Britt Adams' Blog

Our boys’ and girls’ track teams won the Whitfield Co. Middle School Track Championships this past Saturday. Congratulations to them and to Coach Houston and Coach Shields.

I hope that most of you have seen the great things that are going on at VPMS through our local newspaper The Daily Citizen News. It is great when we can show off the positive impact of public education to everyone. The paper has had pictures, captions and articles highlighting our school over the past month and we appreciate their support.

Yesterday, education reporter Rachel Brown was at school preparing to do an article on our 6th grade Carpet Project. Dr. Howard Elder from J&J/Invision and Denise Wood from Mohawk Industries came and talked to our students about the environmental challenges that face the carpet industry and challenged our students to help them come up with ideas to make the carpet industry “greener”. Our 6th graders will, with the help of David Laufer and Lynn Whitworth of Brown Industries, create a magazine that will showcase their research and possible solutions. Students will also film documentaries that will also tackle these environmental concerns. I want to thank Mrs. Caldwell, Ms. Shaull, Mrs. Medlen, Mrs. Monday, and Mr. Hendley for their hard work and commitment to this project.

What a night!!  Yesterday’s celebration held at Valley Point Middle was a show of force for our community.  If you missed it, let me try and recap it for you.

We started everything off with a scrimmage between our own Green Waves and Eastbrook Middle.  I.V. Chandler Field was packed with fans creating an aura of excitement that was contagious.  The Valley Point and Eastbrook bands played together creating even more enthusiasm during the game.

After the scrimmage, we held our annual Open House.  Parents, students, and others came through our building to see the great work our students are producing while meeting the best staff in Georgia.  The Southeast High School Marching performed on our field for a standing room only crowd that got to hear one of the premier marching bands in our area.

After open house, everyone gathered out at the bonfire site where the Southeast High School football team and cheerleaders formed a spirit line for all of our community teams to be recognized.  Coach Nichols introduced the teams as they ran through the line to the cheers of all those in attendance.  The Southeast cheerleaders and Valley Point cheerleaders led the crowd in some cheers as the bonfire burned in the background.  Southeast Head Football Coach David Crane closed the event by speaking about the Raiders’ upcoming game against Model tonight at Raider Stadium at 7:30 and reminded everyone of the “Blackout” tonight.

I would like to thank the Valley Point Ruritan Club for cooking hot dogs and helping to provide free meals to everyone in attendance.  Also, a big thank you to the Southeast High School band, cheerleaders and football team for their support.  Thank you to the Valley Point faculty and staff for all they do for the children in our community and a special thanks to Coach Nichols and Coach Gray for their leadership.

Overall it was an amazing night that allowed us to come together as a community and I look forward to next year’s event.

Here are some pictures taken by the Daily Citizen News.  Thanks!!

http://pictures.daltoncitizen.com/

Thursday September 3rd…mark it on your calendar! Valley Point Middle will be hosting a community event in conjunction with our annual Open House that will be a blast. First, Valley Point and Eastbrook will play a scrimmage football game from 4:00 – 6:00. We will hold our Open House from 6:30 – 8:00. As the night progresses, we will have a bonfire out at the walking track where the band will play, our cheerleaders will perform and we will recognize all of our community teams. Please come join us as we welcome a new school year at Valley Point Middle.

I was fortunate to attend to first ever VPMS faculty alumni dinner Saturday. It is great to see so many former Valley Point teachers back in our school. As I talked to the teachers it was obvious that as their careers had taken them to different schools and different districts and states, Valley Point held a special place in their heart. “It’s just different here” was echoed continuously by all who attended. I really enjoyed the slide show that played during the night. Being a former student, all the pictures brought back so many great memories of my time at Valley Point. I want to thank Ron Kennedy, Marty Booth, and George and Ernestine Holland for inviting me to the dinner.

Oh…by the way. They are right you know…this place is different. And I am so glad it is.

The first day of school is something I still get excited about. I woke up at 4:00 in the morning and couldn’t go back to sleep. I was ready to get to Valley Point and get the new year started. And what a first day it was. Our wonderful faculty did a great job of working with our students and getting all of the first day paperwork out of the way so we can hit the ground running on Monday. The students were excited to get back as well as I went into their rooms and welcomed them back.

I want to thank all the parents that came to our Meet Your Teacher drop in on Thursday.  We had more participation this year than we have ever had.  We hope to continue to see you throughout the year at our parent nights or whenever you wish to visit.

Boy, I have got to get better at keeping this blog updated.  I will do a better job this year, I promise.  With that being said there are a lot of new and exciting changes coming up for us this year at Valley Point Middle.  First of all there are three new teachers that will be joining our team.  Taylor Andersen will teach 6th grade science, Rachel Holt will teach 8th grade science, Kim Kaska will be our new Spanish teacher and we welcome Donna Rogers as our new Assistant Principal.  Also, we are changing our schedule.  We are going to a five period day next year.  We feel that this new schedule will help us in giving some extra time to social studies and science while eliminating the isolation those teachers have felt in the past because there was only one of them in each grade.  We are also changing up our teaming for next year.  We are experimenting with three 2-person teams next year.  We hope that this arrangement will be help us to better connect with our students and their parents.  Each 2-person team will have a total of around 45-50 students.  We have a few other new things to tell you about.  Next year we will be putting our teachers as advisers program into place district wide.  MyMAP is the name of the program and we are very excited about implementing it next year.  Through MyMAP students will be assigned to an advisor who will stay with them throughout their career at VPMS and who will provide support in many areas including career exploration and in coaching their advisees through student led conferences.  Finally, we are excited about using MAP.  MAP stands for Measure of Academic Performance and will give our teachers, parents, and students a longitudinal way of measuring academic growth over a period of time.  WOW…I told you it was a lot.  We are very excited and even though the school year just ended, we are already looking forward to getting back and focusing on our core business which is designing meaningful, challenging, and engaging work for students.  Stay tuned…

Next week we begin CRCT testing. I want to remind everyone to get a good night’s rest and to eat a good breakfast to be mentally prepared for the tests. We will have the Reading test on Tuesday, April 1st, the Language Arts test on Wednesday, and the Math test on Thursday. We will continue the following week with testing on Tuesday April 8th with Science and finish up on Wednesday with Social Studies. All of the tests are important to us and we want to perform to the best of our abilities on each one.

I would like to thank our PTO and all of those who volunteered to cover our teachers’ classes and for buying Christmas lunch for them at The Cellar last week. We are blessed to have such a great support group for our teachers and students.

Recently, Southeast High School has been hosting a series of meetings with their feeder schools to build a sense of community among all stakeholders in our area.  We will meet again this week and I can tell you that these meetings have been very fruitful and I commend Alan Long at Southeast and his design team for hosting these meetings.  We will meet this week at the Brown Center at Dalton State College and I am very much looking forward to learning more from my colleagues.