By Logan Wells, News Director | Logan@kymnradio.net
With the start of the school year, each of the school buildings in Northfield has been giving showcase presentations to the School Board, highlighting successes from the past year and this year’s focus areas. We have already covered each of the other buildings today. We’re going to focus on three elementary schools: Bridgewater, Greenvale Park, and Spring Creek.
While each school is unique, there were also common successes across the schools. In Elementary school, the new curriculum for Math and Reading has been rolled out in recent years. The new curriculum required considerable training for teachers and the overhaul of lesson plans. Tania Will, the Principal of Spring Creek, noted that these new trainings lead to improvements across the district.
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“Elementary teachers were completely immersed in professional learning during the 2024-25 school year. This math implementation, coupled with the science of reading training that was occurring during PLCs has really set the stage for high-quality instructional practices and responses.” – Tania Will, Principal of Spring Creek Elementary at the 8/25/2025 School Board Meeting
In particular, Will noted the improvements in several scores, including the culture of learning and high-quality math content, which increased across the district. The new math curriculum has also translated to higher test scores. On the MCA Math tests across the whole district, 78% of 3rd Graders and 78.3% of 4th Graders were proficient. Those results were far higher than the state average, and according to the Interim Principal at Bridgewater, Hope Langston, showed significant improvement:
Highlight of Math Scores scores and curriculum rollout across the three schools.
“And I just want to point out, having had a history of world’s best workforce, where we were asked to look at this metric every year, this is tremendous because we used to be down and like we’re higher than 50%. Dr. Hillmann, you probably remember. So to be hitting the, you know, mid 70s, mid to upper 70s shows progress as a system in meeting the needs of our students.” – Hope Langston, Fmr. Interim Principal of Bridgewater Elementary at the 10/14/2025 School Board Meeting
However, it’s not all just about test scores; the three principals also cited a positive culture at their schools as another success area. At Greenvale, Sam Richardson noted that they have several school-wide and grade-specific events to help build that positive culture, and many of these events also include opportunities for parents:
“Engagement events are something that we’ve been really dedicated to and so those are events that the grade level teachers work together to develop to bring families into the school to see the learning that’s being done and also to walk alongside their their children I know students are very proud to have important people come in to be with them so those events have really allowed us to strengthen some of those those bonds and help families learn more about what’s going on in our schools.” – Sam Richardson, Principal of Greenvale Park Elementary at the 9/8/2025 School Board Meeting
Richardson cited survey data that showed parents were proud of the school and felt it had a positive impact on student learning. Will at Spring Creek cited similar survey data showing an overall 85% satisfaction from parents, and Langston at Bridgewater cited improvements in attendance, with 90% of students attending school, the first building in the district to reach that goal.
Learn about what’s happening in the other school buildings:
Northfield High School Sees Improvements in Student Attendance
Report Shows Highlights of the Northfield Middle School
When it comes to focus areas for next year, there was more variety among the school buildings. At Bridgewater, the focus was on improving the Employee Engagement Survey and the Parent Experience Survey. At Greenvale, the focus was on social-emotional learning and communication with parents. And at Spring Creek, the focus was on a proactive positive behavior system.
However, the schools all shared one common goal and it was a continued effort on student achievement, with 80% of students demonstrating academic proficiency. Here’s Langston:
“We know this is a stretch goal. That’s okay this is where we want to end up and we know that in order to do that we need consistently good instruction of grade-level content for all students.” – Hope Langston, Fmr. Interim Principal of Bridgewater Elementary at the 10/14/2025 School Board Meeting
Langston said it takes many different factors working successfully to reach that goal, but that many were in place, and she was confident in continued improvements.
Bridgewater’s Presentation (starts page 10)
Greenvale’s Presentation (starts page 27)
Spring Creek’s Presentation (starts page 32)
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