Bonding meeting was a success! :-)

Last night, the Freshman House had a bonding meeting at a local restaurant to discuss the past school year and goals for next school year.

I have to say that almost every single teacher in the Freshman House came to the meeting. The fact that we attended this meeting during our time off is a huge deal.

Our house master (aka Asst. Principal) had some positive data to share with us. Our failure rate went down by 16% this year! Every single year the Freshman House has been in existence at my school, we have seen improvement. Some of the biggest goals of the House is to help with the transition from Middle to High School and the expectations of being in High School AND to decrease the drop out rate at my school. There has been a slight decrease but not as much as we would like to see. I guess we need to be patient and see what will happen . . . after sophomore year is when we see the drop out rate increase (in most classes).

One of the goals for next school year we discussed was to create a more community feel in the Freshman House. We also scheduled two more bonding meetings this summer for the teachers.

Oh, I'm on a new team and I LOVE IT! The English and Math teacher are great friends of mine (the Math teacher and I are co-advisers for the Class of 2010 so we are already used to working with each and get along great). We do have a new Science teacher - she's fresh out of college so she will probably need some support. She seems nice and willing to work as a team. Compared to this past school year, I'm looking forward to moving on and working with a group of people that are in this for the kids and the school community. :-)

And, the SPED teacher that I worked with for the past two years is no longer in the Freshman House. He's still working with the Social Studies teachers but from what I understand the administrators are working very hard to not schedule him with me. Yeah!!!! :-)