Dear Parents/Guardians and Stakeholders,
Black Water Middle School is a fine-arts infused middle school that serves a diverse learning community of 685 students in grades 6-8. Our school is helping all students develop the world class skills and life and career characteristics of the Profile of the South Carolina Graduate by” achieving greatness” in academics, the arts, athletics, and service to others.
Black Water Middle School offers a strong academic program that offers students the opportunity to earn high school credit in the following courses: Algebra I, Geometry, and English I. Our staff development plan has focused on increasing student engagement, collaborative planning, and working together to align standards and activities and materials in our lesson plans. We implement cooperative learning structures to promote and develop self-direction, work ethic, and interpersonal skills in classroom learning. Horry County Schools believes in developing world class skills and world class knowledge and has a 1:1 personalized digital learning platform in a blended learning model. Our teachers and students engage with technology tools that include, but are not limited to: Achieve 3000, No Red Ink, Aleks, Socrative, Google Classroom, Achievement Series Assessment Program, Gizmo, Discovery Education, Edgenuity and other google applications to enhance instruction. We have worked with students to build their own digital portfolios. We continue to drive instructional decisions using data that allows us to provide the very best learning environment for all of our students. For the 2017-2018 academic year, 58% of students met their growth targets in ELA, and 63% of students met their growth targets in mathematics as measured by MAP (Measures of Academic Progress). We had 17 students qualify as a South Carolina Junior Scholar, which was a significant increase from previous years. Our school improvement council is active and meets monthly to discuss areas of improvement and members are engaged in our school, to support our fine arts programs, athletics, Beta club, robotics, math counts and school-wide events. We are currently redefining and designing a new parent organization called C.L.A.W.S-Community Leaders in Action With Students.
Our Beta Club continues to lead and represent our school on the national landscape. We had 9 entries that won state recognition and qualified for national convention. Nineteen students, sponsors, and teachers traveled to Savannah, Georgia where our students had 5 Top 10 Entries, and 3 entries recognized in the Top 5 nationally in the categories of Science, Digitally Enhanced Photography, and Meeting of the Minds Team. We are very proud that Black Water Middle School has a mission of service to others and a very active Beta organization that is a National Beta School of Merit. Two students also advanced to the national level for National History Day. Our scholars perform and represent the characteristics and skills of success beyond the classroom.
Our fine arts department produces exceptional performances for our school and community. We offer the only middle school dance program in our county with 6 showcase productions throughout the year, and will host the second annual district gifted and talented dance camp. Band and Orchestra students participated in Solo and Ensemble with 22 superior ratings and 2 excellent ratings. Our choral department produced the outstanding production of “Seussical, Jr.” and our Art Show, :Art Attack” featured over 1,700 student works of art.
The students at Black Water Middle are the purpose of our work as we “Achieve Greatness”! Our school is a welcoming center focused on exceptional teaching and learning. Thank you for investing in our children and supporting our school, the best is yet to come.
Respectfully,
Candace Lane, Principal Tracy Brown, School Improvement Council Chair
