Dear East Community:

Working collaboratively with staff, students, parents, and community partnerships, we are implementing effective strategies at East Elementary School that will create a safe and effective learning environment that promotes academic achievement and personal growth.

Central to our efforts is the emphasis on rigor, relevance, and relationships. Relevance and relationships are the vehicles that get us to the destination of rigor. Our students have interests, passions and talents to be tapped into learning. What happens in our classrooms has to be understood and linked to the student dreams and aspirations. It is my expectation that all teachers will engage students in rigorous and relevant classroom instruction.

We can only achieve relevance that is meaningful to our students if we know each student individually. This requires genuine relationships—both between teacher and student and among groups of teachers working together.

As a professional learning community, we will work together to build relationships that will motivate our students to learn at the highest level, and empower our parents and community to ensure continuous student academic growth and life skills development.

In our efforts to make East a model of excellence, we are working tirelessly to create a culture of change that moves all of us into a new zone of thinking, behavior, and core assumptions of what it takes to educate our children and make their dreams come true. It is our aspiration that we lay the foundation of 21st Century skills needed to be successful in today’s society.

I welcome the challenges and look forward to celebrating the successes we will attain in our quest to improve student outcomes at East Elementary School. We need to be diligent not only in providing for and measuring academic rigor, but character as well. At East we believe in educating the whole child.