Thomas Grover Middle School
Encyclopedia
Thomas R. Grover Middle School is located in Princeton Junction
in Mercer County
, New Jersey
, United States
. It is part of the West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District
, and serves grades six through eight. Grover's mascot is a jaguar, and its students are known as 'Jags'. The official colors are black and gold.
As of the 2005-06 school year, the school had an enrollment of 1,182 students and 110.6 classroom teachers (on an FTE
basis), for a student-teacher ratio
of 10.7.
for 3 years. Languages offered are Spanish
, French
, Mandarin Chinese
and German
.
for the middle school curriculum, there are 4 basic subjects, taught within a "team": IRLA (Integrated Reading and Language Arts), Mathematics, Social Studies, and Science. Students certified as "advanced" through a test from the third grade have a separate mathematics class, the Advanced and Enriched Mathematics program. These four classes are 52 minutes each, the other three classes (one of three world languages, a cycle class, and an elective, and Physical Education) have 40 minutes, and lunch & recess are 40 minutes. (An extra 4 minutes are built into first period for morning announcements).
As of the 2010 school year, "AE Flex" is given each day for 30 minutes. It is a time in which students can do homework, study, finish their work, and read, or go to PRISM. As a result, each team period is shortened to 52 minutes. (The past ones were 57 minutes.)
Programs that aid students with difficulties. These programs include the Literature Lab where students struggling in Language Arts
practice to improve their knowledge on that subject to normal, required standards, the Math Lab where students improve their mathematics skills, and the ACES class where children diagnosed with autism
learn and socialize with other autistic people in the school.
and MathCounts
.
(Addressing Middle School Issues by Giving Options to Students) are a group of hand picked 7th and 8th graders. These 30 or so students are picked from their 7th grade teachers and counselors because they show desirable traits. They help with 6th and 7th graders and also host fundraisers to raise money. For example the AMIGOS work with the SUNSHINE Fund, Help us Help our own. This fund is one of Grover's "charities" that give money to the unfortunate families of Grover by selling paper paws and hanging them around the cafeteria.
Princeton Junction, New Jersey
Princeton Junction is also a New Jersey Transit and Amtrak station on the Northeast Corridor line.Princeton Junction is a census-designated place and unincorporated area located within West Windsor Township, in Mercer County, New Jersey...
in Mercer County
Mercer County, New Jersey
As of the census of 2000, there were 350,761 people, 125,807 households, and 86,303 families residing in the county. The population density was 1,552 people per square mile . There were 133,280 housing units at an average density of 590 per square mile...
, New Jersey
New Jersey
New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...
, United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
. It is part of the West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District
West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District
West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District is a regional school district in New Jersey, serving students from West Windsor Township and Plainsboro Township ....
, and serves grades six through eight. Grover's mascot is a jaguar, and its students are known as 'Jags'. The official colors are black and gold.
As of the 2005-06 school year, the school had an enrollment of 1,182 students and 110.6 classroom teachers (on an FTE
Full-time equivalent
Full-time equivalent , is a unit to measure employed persons or students in a way that makes them comparable although they may work or study a different number of hours per week. FTE is often used to measure a worker's involvement in a project, or to track cost reductions in an organization...
basis), for a student-teacher ratio
Student-teacher ratio
Student-teacher ratio refers to the number of teachers in a school or university with respect to the number of students who attend the institution. For example, a student-teacher ratio of 10:1 indicates that there are 10 students for every one teacher...
of 10.7.
Facilities
The two-story school building was built in 1999. The building, designed by Faridy Thorne Fraytak Architects/Planners, with 175000 square feet (16,258 m²), was built to accommodate as many as 1,150 students. The first principal of the school, Steven Mayer, served as principal from 1999 to the end of the 2006 school year.Awards and recognition
TGMS has won a large number of notable awards.- In May 2008 and 2010, the Thomas R. Grover Choir took home 1st place trophies and best overall choir at a music showcase in Williamsburg, VA.
- In April 2005, Ming-Ming Tran, a sixth-grade student at the school, won the $25,000 first-place national championship of the Reader's Digest National Word Power ChallengeReader's Digest National Word Power ChallengeThe Reader's Digest National Word Power Challenge is an annual vocabulary competition in the United States for youth in sixth, seventh, or eighth grade. It is sponsored by Reader's Digest magazine.- School :jbyf give students 25-question multiple-choice tests...
, a vocabulary competition. A total of 1.6 million fourth through eighth grade students nationwide participated in the event. As of recently, she remains the youngest award winner.
- In March 2007, Sarah Antony, a seventh-grade student at the school won the New Jersey State Championship in the fifth annual Reader's Digest National Word Power Challenge.
- Michael Wu, won first place in the 2007 New Jersey state contest of the National MathCounts Competition. Both Michael Wu (second place) and Ming-Ming Tran (third place) were on the New Jersey state team competing for the National MathCounts Competition in 2006. In 2000, TRG student Venkat Chandar won first place and Dan Le, also a student at the school, won third place, while the school's team coach, Cecelia Jancola, was selected to coach the New Jersey state team in the national competition. In 2009, Alexander Clifton became the third Grover student to follow up a second place finish in 7th grade with a first place finish in 8th grade. He joins Michael Wu (2006–07) and Ian Frankel (2003–04). The MathCounts team has taken 1st place in New Jersey 7 of its first 10 years in existenceMathCounts historical resultsThis is a list of historical results in all areas of the National Mathcounts competition.-Countdown Champions:The champions of the Countdown Round are considered the individual national champions of Mathcounts.*1984: Michael Edwards, Texas...
, and coach Dr. Alyce Z. Doehner has led the New Jersey state team to 2 national 3rd place finishes.
- The school also hosts the Future Problem Solving Scenario Writing program which is offered in conjunction with the Future Problem Solving program. The 2007 state winners in the junior division were all from TGMS: Winston (Sean) Wu (first place), Ishar Keshu (second place) and Amani Saeed (third place). In 2008, Jyotsna Suresh won 2nd place at the international competition for the junior division.In 2010, a 6th grader and a 7th grader took second place and honorable mention, respectively, in the state for the junior division.
- The 2009 Science Bowl Team of Elias Wang, Ikshita Singh, Rishabh Singh, and Alexander Clifton took first place in the regional Science Bowl at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Coached by Rae McKenna, an 8th grade science teacher, the team competed in the National Middle School Science Bowl Competition in Washington D.C. and was ranked 7th place.
Curriculum
Grover Middle School (GMS) students take classes in music, art, performing arts, media, health, computer, life skills, and technology. Students also participate in choir which is Spotlight for girls and Encore for boys which meets every other day, orchestra, and band programs that provide group and individual instruction. The elective program includes a class in which students produce their own television program via an intra-school cable network. There is also "AE Flex," an addition to the school schedule. During AE Flex, students get to catch up on work, and take a break from the busy school day. Some students also can go to PRISM. Flex is for 30 minutes and stands for flexible.World languages
Students in Grover are required to pick one world languageLanguage
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
for 3 years. Languages offered are Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
, French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, Mandarin Chinese
Chinese language
The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
and German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
.
Band
The band program at GMS is directed by Glenn Kaufmann and Jim Fultz. In 2011, the Eighth Grade Wind Ensemble won first place in the AA division with a rating of superior at the Music in the Parks festival at Six Flags Great Adventure. To visit the band page, visit http://web.mac.com/groverbandman/Site/Welcome.html. Grover currently uses Essential Elements for a practice book. The band and the orchestra perform together, and the band is actually required to wear the TGMS Music shirt. The band is consisting of about 200- 300 kids at this moment, the 2011- 2012 school year. A day and B day bands are actually a band. They rehearse separately but perform together.Electives
Seventh graders choose one extracurricular class, and eighth graders choose two extracurricular classes. In sixth and seventh grade, students have their electives every other day (see A day and B day) and have physical education class in place of the days that do not have electives. Eighth grade students have electives opposite each other in somewhat complicated 2-day schedules.Cycles
Cycles are classes that each student is assigned to every year. Each cycle lasts an equal fraction of the year. For example, in the 7th grade, each cycle lasts approximately thirty days, and the subjects are Technology, Health, Music, Computers, Art, and Life Skills. Study Hall however, has been taken out and replaced with technology (woodshop).PRISM
PRISM (Performance Revealing Individual Student Magic) is the school's Gifted and Talented program, currently taught by Mrs. Cohen. Unlike most Gifted and Talented Programs, there is no entrance test. Programs that PRISM offers are Future Problem Solving (FPS), National History Day, ROGATE, and Cognetics. The first two are competitions and the latter two are expositions.Student division system
The students are divided by 'teams' that go from T to S. The number of the grade of the team is first, followed by the letter. Teams T-S consist of 4 teachers and at least 1 special education teacher. The teachers teach Math, Science, Social Studies, and IRLA.A Day and B Day Classes
A and B Day Classes are 40-minute classes which alternate every day. Throughout the year, students go to their A and B Day Classes depending upon which of the two days it is. For grades 6 and 7, there is one time slot per day for A and B day classes, for physical education and an elective. 8th graders' schedules have two A and B day class time slots, with a combination of cycle, physical education, and two electives. On A and B days, the designated classes would alternate.Schedules
Since the district combined reading and language artsLanguage arts
Traditionally, the primary divisions in the language arts are Literature and Language, where language in this case refers to both linguistics, and specific languages....
for the middle school curriculum, there are 4 basic subjects, taught within a "team": IRLA (Integrated Reading and Language Arts), Mathematics, Social Studies, and Science. Students certified as "advanced" through a test from the third grade have a separate mathematics class, the Advanced and Enriched Mathematics program. These four classes are 52 minutes each, the other three classes (one of three world languages, a cycle class, and an elective, and Physical Education) have 40 minutes, and lunch & recess are 40 minutes. (An extra 4 minutes are built into first period for morning announcements).
As of the 2010 school year, "AE Flex" is given each day for 30 minutes. It is a time in which students can do homework, study, finish their work, and read, or go to PRISM. As a result, each team period is shortened to 52 minutes. (The past ones were 57 minutes.)
Special Education Programs
The school has Special educationSpecial education
Special education is the education of students with special needs in a way that addresses the students' individual differences and needs. Ideally, this process involves the individually planned and systematically monitored arrangement of teaching procedures, adapted equipment and materials,...
Programs that aid students with difficulties. These programs include the Literature Lab where students struggling in Language Arts
Language arts
Traditionally, the primary divisions in the language arts are Literature and Language, where language in this case refers to both linguistics, and specific languages....
practice to improve their knowledge on that subject to normal, required standards, the Math Lab where students improve their mathematics skills, and the ACES class where children diagnosed with autism
Autism
Autism is a disorder of neural development characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, and by restricted and repetitive behavior. These signs all begin before a child is three years old. Autism affects information processing in the brain by altering how nerve cells and their...
learn and socialize with other autistic people in the school.
Clubs and extracurricular activities
The school has many after school programs, also known as clubs, ranging from Homework tutorial to Debate Club. All clubs must be supervised by a teacher. A club usually has a range of about 20-25 students. Most clubs are applied for by the students in Autumn and Spring via paper, although some may require special nomination, like First Period Paws. Other activities include Science OlympiadScience Olympiad
Science Olympiad is an American elementary, middle, or high school team competition which tests knowledge of various science topics and engineering ability. Over 6,200 teams from 49 U.S. states compete each year. Most teams compete in three levels of competition: regionals, states, and nationals...
and MathCounts
MathCounts
Mathcounts is a middle school mathematics competition held in the United States. Its founding sponsors include the CNA Foundation, the National Society of Professional Engineers, and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. The competition is designed for sixth, seventh, and eighth...
.
Jaguar Journal
"The Jaguar Journal" is a magazine published once a marking period, and is produced and edited by students. However, newspaper-type issues only cost 25 cents.First Period Paws - Grover’s TV Station
First Period Paws(FPP)is a video production and broadcasting program that provides students with the opportunity to learn the art of communication, the fundamentals of video production and the basics of broadcast writing by creating and presenting live broadcasts that are seen by both students and teachers throughout the school every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning.This program teaches kids how to use editing machines to make their own videos that can sometimes be seen on the broadcast show.AMIGOS
The AMIGOSCompetitions
GMS is an active competitor in multiple academic competitions, including Science Olympiad, Science Bowl, MathCounts and Future Problem Solving.Science Bowl
Only 8th graders are allowed to participate in Science Bowl. However, these 5 selected students (4 on the main team, 1 backup) are only accepted by recognition by teachers, and then through invitation.Math Counts
All grades may participate in this competition in the form of a club. In order to take an active role, you must first make the math counts team by performing well on a series of problems given to you by Dr. Doehner.Science Olympiad
All grades may participate in this competition. It takes place every Tuesdays and Thursdays and his headed by Rae McKenna and Andrew Maskell. This is by testing only and once in, more tests are given in order to determine the competition team.FPS(Future Problem Solving)
Part of the school's PRISM program, students take an active role in solving problems of the future. Only 7th and 8th graders may participate. No requirements as to who may join. There are multiple teams with at most 6 people on one team.Dr. Doehner
The Advanced and Enriched (A and E) math program in the 6th and 8th grades is taught by Dr. Alyce Doehner.External links
- Thomas Grover Middle School
- Data for the West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District, National Center for Education StatisticsNational Center for Education StatisticsThe National Center for Education Statistics is the part of the United States Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences that collects, analyzes, and publishes statistics on education and public school district finance information in the United States...
- Thomas R. Grover Middle School statistics
- TeamYOA