Tweaks Expected at Gibbons Middle School This Year

Tweaks are coming to the Gibbons Middle School this year.

"What I'm looking forward to is really refining a lot of the things that we've already put into place," said Principal Jack Foley, who starts his fourth year leading Gibbons.

"For us, it is tweaking the changes that we put into place locally, tweaking the restructuring as necessary."

Westborough's first day of school is Aug. 28.

Foley said that "last year, we had some pretty significant changes" at Gibbons.

The school  "made foreign language an option for all students", and "went to a tri-mester," he noted.

"Last year, we introduced a full-detailed online progress report for parents and students," Foley said.

"We're just going to add onto some of those ideas. We're going to take one of the high school's ideas, and for our online grading component module, we're going to incorporate iStudent, as well as iParent. IStudent gives the student access to their grades as well."

Foley said he will explore with the staff this fall "the potential of opening up our progress report window for a little bit longer period of time."

"Right now, each tri-mester is 60 days long, and we open up the full detailed progress report at the 30-day or halfway point. We did some surveys of staff, students and parents, and there seems to be a consensus that opening up for a little bit longer would be a good idea. So, we're going to talk about that when we get back."

Last year also saw Gibbons not offer its traditional Washington, D.C. trip for the eighth grade.

The school instead offered the students a Boston Harbor cruise in June. And each eighth-grade team visited the Freedom Trail and the Museum of Science, Foley said. Gibbons also hosted a performance of "Romeo and Juliet"  in the spring.

"It certainly wasn't the same for the kids, but it was what we could support," Foley said.

"We had some cuts in our clerical staff, and we just didn't have the manpower to process a couple hundred thousand dollar trip.

"I still don't have the staff, so I don't anticipate revisiting that."