Transformation Begins Here
Every student has their own educational journey. Create your path at NOVA Middle School.
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Choose Knowledge. Experience Wonder.
NOVA Middle School is South Sound’s intellectual home for highly capable learners. With our core values of connection, commitment, intention, and joy, NOVA’s teachers invest in each student’s potential and individuality. For more than 25 years, we have fostered the joyful pursuit of intellectual, social, and emotional expansion through a challenging curriculum that nourishes highly capable students to develop identity, self-empowerment, and community.
Connection
Connection is one of NOVA's core values. Always important to us, it has taken on an even greater meaning during this time of distance learning.
Commitment
Our faculty and staff are committed to providing a distance learning education that is engaging, student-centered, and responsive.
Distance Learning at NOVA
When Governor Inslee gave the order to close Washington schools in March 2020, we were ready. For students, that meant no interruption of their classes as NOVA moved its program online. With over 90% approval rating from our parents and students, we built on our spring success to design the Enhanced Distance Learning program that launched September 2020.
NOVA’s Enhanced Distance Learning program doesn’t just include the core academic subjects you’d expect. All the elements that have made NOVA so beloved for three decades have been adapted to our current educational moment. Our program embeds social emotional learning activities, and provides a broad range of enrichment classes to give students a choice in their education. These include music, art, robotics, and many more.
The relationship building that is so key to the NOVA experience has been intentionally redesigned for the online environment. Students connect with teachers and peers in real-time classes and structured study halls, while also having ample off-line time during the school day. Teachers are available during office hours for direct interaction, and students benefit from grade-level seminars that provide social engagement and bond them with their peers.
Education is relational, not transactional. Our preference will always be to have students on campus. But in this time of pandemic, our highest priority is maintaining the health and safety of our students, teachers, and community. We believe that our Enhanced Distance Learning program can fully deliver on our mission, while contributing to the greater good of reducing the incidence of COVID-19 in Thurston County.