Happy 2012 to all of our Cascade Mountaineer Families!

 I hope you all had a restful and enjoyable winter break!  We have a lot of events happening in the next couple months that I wanted to make you aware of at Cascade. 

One of our goals this year is to have activities that bring the students together.  As you know, we had our food drive and it was a huge success!  The students were able to collect over 3000 items that were donated to Neighbor Impact.  All of the advisories decorated shopping carts and on the last day before winter break we had a parade down the halls.  It was hilarious to see how the carts were decorated and a fun way to do something for our community. 

Our conferences will be held on February 1^st and 2^nd from 3:30-7:30. If you would like a conference with your child's teachers, please email them. We will only be scheduling conferences on Wednesday. Thursday will be drop in conferences in case you were not able to get one scheduled on Wednesday.  Scheduling of conferences will be first come, first serve, therefore, you may want to get in touch with teachers soon.  Please refer to the letter that was sent out to parents early January for more information. 

 Our first school-wide event for our Sparrow, K.K., will be our Second Annual Shiver and Shake on February 17^th at the Athletic Club of Bend.  Please check out our January newsletter for more details.  We are hoping for more plungers this year and for parents and teachers as well!  You can bet that Mr. Wolnick and I will be jumping in the pool for K.K.!  We will be having advisory competitions for the most people in advisories participating and for the students with the most donations. Another activity we are doing for Sparrow is a flash mob dance downtown in February.  Students have been practicing the dance in their P.E. classes. It's a secret when we are doing the flash mob for K.K., but we will let students know a couple days before so you can help them get there. 

 Our 8^th grade students have taken their Explore test and we have the results back.  The Explore test is the 8^th grade version of the ACT.  It gives 8^th graders practice and also tells students and parents if he/she is in line with college readiness. It is so wonderful that all of our students take this test.  It is not usually offered free of charge, but Bend LaPine School District believes if we give students multiple opportunities to practice this test, their success rate will go up dramatically when they take their college entrance tests when they are juniors in high school.  Our results reflect all of our students' scores compared to the national scores of select students around the country who know it is beneficial to take the test early. We would expect our scores to be lower when comparing a whole school to a select group, but as you see below, we have done very well! If you have an 8^th grade student, please go over those results, and if you have any questions, do not hesitate to call your child's counselor.  Here is a breakdown of the overall school results:

 From the results you can see we are far above the national average and very close to all of our students meeting college readiness marks!  Way to go 8^th graders!

Sincerely,

Stephanie Bennett  

Principal