Charlotte Central School updates announced

Lead Principal Stephanie Sumner said she and the Charlotte Central faculty and staff were excited to welcome back returning students and are looking forward to getting to know new students joining the CCS community.

Administrator update
As many are already aware, Barbara Anne Komons Montroll has accepted the Champlain Valley School District director of communications and public relations position. Stephanie Sumner has moved into the lead principal position. Sumner will remain the primary administrator for PreK-4 and Jen Roth will be the primary administrator for grades 5–8.

In preparation for an exciting year of learning, members of the CCS staff have had a busy summer. Teachers and teams have participated in professional development and worked on various initiatives including curriculum mapping and developing learning targets and scales aligned with Common Core State Standards and Next Generation Science Standards; and participating in coursework or workshops in various areas, including responsive classroom, middle school advisories and personalized learning process, math best practices, and blogging.

New staff and new roles
CCS is pleased to welcome the following new staff members:
Ann Foster, digital learning leader
Nihad Cekovic, K–2 physical education
Beth Birmingham, special educator
Ash Cotton, K–8 art teacher
Katie Duprat, school nurse
Marley Evans, 7/8 language arts teacher
Timothy Holcomb, behavior systems coordinator
Matt Kent, 3–8 physical education
Chris Giard, half-time facilities director (shared with SCS)
Melissa Skinner, athletic director

Facilities update
A tremendous amount of work has been done at CCS over the summer by Audrey Hornbeck, Bill Schmidt, James Waite and Justin Leavitt, with support from Kurt Proulx from CVU, John Gallagher (painting), George Gosselin (former CCS employee), and Stephanie Schmidt, long-time summer facilities employee. This includes new carpeting in the library, new tiles and roof repair in Dave Baird’s classroom, roof replacement on the library and cafeteria annex (including some internal work in the cafeteria annex to remedy a water leak), several room/office moves, professional cleaning of all carpets and cleaning and waxing of all tile floors.

New advisory model
This new advisory model is similar to what is happening with CVU’s advisories. Students will meet daily from 9:00 a.m. to 9:20 a.m. in groups smaller than their support rooms. This reduces the number of students in each advisory from over 20 to roughly 10 to 12, as there are eight advisors this year. The advisors will be the Core Omega (7th–8th grade) teachers Marley Evans, Matt Lutz, Nancy Matthews and Mary Tierney, along with band teacher Andy Smith, school counselor Kathy Batty, school librarian Heidi Huestis and world language teacher Sarah Pierson.

Advisories will encompass many things, including community-building opportunities, project-based learning experiences, and essential work on students’ personalized learning plans. For the past two years, CCS has had a team working on Middle Level Visioning—analyzing what middle school students are currently experiencing at CCS, want to experience, need to experience and could experience. Middle school and essential arts teachers, along with former lead principal Barbara Anne Komons-Montroll, PBL coach Mary Muroski and school counselor Kathy Batty engaged in both empirical and experiential research. This included engaging CCS students in school and district think-tank experiences to provide feedback and ideas and visiting other middle school programs in Vermont. However, key initiation of this work came from CCS teachers and their connections with students—there was recognition that teachers and middle-level students were all seeking stronger connections with one another. There is a desire to increase student engagement and create more personalized learning experiences.