Sailor Community,

Thank you for taking the time to explore our campus website. My name is Larry de la Cruz and I am the proud principal of Burnet Middle School. Prior to coming to Burnet in February of 2023, I was the associate principal at Navarro ECHS, Burnet’s main feeder high school. My vision for the school can be broken into two different categories, academics and electives

For academics, we are committed to coaching our teachers to be the best instructional educators in this district. We do this by keeping our leadership team focused on instructional practices. It’s not just knowing what to teach, but how to teach it. One campus goal is to implement engaging strategies into our lesson plans. This means more movement in the classroom, more opportunities for students to talk, and more opportunities for our students to engage in collaborative work. To meet this goal, we are using Kagan strategies in our classrooms. In addition, there is a campus wide focus on literacy. Every teacher on our campus is being taught skills on how to incorporate intentional reading and writing strategies into their lesson cycle. Lastly, we have learned a lot from our elementary teacher that small group instruction in the classroom is a great way to teach students in a smaller setting during class time. We are committed to offering small group instruction in all our math and ELA classrooms.

The second category is electives. I believe that all students should be given opportunities to find their passion by engaging in different CTE classes, fine arts, and athletics. We offer CTE principles classes in agriculture, human services, culinary, business systems, AV Tech, digital media, and career discovery. In fine arts we offer choir, mariachi, guitar, art, dance, band, and orchestra. In athletics we offer football, volleyball, soccer, basketball, track, cross country, and tennis. Other electives we offer are Spanish and AVID. We make a big effort to encourage our students to take as many elective classes as possible that they have a passion for. Middle schoolers don’t always like to perform on stage or on the field, but we help them break those barriers by helping them build mental confidence and skill in whatever they set their minds to.

I hope that everyone in our community has an opportunity to engage with our school and our students. We truly have an amazing community that has so much to offer. I encourage all our parents to join our PTA and to come to all our school sponsored events.

Go Sailors!

Principal de la Cruz