Rochester Memorial School will likely experience a second year of increased enrollment, but with a new strategic plan for the school district, the school's principal is confident goals will be met.

"We are currently at 495 (students)," Rochester Memorial School Principal Derek Medeiros said. "We've fluctuated during my time, but we've been consistent around the 470 to 480 mark.

"Last year, for the first time, we were over 500," he said. "We're pretty close to 500 right now. After school gets started some kids transfer in, so it'll probably be around 500. That's a healthy number for us."

The elementary school principal says that the school is ready to handle those students with most of the previous staff and a few new ones, as well. He said kids and parents will be greeted by a new school secretary and some other new staff.

"We have a new school secretary. Her name is Mrs. Donna Aberay. Mrs. Diane  Legasse retired. Also, we have new school psychologist, Ms. Shannon Mulcahey, so we're excited about that. And we are in the process of interviewing for a grade 6 position. We haven't selected that person yet."

There will also be new technology equipment for some grades.

"We got some new Chrome Books ,so we will have Chrome Books for all of our students in grades 3 through 6, which in the past was only for grades 4 through 6," Medeiros said.

He said introducing the technology to young students is forward thinking and in line with educational plans.

"It supports the 21st century learning initiative," he said. "Our kids are great multitaskers. Our teachers use a lot of technology like Google Classroom. They communicate with their students and give them feedback through platforms like Google Classrooms. It gives our kids an opportunity to have something at their fingertip  so they can access all that information, but at the same time communicate with each other and their teacher on projects, or for using certain websites, whether its math related or science related. We're a really just trying to help our kids and support them with the 21st century learning initiative that's in all schools."

All of this fits into the school district's strategic plan, which was recently completed.

"We have a new strategic plan that we hope to get approved by the Joint School Committee," Medeiros said. "Obviously that helps give us direction for our school and for the district. I know we're trying to all be on the same page, all be moving in the same direction."

"There are topics in the plan that will clearly benefit the kids like global citizenship, social and emotional learning and 21st century learning," he said.

"As far as programs and classes, I think  if we can get the district strategic plan approved, you'll see a lot of responsive classroom practices in there, which is awesome" Medeiros said. "We've been doing responsive classrooms here at RMS for a long time, but I think this gives us a chance to do self assessment, and really fine tune it and perfect it. It's a great philosophy that we believe in. It's going to be nice to dissect that and really fine tune our practices around that and make sure we're doing it with fidelity.

"That plans tells us in five years this is where we want to be as a district. And then it breaks it up in year one, year two. It breaks it up in incremental steps until we get to year five. There were a lot of stak holders that were involved - Community members, students, staff and faculty from all grades, pre-K through 12, teaching staff, measuring staff so you had all those stakeholders involved in that process. To say we'd all love to see the district here, at school it's our job to make sure that we're doing what we need to do at each one of our buildings so that our district does get to their points within five years."
Medeiros encourages parents to attend the school's open house on Tuesday, Aug. 28, from 6:30  to 7:30 p.m. to take a tour of the school and see the classrooms where their children will be educated and socialized.

There will be a kindergarten orientation on Thursday, Aug. 30, he said.

"Our orientation goes by the first letter of your last name. Any body with the letters A through L, they  come at 9:30 a.m. and stay until 11:15 a.m. The afternoon session is for M through Z. They come from 12 to 1:45 p.m."

In the meantime, Medeiros encourages parents and community members to read about the school district's strategic educational plan for all the schools on the school district's website.

"If they are interested in seeing where we hope to be heading in the next five years, there  are draft forms of the district's strategic plan on the superintendent's website," Medeiros said. "There's some great stuff in there. and I think we're moving in the right direction."