We continue to strive for excellence here at Ladera Palma!  We are proud of our status as a California Distinguished School and endeavor daily to maintain our high levels of academic excellence.  We continuously challenge ourselves with refining our professional practices to ensure that we are providing the optimal learning environment for all of our learners. We believe that we must continually strive to build higher quality educational programs and practices for our students.  Our goal is always to help support our students to progress from their current academic levels to higher academic performance. To this end, the Ladera Palma staff is working hard to keep our ExCEL reading model strong and focused.  This model serves students in targeted skill areas and provides a response to intervention for students at all levels on a daily basis. 
Our staff is a tight-knit group of professionals that meet weekly to work together in their Professional Learning Communities (PLC’s) to continually ask four critical questions regarding their students:

• What is it we want our students to know
  and be able to do?
• How will we know when the children
  have learned it?
• How will we respond when students
  do not know it?
• How will we respond when students
  already know it?

The success of our students’ achievement lies in the answers to these four questions.  Teachers collaborate to develop goals; work together on common goals for all students at a particular grade level; discuss how they can and do differentiate instruction to meet the needs of all students; share student work samples to collectively determine needed interventions; share best practices that impact student learning; continually monitor student progress; and maintain a strong emphasis on results by celebrating successes large and small. 
Our API has continued to grow to 887 and we are very proud of it as it is the result of teacher commitment, collaboration, and caring for students and their success that lead us there.  We look forward to the rest of the school year with the anticipation of more success for all.

Rosamaria Murillo, Principal
rmurillo@lhcsd.k12.ca.us

Rosamaria Murillo, Principal