The Long Beach Board of Education has approved the appointment of Dr. Michele Natali as Principal of Long Beach Middle School, effective July 1, 2011. She replaces Audrey Goropeuschek, who resigned to pursue other interests.

Dr. Natali has served as Vice Principal of Long Beach Middle School since July of 2007. During her tenure as Vice Principal, she was instrumental in restructuring the NYS assessment process, aligning it with brain research. She has also enhanced the school’s social and emotional literacy by promoting character education programs such as Character Counts, which has expanded as a district-wide initiative. Dr. Natali was instrumental in implementing the Foreign Language Exploratory (FLEX) program, so that sixth graders would be able to make educated choices about which language to pursue. She has served on the district’s Curriculum Committee, the Superintendent’s Conference Day Planning Committee, and has organized the District Spelling Bee.
   
Dr. Natali came to Long Beach after 15 years in the classroom.  She started teaching in parochial and private schools in New York City before teaching in the Garden City Middle School, where she taught sixth-grade math and ELA. Before embarking on her career as an educator, Dr Natali worked as a project engineer at Trans World Airlines and as a facilities planner at Ford Motor Company. She earned her master’s and doctorate degrees from St. John’s University and her bachelor’s degree from Cornell University.

Dr. Natali is a member of the National Middle School Association, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Dr. Natali said she is excited to embark in this new position. “I look forward to working with parents and teachers to ensure that the needs of all of our students are being met.”