Executive Summary

Edgewood Middle School is a 7^th to 8^th grade school located in Warsaw, Indiana. We serve approximately 590 students from the northwest area of our community. Our school community is diverse with 75.9% white, 16.8% Hispanic, 4.2% multi-racial, 1.7% African American, and 1.4% Asian. The free/reduced population is 39%, special education is 15.4%, and English Language Learners is 4.4%. Historically, EMS has significantly outperformed the state averages in math, language arts, and biology for the ILEARN tests. This is punctuated by Edgewood's receiving USA News and World Report's award for being one of the top 10% middle schools in Indiana. The principal, JoElla Hauselman is in her 21^st year now as the principal of the building. The staff includes 45 classroom teachers and 12 paraprofessionals for interventions, literacy support, one-to-one special needs, and coverage duties. At Edgewood, our focus is to provide students the best educational experience while caring for their overall well-being. EMS implements four core pillars to ensure student success. Each pillar targets a different aspect of student development.

Our first pillar focuses on teacher instruction. Maximizing student learning is an area of great importance to staff at Edgewood Middle School. Leaders within this pillar provide a framework for staff to utilize technology tools to instruct and assess student learning, as well as provide teachers with data analysis of student learning. By offering teachers this feedback on instruction, pillar leadership can assist other teachers in driving critical components of STEM curriculum.

Student wellness comprises Edgewood Middle School's second pillar. The wellness of the student body is a key to individual achievement in the classroom. Our staff uses practices set by the district to help students better understand how to interact with others and self evaluate. Programs such as Thoughtful Thursdays and Brain Breaks are just two of the practices EMS uses to help make students more invested in teacher instruction. Edgewood also pairs staff with a group of students to mentor for the two years while in attendance. These practices help students regulate the stresses involved in these formative years.

The pillar of philanthropy constitutes Edgewood's third pillar. Having students actively involved in caring for others provides many students unique opportunities to grow. Demonstrating compassion for others and giving back to the community in which you live is vital to how students will assign value to the educational process. As a staff, we strive to demonstrate the importance of community involvement by dedicating instructional projects both in and out of the classroom. Allowing students the chance to identify and offer solutions to the real life situations, offers them the chance to voice how society needs to evolve.

The pillar of STEM is our fourth pillar. In the ever changing world of innovation, the skills formed from STEM instruction become more important. The skillful use of technologies, along with the abilities to solve real situations are just some of the skills intentionally incorporated into daily instruction. At Edgewood, students gain these 21st century skills in all areas of curricular instruction. From collaborative groups in their language arts classes, to the intense use of computer programmed lasers, students can always be immersed in the needed preparation for future employment.