Dear PAWS Families,
The proposed start time of 8:45 AM and end time of 2:45 PM has been approved by the Wellesley School Committee! With this exciting news, we are now able to share the PAWS programing schedule for the 2015-2016 school year including your child’s classroom assignment. Thank you for your collaboration and support throughout this important process.
The classroom placement process at PAWS is a very detailed, thoughtful, individualized, and rigorous procedure whereby the PAWS faculty and staff work tirelessly to create heterogeneous, integrated, and balanced classrooms. The classrooms are designed to enable teachers to best meet the needs of every student at PAWS. Students with Individual Education Programs (IEPs) are placed in classrooms through the TEAM process including conversations with parents, teachers and specialists. Students without IEPs are placed in accordance with student need and parent requests whenever possible. Unfortunately, we received many more requests for full day classroom spots than we have spaces. We could not fulfill the request for a full day for every parent who requested it. In some cases some students have been provided with an extended day classroom to provide a longer school day option. The PAWS class placement letters will be mailed out at the end of this week.
You may have heard that PAWS is growing and will be adding an 8th preschool classroom to the program. The 8th classroom was originally going to be housed at the Bates Elementary School. Due to low enrollment in the kindergarten at the Upham Elementary School, there will be a big, beautiful, vacant kindergarten classroom available for PAWS to use! We are thrilled with the warm welcome we have received from the Upham principal Jeff Dees. We are excited to set up the new classroom for our preschoolers and to make it a wonderful space to learn and grow!
If you have questions, please direct them to me at zieminskir@wellesleyps.org. I will be happy to speak with you. I look forward to seeing you all at the PAWS Family Picnic tonight from 5:30 PM – 7:00 PM.
Sincerely,
Rebecca M. Zieminski
Director of Early Childhood, Wellesley Public Schools