Mahtomedi Middle School Philosophy
Our staff has planned an educational program that attempts to provide our students with learning and growing experiences matched to their needs. We have seven teaching teams working with more than 800 students.
In planning our program, the students’ learning experiences have been based on the Carnegie Report’s Recommendations for Middle Level Education 2000.
- Create small communities for learning where stable, close, mutually respectful relationships with adults and peers are considered fundamental for intellectual development and personal growth. The key elements of these communities are schools-within-schools or houses, students and teachers grouped together as teams, and small group advisories that ensure that each student is known well by at least one adult.
- Teach a core academic program that results in students who are literate, including in the sciences, and who know how to think critically, lead a healthy life, behave ethically, and assume the responsibilities of citizenship in a pluralistic society. Youth service to promote values for citizenship is an essential part of the core academic program.
- Ensure success for all students through elimination of tracking by achievement level and promotion of cooperative learning, flexibility in arranging instructional time and adequate resources (time, space, equipment, and materials) for teachers.
- Empower teachers and administrators to make decisions about the experiences of middle grade students through creative control by teachers over the instructional program linked to greater responsibilities for students’ performance, governance committees that assist the principal in designing and coordinating school-wide programs, and autonomy and leadership within sub-schools or houses to create environments tailored to enhance the intellectual and emotional development of all youth.
- Staff middle grade schools with teachers who are expert at teaching young adolescents and who have been specially prepared for assignment to the middle grades.
- Re-engage families in the education of young adolescents by giving families meaningful roles in school governance, communicating with families about the school program and student’s progress, and offering families opportunities to support the learning process at home and at the school.
- Connect schools with communities, which together share responsibility for each middle grade student’s success, through identifying service opportunities in the community, establishing partnerships and collaborations to ensure students’ access to health and social services, and using community resources to enrich the instructional program and opportunities for constructive after-school activities.
Our hope for the Mahtomedi Middle School is to provide a transition from a self-contained elementary school to the less directed, more independent work of the high school. We pledge to do our best to help our students make this important transition.
Dr. Mike Neubeck, Principal
phone: (651) 407-2200
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