Underdown Junior High School is committed to providing excellence in education and guiding children to gain confidence in a safe environment that enables students to be successful, caring, and knowledgeable members of our community.
Beliefs
UJHS has seven core beliefs that create a challenging and enriching environment for all students. These guiding are as follows:
We Believe
-The school atmosphere must be orderly, purposeful, and businesslike and free from any threat of physical and verbal harm for students to learn.
-In developing a climate of high academic expectations that will be achieved by staff that are capable and work collaboratively to assure UJHS student success.
-That the principal is the leader of leaders and as such guides that teachers to become instructional leaders through the avenues of coaching, partnering and encouraging teachers to highly motivate UJHS students to learn.
-That teachers should be trained to design and deliver instruction that responds the demands of accountability and is responsive to the needs of higher levers of learning for the continued success of UJHS students.
-That the teachers must become more skilled at developing interdisciplinary curriculum and be willing to declare that some things are more important to teach than others in order to provide the opportunity for UJHS students to learn in the allocated time available to them.
-That teachers must pay more attention to the alignment of the instructional curriculum that must exist between the taught subject matter and the subject matter tested. This belief centers on the questions "what worth learning?" and "how will we know, understand, and can apply what they've learned?"
-In developing an authentic relationship with parents that is built on trust and communication so that the parents and teachers have the same goal of providing and effective learning opportunity for the students at UJHS.
Vision, Goals and Objectives
-The purpose for establishing UJHS is to create a learning atmosphere based on a concern for the well being of children academically, emotionally, and physically.
-We will contiune to use a constant improvement model, which progressively moves the organization and the students toward a more technologically rich and academically challenging curriculum and environment.
-We will continue to have high expectations for behavior, respect for self and others, and pride in Underdown Junior High School and self.
-We will continue to develope a very strong support system for exceptional UJHS students of all types and encourage parental participation in the planning of these processes.