East Haddam Public Schools is a wonderful place with a amazing students and the most caring and supportive staff one could wish for. Students attending our schools might build a one off roller coaster in first grade, plan an assembly for the entire school in seventh grade and serve the seniors in our community a meal while waiting for a printing a 3D image in class in the 11th grade. The opportunities for our students are something that we value and continue to improve.
We continue to move forward as a district in a planful and meaningful way. Our direction as a district is communicated in our strategic plan that was approved by the Board Of Education in June of 2019. The strategic plan is arranged in four areas of growth and they are Relate, Achieve, Construct, and Develop.
Achieve: It goes without saying that a school system must improve achievement levels of students over time. As we fine tune our curriculum, assessments, and lesson plans, we are confident our students will continue to achieve at higher rates. We work on a theory that providing our students with authentic and meaningful experiences will have the most impact on our students’ achievement. Authentic experiences is woven into the Relate component of the strategic plan where we are connecting our students with the community to give our students authentic experience outside the standard classroom in person or virtually. Meaningful experiences are created when students are engaged in the process of developing the experience. To this end we encourage our students in a variety of areas to pursue their specific interests and passions as they work through their public school experience.
Relate: The success of our student is integrally tied to our school system’s ability to connect our students with the local and global community. Connections with local adults and organizations supports our students to have authentic learning experiences and to learn communication ‘for life’ in a variety of settings and situations that they will need as they complete their public school experience. We are very excited about some of the connections our students are making with their community as a result of National History Day programs and Senior Projects where students have uncovered insights from their community that were unknown before they started their inquiry.
Develop: East Haddam is very fortunate to have an excellent staff that support the development of our students each and every day. All staff members require support to stay current with up to date practices. Supporting our staff development will result in state of the art social emotional learning, varied instruction to meet a wide range of student abilities and talents, and instruction that supports all learners. In order to provide the rich experiences to our students that our strategic plan illustrates, supporting the continuing development of our staff is paramount.
Construct is the last element of the strategic plan. As the types of experiences our students experience evolve, our environments will continue to adapt. We started this adaptation process with the renovation of classrooms to create STEM spaces at the schools and to move our library media centers to be designed to support students’ collaborative learning with appropriate and individualized education.
Brian S. Reas
Superintendent of Schools