February 10, 2025

Greetings, BHS Families & Community. I hope the first newsletter of February finds you well.

I was so pleased to sit alongside Ms. Jada Payea last week as our School Board approved her as one of BHS's permanent Assistant Principals. Her confirmation now officially ensures that the entire four-person administrative team will be returning next year. It's been quite some time since the high school has had complete stability in leadership from one year to the next, and it would be an understatement for me to say that I'm excited about the possibilities ahead. I speak for all four of us when I say that we love being at BHS, serving our students and staff.

Another highlight for me was having the opportunity to tour the interior of our new high school campus. The architects and contracting teams graciously walked me around for over an hour, checking out just about everything. At this point, over 150 workers are building on any given day, and it's amazing how much progress has been made since the final beam was raised in early October! The building looks even larger inside than it does from the outside, at least right now as rooms have been framed and await drywall in most spaces.  I hope you enjoy the photos below (from left to right: the main entry/cafeteria, auditorium, and gymnasium), and that they provide some sense of the beautiful, bright and modern learning space that awaits us.

Recently, I've fielded some queries from parents about changes to BHS's grading practices, so I wanted to take a moment this week to address any confusion. BHS has not changed our grading practices at this time, but the BHS faculty is engaging in learning about standards-based teaching & assessment as we look to develop greater alignment in terms of our grading practices and within curriculum across courses, both vertically and horizontally. This might not come as a surprise to any students or families who have raised questions about varying grading & reporting practices at the high school.  At the end of last year, the BHS Leadership Team decided to focus BHS's professional learning on standards-based alignment and inclusive practices, and purchased a staff set of the book Making Grades Matter: Standards-Based Grading in a Secondary PLC at Work (Townsley & Wear, 2019) to guide a shared learning experience. During Fall Semester of this year, our Instructional Leadership team (administration, our instructional coach, and each department's Lead Teacher) read this book together, considering its implications for our school. This Spring, we began a faculty-wide book study, facilitated within each department by Lead Teachers.

The goal for our reading is to establish shared understanding, as a staff, of key concepts of mastery-based learning, including how assessment and grading can be more meaningful and motivating to learners, while also providing more precise data to educators and support staff. The text also examines how the professional learning communities (PLCs) that we already have can collaborate to clarify our core learning standards in each content area, develop more standardized scoring rubrics, and create more consistency for students around homework, opportunities for reassessment, and our grading categories and weighting. Both students and educators stand to greatly benefit from greater alignment, for a variety of reasons. This learning year is designed to lay a foundation for working as a team to establish an aligned and guaranteed curriculum, particularly in the 9th and 10th grade core sequence, so that all students can access rigorous learning opportunities and clear expectations within our school. I will be sure to keep our school community posted as this work continues.

Thank you for your support of and investment in our school, our young people, and our learning community. 

With appreciation,

Sabrina Westdijk