MANCHESTER – School Superintendent Diane Pedroza is ready for the new school year. Schools reopened earlier this week and a lot of work went into making that return as smooth as possible.
Pedroza, who spent most of the last school year as the district’s “interim” superintendent, began her permanent position in that role on July 1. She spoke with The Manchester Times recently about the challenges ahead and the excitement that she has seen among the district’s staff and students as well.
“Transitioning to being superintendent has been busy but it has been extremely rewarding. I’ve been focusing on leadership overall and delving into the strategic plan and community engagement,” Pedroza said.
She had previously served as director of curriculum in the district, a role she also served in while being the interim school superintendent but the district has a new curriculum director, Tracey Raimondo. “I’m always available for anything she needs as this is a new position for her. My style is collaborative and it really has been very seamless,” the superintendent added.
Pedroza noted that the district also added Jill Moore as director of Special Services. “Both Jill and Tracey have a wealth of knowledge and extensive experience, great instincts and good judgement and are extremely professional and very community driven and it is awesome to have people moving in the same direction as I am.”
“We are all student centered. We are focusing on how we can bring the community together, what we can do for our students and our staff and for me that is a real positive. We are extremely fortunate that our teams are focused on curriculum alignment and focusing on staff development, facility readiness but of course just like everybody else looking for new teachers and have welcomed a number of new educators to the district,” she added.
Pedroza said, “we filled some key positions across the district and we of course still need bus drivers. We have reassigned some of our staff to new roles within the district. We are transitioning some reading coaches – some of whom were placed back in the classroom – and we had an interventionist coach and our goal has been that staff is working with kids.”
“Some of those positions that were a little bit more procedural,” she said. “We always wish the best when colleagues leave. We wish them well because you have some retirees and we have some people who have been promoted. We know our new staff will contribute just as our former staff did.”
As far as new student schedules for this new school year, Pedroza commented, “the middle school has revised their schedule. There was a change under the previous superintendent at the middle school. We had a committee come together that once again was involved with administration and a lot of teachers and they spoke about the pros and concerns they had with the schedule.”
The superintendent explained, “we made some revisions and the new schedule will include block for ELA (English Language Arts) and for math and will reduce the average class size. A big benefit of the schedule is that we are going to offer French for 8th grade students. We had done that years ago. When I worked at the middle school years ago, we had a full time French teacher there. We will offer French as another world language and offer drama, music, art, food and consumer science, STEM, band and gifted and talented to the entire student population.”
Manchester School Superintendent Diane Pedroza strolls through the hallway getting a thumb’s up from students during a school day. (Photo courtesy Manchester Schools)
“There will be some choice and some rotation that will allow for children to have some exposure to a lot more of those elective type courses,” she added.
Pedroza noted another change for the new school year, “Pre-school has been fairly new for us. We do have a new supervisor of early childhood (Michelle Nichol) who was our elementary supervisor then we moved her to the middle school supervisor and we are now moving her back to her wheelhouse and that is elementary school education.”
“Michelle was a reading specialist and her background is teaching those early grades. She was a kindergarten teacher for a period of time. She has been instrumental in writing curriculum and has been working with the pre-school team preparing the classrooms and getting the curriculum ready for pre-school students,” Pedroza noted.
“The preschoolers will now follow the same schedule as our K-5 students. That allows us to create some consistency and routine for families. So, while it may lengthen the day for our preschoolers slightly it will allow them to have enhanced learning opportunities, social and cognitive development and so we are really excited about this and we will continue to nurture curiosity, creativity and critical thinking,” she added.
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