Weekly News and Notes

A few announcements from UHS this week:

Career Fair

On Friday, we hosted a Career Fair for students in grades 8 and 10, at which students heard from representatives from five companies and the MassHire Central Massachusetts Workforce Investment Board. Our goal is to help students identify career and post-secondary decisions that impact them more completely and relevantly, and also to learn that companies in the region, across the many fields that they have interest in, have a number of opportunities. Counselors polled students and had companies join us with positions in the highest interest, including medical, business, law enforcement, engineering, and human services. In sum, the event was very successful, and we look forward to the feedback of our students!

Grade 2 at UHS

On Thursday, we hosted all six classes of second graders at UHS for a day of preparation for the annual Taft International Fair. Students went through classes in fine art, physical education, family and consumer science, and world language. The activities were robust, the partnerships in learning truly excellent, and, perhaps most importantly, the enthusiasm was palpable. We are so proud of the work of so many teachers to make the day possible, coordinated by Ms. Dzivasen and with help from Ms. Hill, Mr. Berkowicz, Ms. Ahern, Mr. Catalano, Ms. Hendrickx, Ms. Drakulich, Ms. Gaudet, Mr. Barros, Ms. Munley, and Ms. Struppa. We look forward to even more partnership with our youngest Spartans in the future!

NEASC Report

The reaccreditation report from UHS will be released soon. After months of waiting for our visiting committee chair and directors from NEASC to finalize their edits, we are looking forward to seeing the findings and using them as levers for more improvements to our school!

Follow-Up

Some parents have been asking about follow-up to the letter we sent last month, where we identified some challenges to the emotional safety of some students at UHS on the basis of some bigoted statements. We have already conducted some workshops and trainings with our staff, are attending more training in the coming month, and integrated a new reporting feature to our website. We are also planning some workshops on leadership for some student leaders that we will be hosting in early May, and in the process of planning some more concrete lessons to engage the rest of the student body in the coming weeks and months.

To everyone who has offered support, questions, curiosity, or ideas, we appreciate the sentiments. Know that we still believe our school to be safe, and we are doing all we can to ensure that challenges  to that safety are prevented and/or addressed as needed.

Week That Was

Here's a look back at the Week that Was at UHS:

Have a great weekend!