Welcome to the Forestdale International School web page! We are a magnet school whose aim is to educate young people to respect and understand the diverse peoples and places of the world.
Forestdale is home to about 560 kindergarten through eighth graders and a professional, talented staff. Some of us have lived our whole lives in Malden while others of us came here not too many years ago from Latin America, Spain, Haiti and China, to name just a few countries. Forestdale hosts the two-way bilingual immersion program, Puentes, in which students learn subject matter in English and Spanish starting in kindergarten. All students in the school study Spanish as a world language from kindergarten through 8th grade.
We use an inclusion approach to special education and count among us many with significant physical, emotional and intellectual challenges.
My particular interest in education is in how to maximize the school-time experience for those students who depend on schools to provide the bulk of their intellectual/academic learning experiences. Children come to school with wide-ranging vocabularies and background knowledge that greatly affect the efficiency with which they are able to learn new content. Yet all students have essentially the same thirteen years in which to learn all that is expected of a high school graduate. As principal, my responsibility is to continually monitor what we do, how we do it and how we can improve upon it to provide the best preparation possible to every student, no matter what their experiences had been when they first became our responsibility to educate.
Over the past 30 years I have taught preschool in Guatemala, elementary science, bilingual kindergarten, and middle school math. I have also been a VISTA volunteer, an early literacy specialist, manager of a bookstore and a trainer/consultant - with Educators for Social Responsibility - on conflict resolution and children's literature. For about ten years my professional home was the two-way immersion school, Amigos, in Cambridge, MA, where I taught math in English and Spanish, and was Teacher-in-Charge of the middle school. This is my third year as a principal in Malden.
I received my Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Biology from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1979. I earned a Masters in Reading from Lesley College in 1996 and a Certificate of Advanced Graduate Studies in Educational Administration from Cambridge College in 2003. I am currently a doctoral candidate with an anticipated graduation date of June 2009.
In my spare (?) time I like to do bird watching and photography, though I haven't had time for either in quite a while. I love to read both fiction and nonfiction, and bake chocolate chip cookies.
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