The 2011-2012 Hoover Yearbooks can now be ordered online. The cost is now $35 and will go up in the spring. The yearbook staff are working hard to make this yearbook a great one! Please contact Mr. Leonard Raznick, the yearbook teacher, with any questions.

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New Student Orientation Saturday, May 12!

Welcome to our new Hoover students! On Saturday May 12th, we will have a morning of activities and orientation for our incoming students and their families. Activities will include musical performances, butterfly garden tours, school tours and more.

Saturday, May 12 -- 9 a.m. to 12 p.m.

• 9-10 - Activities
• 10-11 a.m. 6th grade Orientation in the Auditorium and school tours.
• 11-12 - Activities

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Update from Principal Thomas Graven, April 15, 2012

Aloha to the Hoover Ohana: Some 600 years ago English poet Geoffrey Chaucer captured the essence of our experience at this time of year in his prologue to the Canterbury Tales:

"When April with his showers sweet with fruit
The drought of March has pierced unto the root
And bathed each vein with liquor that has power
To generate therein and sire the flower
…..Then do folk long to go on pilgrimage".

The drought of March has surely been banished from memory by the powerful storms that kept most of us indoors over the break, and I hope that everyone got some much needed rest, and stayed warm and dry besides. Metaphorically we have certainly had the April showers of our budget process to deal with although the rain was hardly “sweet with fruit” this year given the harsh realities we had to face. We are now moving down the road towards CST testing, 8th grade promotion, and the end of the school year. At the same time we are planting the seeds for next years harvest, getting the master schedule ready, welcoming our new 6th graders and working together to focus our work so that all students will be successful in our school.

Budget and BSC Updates: Much appreciation to our ever patient SSC who have worked hard to come up with a budget that preserves the traditional Hoover program and also makes significant investments in the future of our school. The bottom line is that our Librarian will be reduced from 1.0 to 0.6 and we will not have a half time parent liason as we did this year. The grant that funded our half time nurse and one of our .5 Learning Support Professionals has also expired and we were not to take on these positions with Site funds. On the positive side of the ledger we will be offering all students on ALEKS math license next year, (with the help of the PTA) and we will fund our instructional coach who will help keep the momentum of our instructional improvement efforts rolling forward.

PTA Electronic Marquee: We have finally been able to install the PTA funded Marquee sign on the outside of the S wing. We will now be able to broadcast calendar information and other news to the community in a very modern and stylish way. We are also now almost completely wireless with just a couple of dead spots in the building that need to be figured out. Thank you to our ever diligent technology guru, Mr. Kong for his dedication to this task.

Hunger Games: With the sponsorship of the PTA our 8th grade English teachers, Ms. Gadye, Mr. Gaver, Ms. Darlington and Ms. Cunningham have had every 8th grader read the first book of the Hunger Games trilogy. Teachers report that students have been very engaged in Hunger Games literary activities, and all 8th graders went to see the film at the West Portal Empire Theatre last week. Thanks to the teachers and the PTA for collaborating on this wonderful project, and we hope to offer it again next year.

Enrollment of the class of 2015: The last two weeks we have been enrolling our incoming 6th graders for next year. We have been very fortunate to have the help of a group of Parents led by parent volunteer coordinator Jeannie Lee to welcome the new members of our Ohana to our school. A special shout out to Susan Chow, Susie Kameta, Jeannie Lee, Carrie Banks, Christine Lao, Karen Wong, Sydney Nakamura, Penn Rustia, Colleen Keneley and many others who helped our new students and families feel welcome.

Hoover Equity Award: Congratulations to Ms. Garcia who received the Hoover Equity Award for the month of April. She received the award from the March Winner Mr. Miguel Barrera, (Azintli). Ms. Garcia has been a resolute leader of the Hoover Spanish Immersion program since its inception. The Hoover Equity Award is given by staff to staff who go above and beyond the call of duty to impact Social Justice in our school.

Milestone in Response To Intervention: Next week we will celebrate the first major milestone in our journey towards a schoolwide academic intervention and acceleration system. Staff have been working for weeks on a common vision statement that will be our lodestone in the year to come. We have come up with the following:

"Hoover Middle School is an academic community where we support one another to create and sustain a safe environment which fosters success, and prepares all students for high school and beyond."

Now the task for our teachers is to create essential learning standards for each subject, and we will be working on this from now until August. I will update you on the process as it unfolds.

Once again all the best for the holidays and come back safely to school on January 3rd.

Respectfully,
Thomas Graven

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Principal Graven's update on Honors program at Hoover

Download a PDF version

Context: Hoover is the most complex of the middle schools in that we have two immersion pathways in addition to other programs and student needs that make a larger middle school very complicated. We are at a point of critical mass where we can no longer offer the separate honors program in which only students with the highest scores in Math and Language Arts go into the 6th grade honors program. The way we have done this in the past excludes all immersion students , all students with learning differences, and all English Language Learners. We can no longer do this with fidelity due to logistical issues caused by this imbalance , and it is not right to do so because of the exclusionary aspects of the policy. Sixty percent of next years incoming 6th grade would be ineligible for entrance into our honors program under the old criteria.

We have been researching this matter and also looking at other middle schools to find solutions to our dilemma. This has been a semester long process that has been accelerated by our need to be transparent with families on our school tours so that they would understand clearly what the changes are. During a meeting with Leslie Trook, the Principal of A.P. Giannini informed our school site council how she moved her sixth grade to heterogeneous groupings rather than having an honors and non-honors track. She said that using the 4th grade CST individual results was not a viable measure to decide who would get an honors curriculum and that students at 10/ 11 years old are too young to be tracked into honors. Giannini has honors classes in 7th and 8th grade Math and Language Arts, and we are planning to do the same next year.

We plan to support our more advanced learners , (based on CST results) as follows:

1. Students will be divided into families with common teachers. This will empower teachers to work collaboratively using appropriate data to meet student needs in a sophisticated way. We will deepen our current efforts to use formative assessment data to determine what students need and how best to serve them.
2. Implement a rigorous semester long professional development program during spring 2012 that will give teachers time and support to identify and differentiate essential learnings in a simple and accountable way.
3. Department heads have agreed to be trained this February in a comprehensive Response to Intervention (RTI) approach so that we can create an intervention and acceleration support system to differentiate students who are substantially above or below the average range in the classroom.
4. We have four new computer labs purchased by the PTA which offer opportunities for differentiation.
5. In Math, the online curriculum ALEKS gives every student highly individualized instruction both for remediation and acceleration. There is data to show how effective ALEKS has been this year.

7th and 8th Grade: We will continue to offer the Hoover Honors program in Math and Language Arts. All immersion students , English Language Learners, and students with learning differences will have access to the program. For example, an English Language Learner who is advanced in Math can have access to the Honors math classes without losing the English language support classes that he or she may need. Similarly some of our students with learning differences who are gifted in language or math will be able to take those honors courses and still get the other supports that they need. Immersion students in seventh grade will also have access to honors classes. All of the other supports (including families of common teachers) will be empowered to make placement decisions to enhance heterogeneous groupings, high technology project based learning , ALEKS , and RTI pull out for acceleration and remediation.

All schools have to work especially hard in these times to cope with budget issues , adapt curriculum to the new common core standards and make sure that all students are challenged in their learning. Hoover is particularly fortunate to have an experienced and highly motivated staff , a supportive community and PTA , and of course a wonderful diverse group of students who are proud of their school and their learning. The SSC and I remain open to all feedback about this plan and any other issues that are of importance to you.

Sincerely,

Thomas H. Graven, Principal

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Hoover Families Helping Eachother

We are always in need of the following to assist our Hoover students:

• Backpacks (gently used or new).
• Grey sweats in all sizes : xsmall to xl
• underwear girls and boys: xsmall to xl

Please leave at the main office or bring to the counseling office.

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