We had a great week at the Heart full of activities and fun events and trust me...there is much more to come in the weeks ahead! Be sure to look over this newsletter carefully to stay up to date on all the fun things we have planned. The highlight of last week for me was definitely the 6th grade carnival! It was so great to see hundreds of 6th graders just enjoy being a kid! Thank you to all of the teachers, parents and students that helped to make the carnival a huge success! This is just a quick reminder that there is no school for students tomorrow, February 20th. We will be having a district professional development day for our teachers/staff.

Just like you, we have begun getting ready for next year. 8th graders have received and returned their enrollment packets for SFHS and are being exposed to all of the options they have available when it comes to electives. Thank you to SFHS for coming out and sharing information about their programs! So far we've had show choir, agriculture, football, pom, and ROTC come and share. I'm sure that we'll have many other programs visit in the near future. Our counselors are hard at work getting things ready for enrollment for our underclassman too. Be sure to reference the graphic below for the specific dates.

Parent/teacher conferences will be held the evening of Feb 23rd from 4:30pm - 8:00pm. This conference will be much like our Fall conferences. Feel free to come and go at your convenience. Teachers will be available for 5-7 minute conferences to discuss your students Spring semester progress. If you are unable to make it, please know that as parents you are welcome to reach out to any and all of your student's teachers at any point in the semester. Just shoot them a quick phone call or email. Additionally, I would like to personally invite you to our FREE spaghetti dinner taking place alongside our conferences! Stop by the Thunderhawk cafeteria from 5pm - 7pm and allow us to serve you!

We have dedicated this upcoming week to celebrating Black History Month! Although our students have been learning about black history since the start of February in their advisory classes, this is the week we will cap things off with a bang! We have fun week of dress up days planned and will end our week with grade level assemblies! We have invited our feeder elementaries and programs from SFHS to come and partake! Our assemblies will feature performances from our students which include dancing, singing, stepping, poetry reading, artistic displays AND...we will welcome Edmond Mayor Darrell Davis to be our keynote speaker! This will be a true collaboration of our Santa Fe vertical and we are so excited!

Lastly, our students are starting to hear more about the activities we will host for Double "PUP" Dare Week! "People Uplifting People" is Heartland's mini version of Santa Fe's Double Wolf Dare Week! "PUP" week will be a raising money for EPS's common thread, City Care, and our goal is to raise $3,000! Click HERE to learn more about City Care OKC. Also, please be sure to click the button below to learn more about the activities we will host and how you can contribute!

As always, should you ever have any questions, ideas or suggestions please feel free to reach out to our office! Let's have a wonderful week, Thunderhawks!

WE ARE...HEARTLAND!

Respectfully,

Veronica Johnson

Principal, Heartland Middle School

405-340-2972

The stars were always within reach for Katherine Johnson. Using her mathematics skills, she helped NASA send astronauts to the moon and return them safely home. She also overcame racial and gender hurdles that helped make giant leaps for humankind.

Johnson was born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, on August 26, 1918. Math came easy to her, but she worked hard to master geometry and algebra. She started high school when she was just 10 years old (most kids are in fourth or fifth grade when they’re 10!) and college when she was 15. After she graduated with honors at 18, Johnson taught Black students math. She later enrolled in graduate school at West Virginia University to study math but left early to raise a family and return to teaching.

In 1952, when she was 34 years old, she learned about jobs for Black women with mathematics and computing skills at the Langley laboratory at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, which would later become NASA. She and the other women worked as “human computers,” figuring out the difficult calculations needed for spaceflight. During her time there, she broke racial barriers, like using the bathroom that was supposed to be for white women only.

One of her biggest accomplishments at NASA was helping calculate the trajectory, or path, of the country’s first human spaceflight in 1961, making sure astronaut Alan B. Shepard, Jr., had a safe trip. A year later she helped figure out John Glenn’s orbit of the planet, another American first. In 1969, she calculated the trajectories of Neil Armstrong’s historic mission to the moon on Apollo 11.