By PATRICK H. O’NEILL, Ed. D., Principal, Lewiston High School

Welcome back to another exciting school year at Lewiston High School! A number of facility projects carried out over the summer have modernized the school. This building, built 31 years ago, now has new administrative and guidance suites, new windows, remodeled boys’ and girls’ locker rooms, and new roofing – great “face lifts” for our fantastic facility. Enrollment is up this year – to 1,401 as of this writing.

This year we have two new administrators – Michael Hutchins, former science department head, and Elizabeth Bradley, former math teacher with the freshman teams. They were selected for these important positions from a very strong field of applicants. This year each administrator has been assigned a unit of students. Bradley heads up the ninth-grade teams; John Bouchles, the sophomores; Hutchins, the juniors; and I have the senior class. We are focusing on creating smaller learning communities to allow students more contact with adults. Lewiston High School and Lewiston Regional Technical Center serve approximately 2,000 students per day. This is a very big population and students can get lost in the crowd. Smaller learning communities will allow us to focus on student needs and help students concentrate on their learning so that they leave Lewiston High School with knowledge of their own skills and what they hope to become as contributing adults.

Lewiston High School and five other large Maine schools have received a grant through the Mitchell/Gates Foundation that will allow us to concentrate intently for the next five years on changing how we educate our youth. The enactment of the No Child Left Behind legislation furthers our commitment to preparing our students for a highly competitive society. The stakes are high and only the most prepared will be successful. Through this grant, we will discover new ways to educate our youth effectively, while complying with high stakes testing and the mandates from state and federal authorities. Our faculty has begun to take the steps necessary to ensure that students are able to achieve quality targets and to offer remediating assistance to those who do not.

On another note, I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate our cheerleaders who took first place in our league for the 2002-03 school year. I neglected to mention this last spring in our school report, and wish to apologize for the oversight. They worked hard for the honor and deserve our recognition for this achievement. Hopefully they will repeat the feat this year.

All staff at Lewiston High School wish success to you and your children. These are challenging times for us, but together we can move the agenda on student success. Please work with us to make your students knowledgeable, competitive, and successful.