Mr. Jesse Encapera

          I am honored and excited for my third year as Assistant Principal for Trailside Middle School.  I will be transitioning into the role of overseeing testing during the 2021 - 2022 school year.  I was a member of the Pioneer Pack at Trailside during my first year in Loudoun County and helped open the school during the 2014 – 2015 school year.  I graduated from West Virginia University’s Five Year Benedum Collaborative, where I specialized in Secondary Mathematics.  After graduation, I spent nine years teaching at Millbrook High School in Winchester, Virginia.  My primary focus for my last seven years in the classroom was Geometry, but I also taught Algebra I, Algebra II, and Trigonometry.  I also earned a master’s degree from George Mason University in Education Leadership as a member of a cohort program that ended in the Summer of 2012.  I worked as the Sixth Grade Dean at Harper Park Middle School in Leesburg for the 2015 – 2016 school year and was an Assistant Principal at Farmwell Station Middle School from 2016 – June 2019.
          I am originally from California, Pennsylvania, which is a small town in the Southwestern corner of the state.  I moved to Virginia after completing my studies at WVU, and my wife joined me after completing her studies at California University of Pennsylvania the following December.  We have two wonderful children - Ava and Nicolas.  We are all HUGE Steeler fans.  When I am not working, I enjoy spending time with my family, watching the Steelers and ANY college football game (especially Penn State, Auburn, and WVU!), and watching movies.  I was the Head Freshman Football Coach at Heritage High School (GO PRIDE!) for three seasons (2013 - 2015) and contributed on Friday nights by tracking the team's statistics and processing the team's game film until the end of the 2018 season.  I now enjoy taking my children to different games on Friday nights.   I also enjoy doing escape rooms, especially with my family.  We have completed two as a family so far, and we plan to do two more before the year is out during vacation.  The picture above is after we completed an escape room with a theme based on the Nickelodeon cartoon Rugrats this past summer, and it truly was a whole family effort.
          I hope to make your children's experiences at Trailside Middle School beneficial and help them successfully progress through middle school.  I have experience implementing the Blended Learning model of instruction in my mathematics classrooms for my last three years as a teacher.  I have included links to my Algebra I and Geometry lesson videos as additional resources for our students.  I am a big supporter of Personalized Learning, Project Based Learning, and Performance Based Assessments.  As a teacher, I wanted to help my students learn the content that I taught in as many ways possible, as they may be the most important for their future success in mathematics.  The problem-solving processes learned in Algebra I and Geometry will be vital for their future mathematics courses.  As an administrator, I hope to continue using my classroom experiences to help the students and teachers at Trailside continue to successfully incorporate the Personalized Learning teaching strategies into their lessons and classwork.  I hope to help make the students' time in the classroom full of positive and valuable learning experiences.