State of the School

By: Kurt Moellering, Head of School

 

As I come to the end of my third year at Learning Prep, I find myself incredibly grateful for the community around me and extraordinarily excited for our future. My first year was in 2020. It was marked by Covid cohorts and terrible uncertainty, and yet our teaching teams came together – both through zoom and in person – and kept the school open during a year like no other. Our students demonstrated remarkable tenacity and courage. Throughout that entire year, our community came together with support and kindness even on our hardest days. 

Last year was again dramatically marked by Covid. We had testing, masking, and distancing policies but started to find a more normal school experience. By the end of the year, meetings were in person (sometimes), after school activities returned, prom and graduation ceremonies happened like always. As we come to the end of 2023, I am thrilled by the future opportunities for this school and the path we are on as we strive to be the best language-based program in the Boston area for complicated learners. As I look forward towards this future path, I must note what we have accomplished already just over the past 12 months.

In our academic programming, Learning Prep: 

• developed a new scope and sequence for both ELA and Health and Student Issues (HSI)

• implemented tiers 1 and 2 of our Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS), offering a level of differentiated instruction that very few private, LD schools can match

• began utilizing Reading Plus, an automated, nationally-normed reading program to improve silent reading accuracy and speed, for the majority of our students

• became a partner school with Landmark College for a dual enrollment program allowing some of our seniors to take online college course for credit

• Hosted Boston Center for Independent Living (BCIL) on campus to teach classes to our sophomores 

• Hosted Work Inc. on campus for Pre-Employment Transition Services classes for our juniors

In our facilities and technology departments, we are in the process of:

• repaving the majority of our main driveway

• resodding our outdoor spaces

• installing a new rooftop HVAC system in our high school

• replacing a third of our Chromebooks 

This is all in addition to the interactive white boards we have installed in almost every classroom last year.

Additionally, we have recommitted ourselves to strong communication with our families and our broader community. To this end, we have:

• hosted multiple Speaker Series presentations, broadening the reach of our school and local experts in the world of education and learning disabilities

• implemented Learning Prep’s first round of parent-teacher conferences in its history

• begun semi-annual family surveys 

• held monthly PIE (Partners in Education) and PAG (Parents Advisory Group)  meetings as a way to facilitate communication and partnership with our families

We likewise have a proactive and transparent partnership with our sending districts, and once a year we send a mailing to them letting them know of Learning Prep updates and hosting office hours for their questions. 

I hope this gives you a sense of some of the work that’s been happening at Learning Prep. While maintaining a commitment to our mission, we have made important improvements to our program. Looking to the future, a data-informed, language-based program differentiated based on student-need and delivered in a safe and nurturing environment will remain our guiding principle. 

With this in mind, the most significant event on the horizon for this school is the Reconstruction process. Every six years, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) and the Operational Services Division of Massachusetts (OSD) allow 766-approved private schools like Learning Prep to reset their program and tuition through a process called Reconstruction. Like at all schools coming out of Covid, Learning Prep has noticed the increasing needs of our students with profiles that are becoming more complicated. Reconstruction gives us the opportunity to evaluate these needs and make any appropriate adjustments to our program. We have begun this analysis now, and any changes will take effect in the 2024-25 academic year. While there will be no changes to our mission or our students–we will always remain an academic, language-based program for complicated learners–this process will allow us to ensure we have the right structures in place to provide our students the education they deserve. We will update families periodically throughout this process.

These are exciting times for our great school. There is something wonderfully unique about the Learning Prep student. Each member of our student body brings a unique combination of wisdom and innocence, joy and seriousness of purpose, kindness and resilience that makes this community unlike any other I have worked with. I treasure the time I spend with our students, and I thank you for entrusting them to us for their education. Never hesitate to reach out to me if you have any questions or concerns, or if you would just like to talk LPS for a while. I would love the opportunity to share more of my vision with you and to hear from you how your child is progressing.

If I don’t get to see you before the end of the year, I wish everyone a safe, joyful, and restful summer.