Greetings Parents and Stakeholders,
Black Water Middle School is a fine art infused middle school that serves a diverse learning community of 720 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 placing our focus on a mindset that service plus leadership equals success in the areas of academics, the arts, and athletics.
Black Water Middle School offers a strong academic program that offers students the chance 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, activities, and materials in our lesson plans. We implement cooperative learning structures to encourage 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. HCS also 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: 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 our students. For the 2018-2019 academic year, 68% of students met their growth targets in ELA, and 75% of students performed at the approaches, met, or exceeds level on SC Ready. We had 13 students qualify as a South Carolina Junior Scholars. We also had 2 students qualify as Duke Scholars. 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 strengthening our parent organization (PTO) so we can partner with parents in our community and do what is best for our students.
Our Beta Club continues to lead and represent our school on the national landscape. We had 6 entries that won state recognition and qualified for national convention. Six students, sponsors, and teachers traveled to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma where our students had 3 entries recognized in the Top 5 nationally in the categories of Science, Social Studies, 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.
Our fine arts department produces exceptional performances for our school 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 as well as the district gifted and talented art camp this summer. Band and Orchestra students participated in Solo and Ensemble with 17 superior ratings and 2 excellent ratings. Our choral department produced two outstanding productions this year and our Art Show, “Art Attack” featured well over 1,000 student works of art. Our fine arts department provides a platform for our artistically gifted students to be able to excel and be recognized.
The students at Black Water Middle are the focus of everything that we do. We put service to students above all else. Our school is a welcoming center focused on exceptional teaching and learning. Thank you for investing in our children and supporting our school, as we continue to strengthen the Black Water Experience by focusing on the mindset that service plus leadership equals success.
Respectfully,
Marcus Timmons, Principal Cheryl Catton, School Improvement Council Chair
