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Though Quieter, the Brandon Hive Continues to Buzz through the Summer

Greetings Parents and Community Members! I hope your summer has been off to a great start! I enjoy seeing all of the awesome updates of your summer travel and adventures on Facebook and Twitter. If you don’t have any plans, or haven’t gone anywhere, I envy you as well! Just hanging out with the family, at the pool or with a good book may be all you need to rest, relax and recharge! While you have been enjoying summer, our admin team has been hard at work, planning for the year ahead, hiring our new bees to the hive, and attending valuable workshops to help build our capacity as school based leaders. To give you an idea, last week myself, our Assistant Principals, Program Administrator and Instructional Coach attended a 3 day APS leadership retreat where we outlined our goals and strategic priorities for the 19/20 school year. We looked at every piece of school wide data imaginable, down to parent, student and staff satisfaction surveys! We ended the retreat packing school supplies for our students to be given out at the APS Back to School Bash on 8/10/19 at the GWCC. It was so much fun! During the following week, Mr. Hutson, Mr. DeCarlo (our IB coordinator) and I all attended a 3 day IB (International Baccalaureate) workshop at North Atlanta HS to learn all about the Enhanced PYP (Primary Years Program). We learned how we can implement even more strategies for our students to make school more meaningful by implementing international mindedness and a global perspective in all that we do!

Aside from that, there’s LOTS of exciting stuff coming our way like:

A new Kindergarten play space – IB has revised its curriculum to include more time for our early learners to play and build meaningful relationships. While standards based instruction will always be at the forefront of what we do, we will continue to find ways for our KK students to learn through play!

Six new teachers joining the HIVE – Brandon is such a special and wonderful place to work and learn that we never have a problem with attracting the top talent around. These new teachers range from 1st and 3rd grade homeroom teachers to Special Ed. and Specials teachers. We’ve also hired a variety of support paras and staff to help our students in every way possible!

A new schedule – We received lots of feedback from our teachers, Leadership team, parents and GO Team around our schedule. I’m happy to say that we’ve created a schedule that nearly doubles the specials time (art/music/pe) your students will get next year with a separate time during the day for French! The importance of Specials, physical activity and multilingualism is so vital to me and I’m happy to say there is ample time for all of that!

A major renovation at our Main Campus – When our students, teachers and staff return in early August, the MC will have a new look and feel! New flooring will be throughout the building (no more carpets in the classrooms!) and teachers will be ready to move into their new rooms (Lots of room changes!). Don’t forget to stop by and see a special surprise located in our Main Campus lobby!

I am more excited than ever to start the new school year with processes, procedures, and expectations in place for the 19/20 school year. While 18/19 will be hard to top, I know that this year will bring expanded curricular options, more time for teacher planning, more multi-sensory learning opportunities, and more time for our students to engage and learn from our new ELA curriculum Wit and Wisdom! Since multi-sensory learning is so important for our children and knowing that one out of every five children are dyslexic, we’ll be implementing a screener to be given to all of our rising KK students. Our teachers will be very prepared as several have attended a 70 hour Orton Gillingham seminar during the summer and should be well versed in all things dyslexia, screeners, and intervention strategies. I also want to give a special welcome to our rising KK students and anyone one else that may be new to our amazing community school WELCOME TO THE HIVE! I look forward to seeing everyone at our Celebration of Learning located at both campuses on 8/8 from 9-11am. Stop by to meet your teachers, drop off your school supplies and learn more about your child’s new grade level.

Until then, have a great summer!

j

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