Principal’s Message

Dear Pine View School Parents, Students, and Friends:

Happy 2023-2024!  We had an amazing opening of the school year, and the first weeks were fantastic!  We hosted our new-to-Pine View Parent “coffees” sponsored by PVA, and we are so excited to have welcomed our new families to the Pine View tradition of excellence.  Thank you to all the parents who attended our Meet the Teacher events, the Open House Night, as well as the PVA-sponsored College Night!  We were excited to welcome nationally recognized speakers and authors, Brennan Barnard and Rick Clark (The Truth about College Admission: A Family Guide to Getting In and Staying Together) for an information night for parents of sophomores, juniors, and seniors.  They also shared insights and wisdom with our high school students during the day.  Thank you to PVA and an anonymous donor for sponsoring this event- another example of our parents and community going the extra degree for our students!

Also at the start of the year, I met with each class in the Ken Bowermeister Auditorium to share with all students a positive message about the 212 degree philosophy, our ethos that gifts are for sharing, and a brief motivational video.  It was such a wonderful opportunity to have each of our amazing classes together in the Auditorium, and our students continue to impress us with their attentiveness and deportment.  Teachers also have been reviewing positive expectations in classes, and each grade level assistant principal has reviewed the overall Student Code of Conduct with classes- please, review it with your son/daughter and reinforce those positive behavioral expectations at home.  Of particular importance this year are the sections on social media, Tik Tok, use of cellular devices, zero tolerance infractions, and the section on the appropriate use of Large Language Models (LLM) and artificial intelligence (AI) which was added this year.  Our School Resource Officer, Officer Eugene Williams, also wants to remind student and parent drivers that we need to follow the 15-mph speed limit during the drop-off/pick-up times on Old Venice Road, and as always, the speed limit is 5-mph on campus at all times.  Please, allow for few extra minutes if you need to visit campus as it takes time to sign-in and go through the safety Raptor System.  We take the safety and security of everyone on campus seriously, and are beginning our required drills of all types, and will communicate with families as we conduct those.

Congratulations to the entire Pine View School community for recently being ranked as the #6 Magnet School in the entire United States, and the #13 high school overall!  These incredible achievements only serve to reinforce the high-quality instruction our students receive by our amazing faculty, and the support they receive from our parents and PVA!  Our students’ achievements in this qualitatively different learning environment for gifted students is part of the uniqueness of Pine View, and we thank our entire community for their support in making this possible.  Rankings do go up and they go down, and there are multiple outside organizations, in addition to the Florida Department of Education, who issue state and national rankings- all using different metrics which change year-to-year.  Nonetheless, it is a public affirmation of the amazing work done in each of our classrooms and we appreciate our special community of learners!  We look forward to a special announcement in September, as well…we are not supposed to make any official announcements yet, but I promise it will be very special, and another recognition of the hard work by our students, teachers, and parents in continuing our tradition of excellence!

After a few delays, in the coming months, we will also be working toward putting AstroTurf on the elementary playground!  This is a significant investment by parents and PVA into the infrastructure of campus for our students and we are excited to see our elementary students play on a new and wonderful surface.  We also were able to open a brand-new elementary playground this fall, two new computer labs, a tv studio, a renovated engineering space, and new carpet and paint for Building 16!

We appreciate all the positive support from the Pine View School parents and our community, and look forward to another great year!  Go, Pythons!

Stephen P. Covert, Ph.D.

Principal

“It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.” — Herman Melville