Midland Park Primary is teaching all students world-class skills and the life and career characteristics of the profile of the South Carolina Graduate by providing a safe, nurturing, and caring learning environment. By using the South Carolina College and Career Readiness standards, we teach critical thinking and problem solving through instructional lessons and foster communication to occur freely and reciprocally so information can be readily gained. By meeting our mission to develop a love of learning in a nurturing and respectful community in preparation for life-long achievement, we work to meet our school goals of increasing student achievement and enhancing literacy, providing a school climate and environment that is safe and supports the learning process, and by improving communication throughout the school community.
Our fundamental focus is to actively engage all students academically and socially/emotionally to build their foundation for facilitating the acquisition of developmentally appropriate skills and competencies. This is achieved through joint efforts between stakeholders within the school and in the greater community. Internally, faculty and staff engage in constant literacy, numeracy, and social emotional professional development to maintain high-level skills and learn new curriculum and strategies allowing for accurate monitoring of student progress to instruction. This provides data allowing for the targeted restructuring of on-going interventions, both remedial and accelerated. We accomplish this through continual and structured collaboration between classroom teachers, ESOL teachers, interventionists, and related arts teachers in professional learning communities, grade-level meetings, reading coach teacher meetings, and teacher administrator meetings. Teacher teams meet weekly to discuss and plan for standards and pacing, effective instructional practices, data gained from sources such as common assessments, FastBridge, myIGDIs, and established SMART goals and instructional calendars. The Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) team provides guidance and the framework for providing academic and social interventions based on the data informed outcomes of the teacher teams.
Additionally, we focus on deepening parental involvement, increasing school-home partnerships, and creating and solidifying business partnerships. This is accomplished through open houses, meet the teacher events, administration open office hours, home visits, and after school Title I functions like family nights, parent literacy events, and workshops. We work to market our events to reach all stakeholders, using Facebook, the school webpage, Dojo, email, and parent phone messaging. All school communication is disseminated to families based on their home-school language survey to be fully inclusive in informing all parents of school activities. Further, we engage families through surveys to determine the additional needs and interests of our parents in order to plan effective events.
By focusing on the needs of all school stakeholders, we are able to provide an effective program that meets the needs of students and parents. Our high expectations result in enhanced performances from our teachers and our students. We are excited about our accomplishments and look forward to continued success at Midland Park Primary where we SWIM as we Show respect, Work hard, Include others, and Move safely.
Ian James, Principal
Angelica Chavez, SIC Chairperson
