Thursday: Parents Can Attend School With Barr Students

Ever wonder what your middle schooler’s day is like?

“This is Education Week. Education Day is Thursday,” said Barr Principal Roger Guccione. “A reminder on Thursday, parents are invited to spend part of or all day with their child in classes. We host a coffee (that morning in the library).”

There is more information about this on the school website. This Go to School with your Child day is the first topic of the newsletter on Barr’s website.

“If you go to the school website, I explain the whole schedule for the day. We want you to go on (the website). Everything is there,” said Guccione. “We stopped doing all those mailings because they’re very expensive and the superintendent has asked us to not do too many email blasts but rather limit it to things that are truly emergencies. I’ve honored that request but I really try to make the website comprehensive—one stop shopping.”

MEET THE TEACHER

Barr hosted parent-teacher conferences to give parents the opportunity to meet with their students’ teachers on Nov. 8, 9 and 17.

“So far, for parent-teacher conferences, we’ve had 250 families come so far: 95 during the day and 155 in the evening,” said Guccione. “We hope to get another 155 (on Thursday, Nov. 17), which will run about 60 percent of the school, which is what we usually get.”

Patch’s article gave a quick on parents and their feelings on these ‘Meet the Teacher’ nights.

“All the feedback I got from parents was that they were pleasantly surprised that there was very little wait, they were able to see all the teachers they wanted to see and ‘wow this was a good idea, why didn’t we do it sooner?’” said Guccione. “So far so good, we’ll see how Thursday night goes, but we’re off to a good start.”

AN ALBANY VISIT

“A couple of weeks ago, I went up to Albany to represent Rockland County as the Middle level liaisons group, which is a group of middle school administrators and superintendents throughout the entire state,” said Guccione. “We were spoken to by commissioner of education, some of his assistants, different various (representatives) on ELA and mathematics.”

“I’m happy to say I was able to bring back all that information to the faculty for our Dec. 1 meeting. We’ll be talking about the common core standards and everything. We’ll be cutting edge with what’s going on in all of New York State.”