Happy Spring parents of our Mace’s Lane Middle School students! We hope your children are enjoying their stay with us during the 2009 – 2010 school year. We want their experience here to be academically stimulating, cognitively enriching, and socially refining.

Our staff is working hard to provide the most challenging and enlightening curriculum possible for our students, your children. In so doing, we are keeping in mind the content decisions we are making, the delivery styles we are using, and the strategies we use to assess how well our students, your children, are grasping it.

How our students, your children, behave is also of paramount importance to us. We have initiated structure into our school culture, provided opportunities for our students, your children, to consider the decisions they are making, and have embedded both sanctions and incentives to reinforce their choices.

Attendance is also very important to us. Our students, your children, benefit from developing a pattern of strong attendance and punctuality with which they may complete their stay with us, thrive during their four years at our high school, and advantage themselves with in post-graduation activity.

You have likely witnessed a number of changes here at our middle school this year. Our students, your children, have probably come home some days and talked about soothing music floating through our halls in the morning, a hammered dulcimer greeting them as they arrived one morning in February, or sightings of our new mascot (Thank you PTO), Mace the Tiger, from time to time in our school and at school functions.

There is more. Our students (presently on a limited basis) have access to four different world languages through the Rosetta Stone software. They are Arabic, Chinese, German (Thanks to the Narr family, who have two daughters at our school), and Japanese. Our students will find this development of their background both entertaining and helpful as they move through their lives.

We now have a dynamic television station, WMLMS, with which our students, your children, provide weekly broadcasts about news important to our school and our students. It has been wonderful to watch them grow and mature both in confidence and in technical ways relating to broadcasting.

We hope you have witnessed major changes in the way our school looks, beginning with the foyer as you enter our building. This “newness” has weaved its way through our main office and will continue to find its way through our halls and classrooms. Certainly, you’ve noticed that our mascot is the Tiger and that we use the traits of the Tiger to have our students, your children, Tiger Up as they approach their daily responsibilities.

We are planning to add an Honors Curriculum to our schedule next fall. The language arts component will feature readings from the Great Books, will have advanced reading and writing levels, and will continue to prepare our students for the MSAs which come each March. The mathematics component will begin with pre-Algebra, move to Algebra I, and finish with Geometry for our students. We are hopeful that we will have free preview classes (budget pending), which follow our County summer school schedule, to support our students, your children, taking these mathematics classes.

What an exciting time to be a Tiger!

None of this would have been possible absent the creativity, support, and commitment of our staff and our community, for which we are mightily thankful.

We welcome you to come visit; take a walk through our school; attend classes with your child; talk with us about ideas you may have to continuing to make our Mace’s Lane Middle School the very best it can be.

Have a Tiger kind of day!

James H. VanSciver, Ed.D.
Interim Principal