Principal’s Message
Fall 2010/2011
The beginning of a new school year brings with it all of the excitement of school shopping and the anticipation of new challenges and opportunities. This year, we are looking forward to continuing our tradition of excellence at Hannan Trace Elementary. We have been informed that our school has been designated “Excellent with Distinction” by the Ohio Department of Education. This is the highest rating given by ODE. We set a goal at the beginning of the year to meet this rating and we did!! Needless to say, the staff and students at Hannan Trace are very pleased that their hard work last year paid off. We are extremely grateful for all of the community support received from parents, grandparents and community partners.
This year was very exciting for us! We achieved our “Excellent with Distinction” rating using the performance index and the value added scores. The performance index gives us points for the number of students that score proficient, accelerated and advanced. Many of our students scored accelerated and advanced this year which boosted our performance index to the “Excellent” level. This is the first time in our history that this has been accomplished and we are very proud of the effort our students put forth this past spring. The value added score is in an indication of the amount of growth each student received last year. For the third year in a row, our students made “more than a year’s worth of growth.” This score gave us the “with Distinction.” I want to sincerely thank the staff, volunteers and LEADS staff for working so hard to ensure that each of our students are learning more every day. We look forward to that hard work again this year!
This year is going to bring some new challenges to our school. We have grown accustomed to the LEADS program, which is our after school program, at Hannan Trace. This has been a program that has been funded by federal grants in the past, but this year there was a limited amount of money and our school did not receive this grant funding. Therefore, our school will not be able to offer the LEADS program in the same way it has in the past. We are working to find a way to provide after-school services to our students because we feel that this program has been extremely instrumental in our schools efforts to intervene with students. We are looking to our community to help us in this endeavor, and we may be calling on some groups and local organizations to help us provide some type of after school program for our students. We will be asking for volunteers from our community in the near future. We look forward to working with you!
We are continuing to work with the community through our CATS (Community Acting Together for Students) program. This program provides food for the Snack Pack program. We greatly appreciate all of the donations from the area churches toward this program. The churches that have been involved with this program are Mercerville Baptist, Providence Baptist, Mount Zion, King's Chapel, Crown City Baptist, Elizabeth Chapel and Victory Baptist. Last year we provided Snack Packs for 95 students and we hope to increase that number this year. We are looking to expand our volunteer mentor program. We need adults that are willing to meet once a week with students to be positive role models for them. You will be given a short training and have the opportunity to build a relationship with one of our students that is in need of positive attention.
At Hannan Trace we are "Striving for Excellence" every day. If you would like to become involved in our CATS program we welcome you. You can contact me at 256-6468 or gl_ebostic@seovec.org.