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Back To School Night 2015

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hello Mustang family this is Doctor Dale with a short back to school night presentation I was asked by the PTSA to put this presentation to next because apparently there were some of you who were unable to get a seat in a small theater and see me in person prior to back to school night I apologize for that get my presentation by celebrating the smooth School opening we have had this fall and I want to thank all of our classified staff PTSA guidance for working so diligently to open our school for students they did an amazing job so many of our teachers were also here over the summer to get ready there is no doubt that MiraCosta requires work year-round a large part of the school opening is due to the fact that for the first time in 6 years there are no construction fences on the campus we have successfully completed the work funded by measure B be on time and on budget and the campus is looking using  I'd like to take a moment show you around campus and show off some of the more amazing improvements that we made of course the first is our math science building it's 31 classrooms in 10 lab spaces it houses about 40% of our kids during anyone. Of the day inside there are amazing class space this is what a typical lab looks like and it kind of gives you the vibe generally of what the classrooms look like also around campus we upgraded and 40 classroom so that almost 2/3 - 3/4 of our classroom spaces are now brand new they look much like this very light very open and provide for Next Generation learning  the next space is our new small theater seats about 300 and is a whipped with state-of-the-art Sound and Lighting we built a small theater to take some of the load off the large theater the large theater used to be booked about 3 150 days per year most of those events though were far less than capacity that's the small theater will be able to take some of the load and life of our iconic and historic large theater  adjacent to the small Theatre are for classroom space is dedicated to the Performing Arts they look much like this they provide state-of-the-art learning and rehearsal spaces for drama choir orchestra and are bands along with measure BB the excitement caused many of our Community Partners to get involved and renovate spaces we want a thing top 15 Alliance of Realtors of Manhattan Beach for putting together this great Lounge for our teachers as a gathering place where they can collaborate and eat  you may have also noticed on the corner of Peck and Artesia the new school sign provided by ASB or if you've been out to the pool deck you know the aquatics boosters have been hard at work putting new paint signage and Banners up that display the proud tradition of Mira Costa Aquatics in the front of the school you may have noticed the PTSA funded Graphics or in the center of the school are tile wall that was provided by the alumni he represented is a tile for every teacher that ever taught at Mira Costa high school and the front of the school you may have noticed our new school sign say to the yard Sign Plus our updated logo Graphics were provided through a partnership with Kinecta  and last but not least look at this the Mustang it's a new Central Gathering Place for students in the center of Campus students loved it and gather their everyday during snack and lunch this is also a place they can go and study on office hours Wednesdays office hours Wednesdays is a new bell schedule for Mira Costa here and you can see here what it looks like between 2nd 3rd. And 4th and 5th. There is time carved out in the middle of the day for students to have self-directed learning what that means is they can go to any one of these spaces they can go to the College and Career Center this lab the library The Learning Center the auditorium the small theater the cafeteria or the guidance counseling office they have the opportunity go and make up quizzes or tests work with their friends on a lab or be part of a study group they can go get extra help from the teacher they can go to the library or the stem lab and do research they can go to the auditorium where we have a completely silent Foods free space and they can quietly and get their homework done or a student can find a place on the campus and sit and read what we like all of your parents to do is encourage your student be sure and sign in at the beginning of office hours it's easy to do by clicking a QR code and entering a numerical code that tells us where that student is if they don't have a mobile device they can use a computer anywhere on the campus to check in  as a staff and as a community we've been waiting a long time to get this type of time carved out for kids so please parents work with us and encouraging your student to make the most of that time  also last year we're pleased to announce that we went through our wasc accreditation process successfully and received a six-year accreditation the Waze team will be back in 3 years for an update and we have our action plan all prepared and ready to go to show them that we're making great progress and Mira Costa high school last year all we were named a California gold Ribbon School For Excellence in the Arts congratulations to the students and the teachers in the Visual and Performing department for their outstanding work and their excellence also last year we went to a 5.0 grade weighting scale now AP classes will receive a 5.4 an a of 4.4 B and excetera we are currently working on a way to transcript that students will be able to access in the spring and submit to colleges for scholarship consideration  this past summer also in next ran a great summer school the registration and the running of the school was outstanding and many students benefited from taking summer school we also last year proved many new courses in English History Science and the Arts please consult the course description handbook online for turn information and I'll talk more about that in a minute this year our focus is on team Costa you may have heard this refer to it many times already but what it means is this we're all a team we're one team students teachers staff parents community together we can all make Costa something wonderful and great look at this photo this was impromptu and it really captured that's Friday at the beginning of the school year when nearly 1,300 kids were there Stampy shirts to campus it was a sea of green and gold and we please tell great that day it's another indication of our excellence in education this is the news that ranks all of the schools in the country they're over 30,000 high schools Nationwide and MiraCosta ranks in the top 1% and I just congratulate all the South Bay Schools for their top ranking this is an amazing place to live and to go to school and is further proof here's the snooze Paul McGann Mira Costa's in the top one percent as are all the South Bay Schools showing excellence in education and we want to congratulate all of them  this year we're having a program called Tuesday Twitter takeover where teachers will be tweet turn off from the classroom the cool things that are going on please follow us on Twitter at at mercosur High  there are other great places to get information thanks to our calendar standing committee working with the PTSA we have a new website it is very user-friendly and a great place to go to get all the formation you can ever possibly want also our PTSA puts out a weekly Mustang newsletter you can get to it by clicking a tab in the turn of our main page of the website and the good thing about the newsletter is it's an efficient way to get the news that you need to know right now this year also we want to work on making School easier on kids notice I didn't say we want to make school easier we want our school to be rigorous you want our curriculum to be rigorous we want the method that is delivered to be rigorous we've built a reputation on rigor in excellence but what we want do is make it easier on them one way we can do that is by standardizing the learning management system that teachers use in the upper left you see Learning Management systems that we use on campus it's possible for student with six teachers to be using all six of these so what we want to do is choose the best one choose the best one that allows teachers to communicate with kids we have teachers that are looking at all these and working together and they're going to recommend to me the one they want to use and at the end of this year will be announcing which learning management system will be using next fall in the lower right corner you see someone who obviously got a lot of homework we want to have better conversations about homework at Mira Costa high school and see if there's a way not to make school easy but to make easier on kids  we also haven't stopped with campus-wide improvements the bottom left is a photo of our new solar panel parking it will make us more energy efficient and provide us cost Savings in the upper left you see our new tables in the quad those what bees are solar-powered in at the base of the pole there plugins for students to charge their mobile devices  this is also the time of year when we point out our course handbook please log on to the website and look at the course description handbook to learn more about the classes we offer here and MiraCosta another good time to look at the course handbook is in March in the event that we add new courses you'll get all the information there that you need to know when you're making decisions for the following year this past week in the beach reporter the first round of Common Core testing results were published you can see our column there on the left and the top portion the 44% that's our proficiency rate in English language arts also are math scores were published and in the top left you can also see the 38% is our proficiency level and Mathematics are proficiency level in ela and well comprar bleed very good are still not up to our standards and will do a better job this year getting his prepared what I need to more and ask if you parents is to help us out with our participation rate this past year a third of our kids a third of our Juniors opted out stack testing we realize they opted out for a myriad of reasons but what we want to do is encourage you that if you have philosophical or pull will issues with the test Please contact your lawmakers in the meantime let's take the test we have to have a 95% proficiency rate or are school goes into program Improvement I am certain that one all of our kids take the test that are proficiency rates will dramatically increase remember this this came out 2011 the year we went over 900 in rap I this was a Craigslist that ranked the best schools in the nation for the real estate buck and we were sixth this is a real thing and show who's the connection that our community has with our schools it's important that we do well on standardized testing and I need all of your help to encourage your students to make the test and do well on the test will do our part on the campus our teachers will continue doing a great job that they're doing we will get out around and talk the kids and encourage them are Juniors they have a prime opportunity with the old STAR testing they had to do well and they had to depend on the sophomores freshman to do well too but now it that's fact it's just the Juniors only the 11th graders are taking the S back test so they take the S back test may we get our API in the fall we put our API on the transcript and they get to send a transcript to the school it says not only do I have great gray I have great grades at one of the top schools in the country and makes them more competitive and it makes their application stronger  so thank you for time it was really great seeing all of you have back to school night there was a very positive energy that night and I appreciated all of the things that you gave me about smooth opening and the upbeat teachers who were quote-unquote on point as one parent told me I passed that along all the teachers and let them know that they impressed all of you that night and we're off to a great start this year we love your kids and we want to see them do the very best that they possibly can we want them to be excellent go Mustangs

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