February 24, 2023
Dear Beagle Middle School Parents,
March 8th, HS Play, and LCC Trip: We are excited to announce that on Wednesday, March 8th during the morning hours before lunches, both our 7th and 8th grade students will be going on an outing. Specifically, our 7th grade students will be walking over to the high school with their CNC class to watch our high schoolers perform A Walk in the Woods; 8th graders will be heading to Lansing Community College West Campus with their CNC class via GLPS transportation to visit the Career Prepartion Center, which is a vocational opportunity for many students during 11th and 12th grade. These will be great opportunities for both our 7th and 8th grade students. Students will have lunch when they return, and they will attend all classes on a modified schedule in the PM. More detailed information will be provided in next week's newsletter.
Mandatory Lockdown Drill Rescheduled: Every August, school administrators must submit fire, lockdown, and tornado drill dates to the county and local law enforcement. We actually had a lockdown drill scheduled for this past Tuesday; however, we canceled that drill–our last one for the year–in light of the recent tragedy at Michigan State University. State law, Acts 137 and 337, requires school officials to reschedule any canceled drills within 10 school days of the previously scheduled date. Therefore, to be in compliance with state law, we must engage in our last lockdown drill for the year on Thursday, March 9th. We wanted to provide parents advanced notice of this, and we will also provide our students advanced notice of the drill on our morning announcements during that week. We appreciate parent support and understanding here.
Lunch Time Concert March 3rd: Thanks to the support of Lise Mtichell and Jean Fellows from the Grand Ledge Area District Library in conjunction with Shawn VanSteeland, our students will experience another lunch-time concert on Friday, March 3rd featuring Kanin Wren. Our students and staff absolutely love these concerts, so we look forward to another great experience next week. We also thank all of the aforementioned people for their efforts in bringing this great opportunity to our students and staff.
NWEA Scores, Use Computer–Not App on Phone: We apologize for confusion regarding accessing student NWEA scores in last week’s newsletter as we should have mentioned to use an actual computer and not the app on a cell phone. From a computer, NWEA scores are available for parents to review within ParentPortal. Once signed in, click on School Net Test Results (bottom left side), and then select the tab to the right: Standardized Tests. Then, use the filter accordingly to find the correct year. Both the fall and winter NWEA scores are available to view. The percentile listed is known as an achievement percentile. While we focus on both growth and achievement as educators to provide appropriate intervention and extension opportunities for students, our main focus is on the achievement percentile as this is highly correlated to predict standardized test performance (MSTEP and PSAT) later in the spring.
End of the 2nd Trimester - March 17: The end of the 2nd Trimester will be on March 17. Most students will keep their existing schedule, however, students who chose trimester electives will change to a new elective on March 20th. This schedule is already visible in PowerSchool and has been available since August. Unfortunately, schedule change requests cannot be honored. Students were placed in electives that they chose last spring and we have constructed the master schedule around these requests.
Joint Hayes/Beagle PTO Meetings: The next PTO meeting will be held on Tuesday, March 21st. We welcome parents to attend our PTO meetings either in-person here at Beagle or virtually. If interested in attending virtually, here is the link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82744686994
Students’ of the Week, Community, and Extra Curricular Resources: To view our students of the week or to review additional community/extra curricular information on our webpage, then please click https://www.glcomets.net/ourschools/beagle-middle-school/ and then click on the appropriate icon on the left side of our homepage.
These are all the updates we have at this time.
Take care,
Dave and Eric
