Welcome to the 2022-2023 school year! We are so excited to welcome our students back to Smith School. I am honored to serve as the Interim Principal this year here at Smith School alongside Dr. Ryan Esdale, our Interim Supervisor of K-8 Education & Student Welfare, and our outstanding Smith School staff. We are also excited to work closely with all of our families to ensure the success and well-being of all of our students.

Smith School is such a special place to learn and grow. Our team structure is the foundation for a strong academic learning community while providing a sense of belonging and connectedness. Together with our dedicated staff, we strive to build strong professional relationships with students to help them feel valued, accepted, and safe. We provide our students with a strong academic program that helps to prepare them for their future in an ever-changing world.

This time in a student's life is a period of tremendous growth and development. We encourage them to explore, develop their passions, and engage in the world around them. We encourage you to stay active in your child's educational journey, and we look forward to building a strong home-school partnership as we support them on their way.

These are exciting times to be at Smith, and we wish everyone in our school community success during the 2022-2023 school year!

As President Theodore Roosevelt once stated, “No one cares about how much you know until they know how much you care.” I have always been inspired by this quote as it has served as the premise for so many positive relationships and interactions that I have been fortunate enough to experience over the last 5 school years in Ramsey School District. As I shift from Ramsey High School to Smith Middle School, I will bring an enthusiastic, familial, and welcoming atmosphere to Smith Middle School. On a daily basis, your students will feel like valued members of our Learning Community. Significantly, the Association for Middle Level Education emphasizes the importance of student advocacy and believes that having teachers who are committed to young adolescents is an essential part of the middle school model. Focusing on kids-really attending to their development and their needs and nurturing relationships will be the foundation of our approach (Berckenmeyer, 2013). To that end, each of the first 3 days of school had 80 minutes of extended Homeroom periods to help students transition to the next grade level and set students up for a successful school year. Already I have witnessed countless positive interactions between our staff members and our students. The attention to detail, level of care, teachers going out of their way to help a student, and the professional relationships formed between the students and the teachers were heartwarming. The tone for this school year clearly has been set - we are all in this together.

You will hear us often refer to our motto for this year, ‘brick by brick,” as we work to rebuild our learning community and engineer a learning environment that is welcoming, rigorous, and enjoyable for all of our community members. Fundamentally, we are asking all of our community members to be safe, be responsible, be respectful, and be ready to learn. After the first few days, I am proud to say we are off to a terrific start.

Berckemeyer, J. (2013). Taming of the Team: How Great Teams Work Together. Incentive Publications.