Yokota MS: Principal's Corner

Greetings Yokota Middle School community,

We are thrilled to embark on another successful school year, together. Middle School is a unique place where we are preparing students for entry into middle school and exiting them into high school. We take this responsibility seriously and work hard to teach our students independence and resiliency! Our staff continuously engages in professional learning opportunities in order to provide best practices and a positive learning experience to our students. Our school mission is centered solely around the responsibility of preparing each student for an exceptional secondary education. Last year, our staff focused on allowing students the opportunity to lead discussions and use discourse as a strategy to enhance their understanding of the content. This year, we are going to continue to embed these same strategies, while adding additional 21st century skills to include learning digitally. We will ensure to embed opportunities for students to design, create and publish content through digital means. Our focus will be to use technology to enhance learning rather than as a direct substitute for traditional learning tasks.

We are excited to start planning our 22/23 school year extra-curricular opportunities. We love creating opportunities for students to engage in many sports that the high school offers. We plan to continue offering running club, basketball club, softball club and other sports to engage students in physical activities. There will be extracurricular club announcements coming soon.

Another unique aspect of our middle school is our wonderful counseling team to support students social/emotional needs. We have a counselor, a school psychologist, an ASACS counselor, a school resource office and an MFLAC counselor. Our nurse even serves on our counseling team! We look at every student’s individual needs and try to plan ways to help them to ensure their success. This includes students on IEPS, 504’s, and Gifted students. Please stop by our front office or check out our newsletter to learn more about the services we have at our school to better serve your family.

This year, we have added several elective courses for students that align to the CTE (Career Technical Education) pathways offered at the high school. This will give our students an opportunity to explore their interests and possibly identify a path they would like to take in high school. Additionally, we have added strategic literacy, math intervention, and enrichment classes to ensure we have a good strategic plan for tiered levels of support. Our Algebra I and II classes had the highest percentage of proficiency in all of Pacific East! Your child’s schedule was sent at the conclusion of last school year. If you have not received it, we have extras in the front office.

We look forward to a wonderful school year ahead! Please do not hesitate to reach out to our front office with any questions and/or concerns.

Sincerely,

Ms. Hilary N. Simmons

School Principal

Official Bio

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