By Stephen Chupaska
Senior Staff Writer
The first day of school. The words seem to land on the page with a thud.
“The summer went by much too fast,” Don Macrino, Waterford High School’s principal, said.
Although students came back on Tuesday, the town’s six schools were busy last week preparing the buildings for returning students.
Below is a quick tour around the district.
Note: The Waterford Times will feature stories about the new Quaker Hill School in our Sept. 11 edition.
Waterford High School
The 51-year-old building began its face-lift this summer as construction crews performed an asbestos removal at the school.
“It’s been buffed up and looking ship-shape,” Macrino said.
The high school will also be welcoming 12 new staffers this year.
“We’re very excited about them,” Macrino said. “We spent the spring and summer going after the best and the brightest.”
WHS will also see more students in the hallways this year, as the school population has inched over 1,000.
Macrino said that the school will be offering an 11th-grade American Studies program, an interdisciplinary class that will be taught by both an English teacher and a history instructor.
“By combining literature and history we’ll be able to give students a full, intensive study of a time in American history,” Macrino said.
Also, WHS has changed its grading software from MyGradebook to PowerSchool.
“We’re excited about that,” Macrino said. “It will allow us to better communicate with parents.”
Clark Lane Middle School
A new program at Clark Lane hopes to ensure that sixth grade is not a tangled web.
Instead, WEB, or Where Everybody Belongs, is a program where 48 eighth-graders served as mentors for the incoming students at Clark Lane.
“The eighth-graders did a tremendous job,” Principal Michael Lovetere said.
WEB is a collaboration between Clark Lane and Waterford Youth Services.
The incoming eighth-graders underwent training over the summer and oversaw a day-long orientation last week.
Lovetere said the school population will be down this year.
“The bubble that we had for three years has moved on to the high school,” he said.
Hence, Clark Lane will share teachers with the high school in core subjects such as English.
The building, which underwent an extensive renovation in the past two years, is finally complete.
“We had to fix the boiler and a few odds and ends,” Lovetere said. “It looks great.”
Oswegatchie
Elementary School
The first day of school was the last one for Oswegatchie in its current building.
Principal Nancy Macione said the school staff and students are looking forward to moving into the new facility set to open in August 2009.
“They are finishing the parking lot as we speak,” Macione said.
Macione said that most of the “underground work”—the water pipes and electricity—has already been completed.
But the old school isn’t out of
commission yet.
Macione said Oswegatchie will welcome 10 new staffers to the school this year.
The school population is down to 275.
“That’s less than in recent years,” Macione said.
Macione said that the school will be expanding its student newspaper started last spring and hopes to publish once a month.
Southwest
Elementary School
Southwest and Great Neck are schools, not Fortune 500 companies, but it looks like they have pulled off a merger that should pay dividends for students and teachers alike.
“We’ve doubled the school population,” Principal Patricia Fedor said.
This will be the penultimate year for Southwest, which will remain open until the new Great Neck School opens in August 2010.
Fedor said the town has added a portable classroom to its Daniels Avenue site to accommodate the new students.
Even though the students from the two schools will have many new classmates, administrators from Great Neck and Southwest started a pen pal program for the children. “They wrote back and forth last year,” Fedor said. “That way they won’t be strangers this year.”
Although the school has ballooned to 500 students, the district has hired more staff to keep class sizes small.
“We’re ready to go,” Fedor said.
The Friendship School
Principal Kathy Suprin said the first day of classes at The Friendship School is a little different than at the town’s other schools.
“Our kids are between 3 and 5 years old,” she said. “So, they’ll have name-tags with the names of their teachers available.”
For many of the students it is their first time away from home, so Suprin said they want to make the process go as smoothly as they can.
The Friendship School, a landmark urban-suburban magnet school that includes children from New London, is now in its fourth year of existence.
Suprin said the school reaches out to parents and had them attend a “practice session” to help kids get on and off the buses.
Also this year, Friendship School will expand its student gardens, so that the pre-k and kindergarten students will be able to plant flowers and vegetables.