Principally Speaking - Judy Bradley

(January, 2012)
I hope that your holidays were filled with many blessings and good times. I want to thank you, on behalf of the school staff, for your kind thoughts and gifts to us that helped to begin our holidays in such a joyous fashion. Your continued thoughtfulness always makes Battlefield Park Elementary such a special place to work!

As I have often stated, we have many blessings to count at Battlefield Park and we have much for which to be thankful. We certainly appreciate, and are grateful for, your consistent support but we also greatly value the support that we get from our Business Partners-in-Education who help us in so many ways. Their support helps us to motivate our students to strive for academic excellence, perfect attendance and to continue to be great citizens. Their support also helps the staff understand the depth of community backing in our important effort of providing a quality educational experience for our students. Likewise, our Business Partners help us to communicate to children that their education is a community-wide concern.

Currently we have eighteen business partners: AMF Hanover Lanes, Barnes and Noble, Battlefield Service Center, Body Mechanix, Chick-Fil-A, CiCi’s Pizza, Collision One, Dynamo Soccer, Tucker Franklin Insurance Group, Food Lion, It’s A Breeze Specialties, Martin’s, McDonald’s, Papa John’s Pizza, Riverbound Café, Starbucks, Union First Market Bank and Village Bank. These partners help us by donating material, gift certificates, time and expertise. It is truly an effort made by all to motivate students to seek the honor roll, perfect attendance, to deepen their love of reading or to assist us with our bullying prevention program. They also are willing to show our students how school success can lead to business success.

Testing is right around the corner. All fifth grade students will be engaging in their Writing SOL in the month of March. A letter will be coming home soon with the details. Our fifth graders will also be taking a practice online writing standard of learning test. This test will not count toward a score. Please remind your fifth grader to do their best on their tests.

Our children in grades three, four and five will be taking their standards of learning tests in the spring. There is a website which offers you the opportunity to examine most of the SOL released tests. Please take a moment to visit www.pen.k12.va.us and explore the released SOL tests. This will help you as a parent to understand the format of the SOL tests and the types of test questions that are asked of our children. It might be fun to take a released test with your child. This year we will be taking our SOLs in math and social studies on the computer (we are piloting this adventure). Next year all SOLs will be on the computer with no paper pencil administration. I hope you will take advantage of this opportunity for I feel that you will find it a constructive and informative experience.

We continue to tweak and improve our safety procedures for our school and students. This year we have practiced fire, hurricane, tornado, intruder and bus evacuation drills. We have also created a safety procedure in the event of an earthquake. In the month of March we will execute our second bus evacuation drill. We will also be providing you with more information regarding our relocation reunification plan. We have been working on this plan with the East Hanover Rescue Squad, Sheriff’s Dept. and with our Division Director for safety, Dr. Stan Jones. Please be on the look out for specific information regarding our relocation reunification plan. (This would be our plan if we have to evacuation BPES for any reason immediately, with out transportation).

I look forward to seeing everyone at the February 7th PTA Meeting as well as around our school building. Thank you again for all you do each and every day for our children and our school.

Fondly ~~ Judith L. Bradley