support staff who serve either in special education, the library, or on our intervention team. We also have 1 school nurse, a Dean of Students, and two front office staff. With our ESSER funds, RSU 16 also added a Social-Emotional Dean of Students and a Behavioral Specialist. These positions are shared among the three elementary schools and have been created to continue to support the behavioral and social-emotional needs of our students. In addition to working directly with students, these positions help provide professional development, as well as additional tools and resources for our elementary staff. We continue to contract with two outside service providers, Sweetser and Spurwink to provide additional counseling services for our students within the school. This year we have been without a school-counselor due to the lack of availability of qualified candidates when the vacancy was posted, however, we are hopeful that we will be able to fill the position next year. We continue to have open positions as educational technicians within our school, and we are always looking for substitute teachers or even volunteers! If you have been thinking about working within our schools or just getting involved with our schools, now is a great time to join our team! If you are interested in learning more about how you can help in our school, feel free to reach out to me via phone or email and we can explore a variety of ways to help get you involved in the great work being done within our schools!

Best Wishes,

Jessica Madsen Principal, Elm Street School E-mail: jmadsen@rsu16.org. Phone: (207) 345-3382

73