What our students hope for

There are very exciting changes happening at my school (JN Fries Middle) next year- we will be converting from a traditional middle school to a magnet school with 2 programs: STEM and International Studies (are in the process of applying to be an International Baccalaureate school). We will serve about half as many students (435), will have a lot of new technology flowing into the building, and the best part of all is that our leadership team truly gets to think outside of the box and create the school we'd love to work in.

As part of this process, I've been pushing for more and more student voice in our decision-making process. You can't claim to be a student-centered school if you don't involve students from the very beginning.... In an effort to do this, I created a quick, optional Google Forms survey and sent it out to our students. (Take a look). The main thrust was in three questions:

• Write 3-5 words that describe what you hope JN Fries will be like
• Write 3-5 words that describe what you hope to DO at JN Fries next year
• Are you interested in coming in with other students to speak to our leadership team about what types of things you'd like to see happen at JN Fries next year?

I loved the responses I got! I decided to make a Wordle Word Cloud of the first two questions to share with our leadership team and I thought I'd share them here as well:

What our future students hope JN Fries will be like:

What our future students hope they will DO:

I'll also be contacting the students that were willing to come and talk to us soon so we can get their input into their new school. Looking forward to it!