Message from the Principal
March 2010

Spring and the DSTP are upon us. Our students are ready to go and we anticipate continued improvement this year. We have had a very exciting winter at JDHS and we are undertaking some major changes. The entire academic program at Dickinson is being redesigned to adopt a new, overarching philosophy as well as several new programs. We are becoming a STEM school. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. It is much more than a collection of courses though. A STEM school utilizes these areas as tools and requires students to apply them to solve authentic problems across the curriculum. Students in a STEM school will look at history, English, business, and other classes through the lens of technology and be required to use modern technologies within these courses. Students may make digital video recordings of a public service announcement in social studies and collect and analyze live survey data using student responders in statistics class. In all classes our instruction will be more project oriented and we will always ask ourselves, “How do we get the students to do the work of collaborating to confront real-world problems in the context of this course?” New courses will include Culinary Arts, Processes of Design & Engineering, and a co-curricular robotics program.

Many of our programs will be relocated this summer as a part of our efforts to create industry standard facilities. Our Culinary Arts room won’t look anything like the home economics classroom I entered in the 80’s. It will look like a commercial kitchen with modern equipment as well as storage and instructional spaces. We are also making several other facilities changes as well. For example, we are relocating the main office so that the building is more secure and so that when guests arrive to our school, they will be funneled naturally to the main office.

Dickinson is also a prospective International Baccalaureate (IB) school. We acknowledge that we have not competed effectively for students in a very crowded choice and charter school environment. We also understand that while Dickinson has always offered excellent opportunities for motivated, high-achieving students, some in the community don’t consider our school a viable choice for their children. We knew that we needed to offer a program that moved our top-end academic program forward and gave us a way to compete with other excellent programs in the district. IB is internationally recognized as a first rate diploma program that offers a level of challenge and rigor that is unmatched in other high school programs. Students who are admitted to the IB program as freshmen will formally enter IB courses in their junior year and emerge with an internationally recognized credential.

Our next open house is on Sunday March 21 from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. We hope you will pay a visit to the school to see what these new programs have to offer.

Previous Messages:

November 2009

March 2009

January 2009

December 2008

October 2008

September 2008