The Tiger Den

Dear HMS Learning Community,

We made it! Congratulations on the successful conclusion of the 2024-2025 school year! Yay! This month was a sprint to the finish line. I cannot possibly include all of the exciting events from the last few weeks of school, but I will certainly include some highlights!

Although the rainy weather threw a wrench into our Field Day plans, we still had an entertaining day. Thank you to the Encore team for coordinating the activities at Morrison Field that our 7th and 8th grade students were able to enjoy. Another thank you to our Student Council members and their advisors for spending months planning and coordinating our first "Field Day" competition at Morgan Field. Our 5th and 6th graders were able to participate in the afternoon. A highlight of the day was the Kona Ice truck provided by the PTA. Thank you!

The year culminated with our 8th grade promotion ceremony. Thank you all for making it a success! As we say "farewell" to our graduating 8th grade class, we wish them well in high school and we know they will go on to do wonderful things. Please don't be a stranger! Remember your old friends back at the middle school and come to visit. Someday, I hope to see many of you back here as peer leaders and teacher cadets!

Yours in education,

Jessica Swaim

Congratulations to our 8th Grade Students who earned HIGH HONOR ROLL throughout their four years at HMS!

Congratulations to our 8th Grade Students who earned HONOR ROLL all four years at HMS!

(Above) Students in 6th grade ELA worked on developing original games based on the novel Holes by Louis Sachar. Students had a lot of fun creating these and experiencing one another's games.

Some of our 5th & 6th Grade students earned a "Water Balloon" fight for mastering their math facts!

June is always an exciting and fun month! Our character trait of the month was generosity, and there is truly a generous spirit around HMS as students commemorate their year together! The generosity of the HEA, PTA, and the HFEE (Hackettstown Foundation for Educational Excellence) was apparent as students had a Student of the Month/Tiger Award pizza party and some lucky Tiger Tag prize winners walked away with gift cards or other goodies for displaying the character traits of the month.

We had our June Grade Level Meetings and our last of the year Teacher vs. Student challenge. Students and teachers alike had a great time balancing pizza boxes on their hands, and trying to get their opponents to wobble and drop their pizza boxes. Ask your student(s) who won the Teacher vs. Student challenges for 2024-2025! The laughs and community-building are apparent during each Grade Level Meeting. In 8th grade, students congratulated their peers for High Academic Honors, Academic Honors, and for other incredible 8th grade awards. Students truly enjoy honoring each other for their amazing efforts at HMS.

We concluded our second year of Students With Important Messages (SWIMs). SWIMs students held their monthly planning meeting, oversaw a lunch time school-wide activity, and had a pizza party. During lunch, our SWIMs students had their grade level contribute to a playlist of their favorite songs to help each other through tough times. There is strong student engagement as SWIMs students run these inspiring activities. We cannot wait to see what our SWIMs students will plan for next year!

Thank you for your commitment to your children and for supporting our School Counseling program. We appreciate you and your wonderful students! To our 8th grade families that are moving on, thank you for sharing your amazing students with us. We will miss them (and you), but we know they are destined for great things! It has been an honor being a School Counselor at HMS this school year. Have a restful and fun summer with your family.

Chromebooks: Students will be keeping their chromebooks with them over the summer. Please remind them to take care of them and use them responsibly. The network will flag content and searches that it deems inappropriate.

5th Grade Parents: All students who are starting 6th grade next year as 11-year-olds require the Tdap and Meningococcal vaccines for school enrollment. PLEASE provide these records to Mrs. LaPlante by mid-August. Students who arrive to school on the first day without these vaccination records will need to be sent home and we want to avoid any such inconvenience.

Questions? Concerns? Reach out to Mrs. LaPlante at tlaplante@hackettstown.org.

8/29: Second student day (Early Dismissal)

8/30: District closed

9/2: District Closed (Labor Day)

Hackettstown Middle School

Asst. Principal: Mr. Ryan Bartol, rbartol@hackettstown.org

Main Office: Mrs. Brenda Carkhuff, bcarkhuff@hackettstown.org

Website: https://hms.hackettstown.org/
Location: 500 Washington Street, Hackettstown NJ

Phone: (908) 852-8554