Principal's Message

Principal’s Message:

It’s hard to believe this will be my fourth year as an administrator of ESMS. It’s odd for me to hear of those students who were with me my first year now moving on to be Seniors at the high school. Time flies so fast and it feels like these last three years have been a whirlwind.

Although the last couple of years have been tumultuous with regard to budget cuts throughout the country and in the state of California, ESMS has managed to make “lemonade out of lemons”. We truly are on the cusp of major change within our school.

Two years ago, we brought a team of teachers together to create a new vision and mission for our school. It was soon after when we began to explore other schools and programs to discuss what our school should look like by 2013.

Many ideas have been thrown around, but one that has stuck through numerous conversations and school visits by parents, board members, district leadership and teachers is the International Baccalaureate Program(IB). With a supportive community and a group of dedicated teachers committed to the best education for our students, IB is a perfect fit for our site and district. This will mean many changes for our school, our curriculum and how we approach learning in the classroom, but it is believed that it will better prepare  our students as they enter high school, college and careers.

We will be holding numerous workshops this year in anticipation of educating our parents and community members just as we will be going through IB training as a site. In addition to our quest to be the first public IB middle school in Los Angeles County, we have also invested quite a bit of time working with El Segundo High School in preparing math curricula so that our students are confident in their skills as they enter high school. And as electives dwindle elsewhere, we have added a few more courses this year to engage the various interests of our students including: Guitar and Garageband and a new 6th grade course called Global Explorations where  students create and collaborate and apply their learning to their own lives.

As stated previously, although there is a lot of turbulence within our economy, we hope to continue to provide the best academic environment for our students. We are a school of good character, great commitment to education and have a willingness to change for the best interest of our students. We wouldn’t be able to do this without the amazing support we receive from our community, our parents and other organizations who step up in assisting us so that we can make all of this possible.

Thank you for all of your support in helping us reach our goals. We know it’s going to be a great year!

Renee DeVore
Principal, ESMS