Welcome Message from the Principal

Dear Families,

Welcome to the Middle School at Prospect Hill Academy.

Each morning, your child will be greeted by adults who are ready to welcome them, notice them, and help them begin the day well.

I want to start with what happens next, because what a day looks like for your child is the clearest thing I can tell you about who we are.

In their core classes, your child will read something difficult. They will make a claim about it, in their own words. They will defend that claim out loud to a classmate who may disagree. They will meet an argument against their thinking and have to decide whether it holds. Then they will write independently, using the text and the supports available to them, and prove what they believe from the evidence in front of them.

Not every day looks exactly like that. Some days are built for sustained writing, a seminar, or a piece drafted and revised over time. But your child will meet real intellectual demand every day they are here.

In math, the same principle takes a different shape. Your child will work on a genuine problem before being shown the method. They will try something, compare their approach to a classmate’s, and explain why it works. We use a curriculum built for that, and we protect the conversation at the end of the lesson, because that is often where the mathematics comes together. Being fast is not the same as understanding. We are after understanding.

Sixth, seventh, and eighth grade are the years when a young person begins to decide what kind of student they are. Not what they are capable of. That is already settled, and it is more than anyone tells them.

What gets decided in these three years is whether school is a place where their thinking matters, or a place where they perform for adults and wait to be told whether they were right. We are building for the first. We want students to leave us ready for high school, able to think independently, explain what they need, and advocate for themselves without waiting for an adult to do the thinking for them.

When your child struggles

Some of what I have described will be difficult for your child. Difficulty is not a sign that something has gone wrong. What matters is what we do next.

We will hold high expectations for every student, and we will provide the support needed to reach them. We are not going to hand your child an easier text and call it support. Lowering the work is how a student quietly falls two years behind while their grades look fine.

Instead, every student gets the real material, and we build the way in: teaching background knowledge and vocabulary before the hard text arrives, giving students a specific job inside the work rather than a watered-down version of it, and providing daily reading intervention for students who need it without pulling them out of the thinking.

For students with IEPs and our multilingual learners, this is the same commitment with more structure behind it. Your child’s accommodations are not a separate track. They are how your child gets to the same work as everyone else.

Four things you can hold us to

Your child will be known.

The adults who teach your child sit down together and discuss them by name. We look at student work, classroom performance, and assessment results so that our decisions are based on how students are actually doing, not on assumptions and not on a report card that arrives too late.

You will not be surprised in June.

We look at what students can do throughout the week, and we respond while there is still time to make a difference. If your child is persistently struggling, we will communicate with you early, clearly, and directly about their progress and what we are doing next. That is a promise about timing, and you should hold us to it.

Our school will be safe, and it will be joyful.

Middle school can be socially hard. We will not pretend otherwise. We are building clear, consistent expectations so that students know what to expect from adults, and clear ways for a young person to tell us when something is wrong. When students hurt each other, we address it directly, involve you, and do the work of repairing it rather than only punishing it.

Joy will not be left to chance. We will build it through advisory, shared celebrations, student leadership, and classrooms where students are expected to bring their full personalities and ideas.

When something goes wrong, we will tell you the truth about it.

Including when we are the ones who got it wrong.

On joy

This should be a place filled with joy. Our students are funny, expressive, and full of ideas, and none of that is something to be managed out of them on the way to achievement. A middle school that is quiet and joyless is not a serious school. We want laughter, and we want arguments about books.

I take your children seriously as thinkers. I will not spend a year asking less of them than they are capable of, and I will not leave them alone with work that is hard.

We welcome families into the life of our school throughout the year. If you want to see whether what I have described here is actually happening, reach out and we will find a way for you to see it. And if you cannot get here during the day, reach out to me. I would rather have the conversation than have you wondering.

Thank you for trusting us with your child.

Sincerely,

Calvin Johnson
Principal
Prospect Hill Academy Middle School