San Marcos High School Guiding Principles

Collaborative Leadership and Professional Learning Communities

• The principal will provide leadership in the high school community by building and maintaining a vision, direction, and focus for student learning.
• San Marcos High School will be a learning community for the entire community. As such, the school will promote the use of Personal Learning Plans for each educator and provide the resources to ensure that the principal, teachers, and other staff members can address their own learning and professional development needs as they relate to improved student learning.

Personalization and the School Environment

• San Marcos High School will strive to create smaller learning units in which anonymity is banished.
• Each student will have a Personal Plan for Progress that will be reviewed often to ensure that the high school takes individual needs into consideration and to allow students, within reasonable parameters, to design their own methods for learning in an effort to meet high standards.
• San Marcos High School will engage students’ families as partners in the students’ education.
• The San Marcos High School community, which cannot be values-neutral, will advocate and model a set of core values essential in a democratic and civil society.

Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment

• San Marcos High School has identified a set of essential content standards – in literature and language, writing, mathematics, social studies, science, world languages, and the arts – in which students must demonstrate achievement in order to graduate.
• San Marcos High School has reorganized the traditional department structure in order to create teams and integrate the school’s curriculum to the extent possible and emphasize depth over breadth of coverage.
• The content of the curriculum, where practical, should connect to real-life applications of knowledge and skills to help students link their education to the future.
• The academic program will extend beyond the high school campus to take advantage of learning opportunities outside the four walls of the building.
• Teachers will know and be able to use a variety of strategies and settings that identify and accommodate individual learning styles and engage students.
• Teachers will be adept at acting as coaches and facilitators to promote more active involvement of students in their own learning.
• Recognizing that education is a continuum, San Marcos High School will reach out to elementary and middle level schools as well as institutions of higher education to better serve the articulation of student learning and to ensure that at each stage of the continuum stakeholders understand what will be required of students at the succeeding stage.
• San Marcos High School will develop a strategic plan to make technology integral to curriculum, instruction, and assessment, accommodating different learning styles and helping teachers to individualize and improve the learning process.

Important Links :

Principal's Message

SMHS Mission

Guiding Principles

Expected Student Learning Results

Driving Directions

School Accountability Report Card