Dracut High School

Music Rocks (and Rolls) On! 

Dracut music teachers accompanied twenty-six Dracut music students the Junior District Festival during late January.  All told, some 936 students from across the Northeast District (roughly 50 school districts) auditioned for the chorus, band, and orchestra. Twelve students from Dracut were accepted.  Students from Dracut High School include:

Tyler Sheehan (9) - bass

Jenny Lin (9) - violin

Lizzie Cormier (9) - alto

Angelina Garibaldi (9) - soprano

These students will join more than other 400 accepted students at a festival in March at Lowell High School.  Our music teachers who give the gift (and training) of music to our students are Mr. Sciolla, Ms. Porter, and Ms. Mallory.

The joint PTO meeting with Dracut High, Junior High and Englesby
has been rescheduled to Tuesday, March 26th at 7:15 pm to be held in the
Junior High Cafeteria

Dear Parent or Guardian:

Please find important information about our school on our school "report card". This school report card is assembled and published so that you, the parents, can easily obtain important information about our school. The report card contains information about student enrollment and teacher qualifications, student achievement, accountability, how Dracut High School is performing relative to other schools, and the progress Dracut High School is making toward narrowing proficiency gaps for different groups of students in our school. The first section of the report card provides information about the students and teachers in our school as compared to the district and the state. If your child attends a school that receives federal Title I funds, you also have the right to request the following information about the qualifications of your child’s classroom teachers:

• Whether your child’s teacher is licensed in the grade levels and subject areas
• Whether your child’s teacher is teaching under an emergency license or waiver
• The college degree and major of your child’s teacher
• Whether your child is provided services by paraprofessionals and, if so, their qualifications

The second section of the report card shows how Massachusetts students are performing on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test that allows you to compare the performance of Massachusetts students to students across the nation or in other states. You can also see how our school performed on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) tests as compared to the district and the state. These two sections, read together, will give you an indication as to how our school is performing against other schools in the United States. The third section of the report card contains three important pieces of information:

Accountability and Assistance Levels: Schools and districts are placed into one of five accountability and assistance levels (1-5), with the highest performing in Level 1 and lowest performing in Level 5. Our school has been placed into Level 2 because, although our student body as a whole met the target MCAS participation rates, we had fewer than 95% of each student subgroup take the MCAS exam.

School Percentiles: A school percentile between 1 and 99 is reported for most schools. This number shows the overall performance of our school relative to other schools that serve the same or similar grades. Our school percentile is 46. This means that our school is performing higher than 46 percent of the schools in the state.

Progress and Performance Index (PPI): The PPI is a number that indicates our school’s progress toward narrowing proficiency gaps, or, in other words, helping all students reach proficiency and be prepared for success after high school. Massachusetts has set a goal of reducing proficiency gaps by half between the years 2011 and 2017. For a group of students to be considered to be making sufficient progress toward narrowing proficiency gaps, its cumulative PPI must be 75 or higher. For Dracut High School our PPI was 90 for all students and 83 for High Needs students.

To improve student achievement in our school, we are working:

• To identify areas for improving instruction in both English Language Arts and Mathematics so that all students and all subgroups are able to meet established improvement targets, including participation rates within all subgroups
• To ensure that all curricula are aligned with the common core and state standards, and
• To integrate technology to support instruction in all disciplines.

We encourage you to become involved in helping us improve our school. Some of the ways you can become involved are:

• Encouraging your child’s learning at home by establishing predictable routines for homework completion
• Establishing daily routines, such as family dinner time, that are designed to discuss your child’s day at school
• Supporting your child in making good decisions about peer relationships
• Reviewing your child’s homework to ensure that he or she understands the material
• Attending parent-teacher meetings and other special meetings and inquiring as to the expectations for learning for your child
• Serving as a volunteer in our school or district
• Encouraging other parents to become involved

For more information about what we are doing to improve student achievement or to request information about the qualifications of your child’s classroom teachers, please feel free to contact me at 978-957-1500.

Sincerely yours, Richard Manley, Principal

Annual School Report Card