Dear MHS Parents/Guardians,
I hope you and your family have had a restful summer. It has been an absolutely pleasure working with your students last year and we are looking forward to start the new school year strong. Thank you for allowing us to take an active role in your students’ lives.
As we are approaching a new school year, I am very excited to announce some new additions joining our dedicated staff. Elif Ritchie will be our new Resource Specialist. She has been working as a Resource Specialist at Piedmont High School and we were thrilled when she applied for the MHS position. Furthermore, we will be seeing Marcela Privat-Gilman a lot more at MHS, she will be teaching three levels of Spanish. Lastly, Elise Marks, one of our English teachers, has generously taken on the role as our fearless Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) Accreditation Coordinator. As some of you might know, Millennium High School was accredited 6 years ago and we are due for our accreditation visit March 2013. To prepare for our WASC visit, we have to conduct a self-study among member of our school community (MHS staff, students, and parents). It will be an industrious process, but it will help us shape MHS to best fit our students’ current needs. I am confident that as a collaborative team, we will come up with effective critical academic needs and action items for our school. During this period, we will need parent volunteers to participate in the accreditation process. Our MHS President and Vice-President, Ellen Mann and Stuart Zangwill, respectively, will provide more information about volunteer opportunities in the near future. Parents are kindly asked to volunteer a minimum of 5 hours during the entire school year. Your support is highly appreciated.
Our school’s theme next year is mindfulness. Mindfulness and social-emotional programs in schools improves students’:
- Concentration, learning retention and standardized test scores
- Inner resiliency and self-esteem
- Attitudes about others, empathy, social interactions and classroom behavior
- Decreases their stress and conduct problems
Every student will be placed in one of four groups in the beginning of the school year. Each individual group will go through a set number of mindfulness workshops led by an Inward Bound facilitator. We will provide students with information on when their workshop sessions take place during our school-wide retreat on August 27.
I look forward to seeing all of you during walk-through registration and work collaboratively throughout the school year.
Warm Regards,
Ting Hsu Engelman, Principal