August 2016

Dear New and ReturningWasatch Peak Parents and Students,

WELCOME to a new and exciting school year!This will be my third year as the Director of Wasatch Peak Academy and I am looking forward to a productive, fun, and engaging school year. We welcome all of the new families, teachers, and staff to the WPA family. We are excited to have Megan Triplett as our new Board President! She will be a wonderful board president. Welcome to our new PTO President, Julie Winegar and her hard-working PTO staff.

WPA is a wonderful community of families and we want everyone to feel welcome and to be engaged in our school community! To create this strong community feel among families, we require all familiesto complete 30 volunteer hours during the year. There are unlimited ways to serve and to complete your 30 volunteer hours. Remember that 30 hours includes parents, grandparents, siblings, and scholar volunteer hours. Share the experience! These are the date markers that will help you complete your hours without feeling overwhelmed:

Complete first 10 hours by Halloween

Complete next 10 hours by February’s Parent-Teacher Conferences

Complete final 10 hours by May 20.

This year, our theme is GROWTH Mindset. We believe that there are always things to learn and as a faculty and staff, we are going to strive to provide a year full of amazing academic, social, and personal growth for all of our scholars. Last year, we focused on our strengths and we were able to continue to build a strong team of faculty and staff inside the building. This year we will build on this strength.

Learning will be visible this year. This means that teachers will keep 3-ring binders on each scholar with their work so that parents can see the learning their child has done in the classroom. Visible learning will mean that the writing, reading, math, and content taught will be relevant, meaningful, and rigorous. Teachers will challenge all students, provide scholars who need extra challenges, work with scholars who need extra support, and meet each child where they are to take them further. We will strive to make each scholar’s learning visible so that you can see their growth over time. We will be working on handwriting as well as keyboarding, literacy strategies that expert readers use, connecting reading with writing, infusing literacy skills into our science and social studies content, and maximizing students’ problem solving abilities in math, going deep with core math concepts at each grade level. We will continue to have our wonderful music and art, keyboarding, and PE classes. We will also have our school play in the spring of 2017, which will be so much fun!

Patriot Traits. We will also be working each month on important character traits that will help us become stronger, kinder, and better people and citizens. Since we are Patriots, we want to be sure and live up to our name!

WPA Community Creed: In May, I created a faculty and staff creed that we will strive to uphold. I want to share aspects of this creed with our WPA families. We invite all of our WPA Families to support these principles to strengthen our community and to build relationships for the benefit of our scholars.

  1. We are first and foremost a COMMUNITY. We share our strengths. We support and lift in whatever ways we can. We help each other. We serve and support school wide events. We are united in purpose and in our goals to serve the scholars, teachers, administration, and families at our school.
  1. We are DEPENDABLE. We keep our commitments. We follow through. When asked to do something, we do it.
  1. We COMMUNICATE respectfully. We communicate regularly and keep our websites up to date so parents can find information they need about our classes and get their questions answered. If we have problems, we go directly to the source. If we cannot find an answer, we call Becky or Lauren! The PTO FB page is an information-only source. This page is not maintained by school administration.
  1. We are GRATEFUL. We show gratitude to others for their efforts, their expertise, their time, their suggestions, their service, their feedback, and their gifts.
  1. We are KIND. We recognize that everyone is doing the best they can. We recognize that we don’t have all of the information in most situations. We give others the benefit of the doubt. We forgive. We take suggestions without offense. We seek help when needed.
  1. We teach with research-based BEST PRACTICE. We make our lessons meaningful, engaging, and relevant. We teach for student understanding. We teach the most important concepts deeply and thoroughly. We use the best books for resources. We continue to engage in dialogue with faculty about our instruction and best practice.
  1. We have GROWTH MINDSETS. We believe in growth. We believe that we can improve. We encourage our scholars to grow. We understand that change is constant and provides opportunities for growth. Teachers are the lead learners in our classrooms!

Let’s have a wonderful year. I’m looking forward to getting started!

Emily A. Swan, Ph.D., Director