We can see more clearly than ever, heading into year 2020, in Learning Supports and Alternatives of Woodland School District! Like last year, we are fortunate to have a “point person” from each program to provide us with a brief narrative of their recent and/or upcoming work. While I make sure the information is understood, supported, and endorsed by me, this report would not be as current, contextual, or useful without their input! I’d like to recognize these point people here:
Family and Community Resource Center
August and September at the FCRC, we have been coming alongside families in need to get them set up for the new school year! We’ve helped provide:
Our current projects are setting up our room of resources and applying for a Homeless Student Stability Grant. Our community partners have been very helpful, and families have been served well and many have expressed gratitude!
Highly Capable Program
This week the WMS Robotics students are working on designing and building components that go into a successful “rocket”. Students are practicing our research skills and learning the engineering design model. Each rocket is built from an ordinary 2 liter bottle filled with water under air pressure. This is a design challenge used in the Science Olympiad competition of past years. In a couple more school days we will be testing our hard work by launching these rockets on the WMS football field!
K-12 Attendance
Stacy Mouat has been busy updating truancy files, following up on students who have withdrawn to make sure they are enrolled in some type of educational program (if not Woodland), going through court reviews and updating paperwork, and mailing home BECCA notices. Stacy has mailed letters and provided handouts on the importance of attendance to local medical providers in hopes they will partner with us on messaging the importance of attendance through that venue.
The CHOICES training (drop-out prevention) has been scheduled for Woodland Middle School 8th graders this coming November 5 and 6, 2019. Fibre Federal Credit Union is continuing to partner with us, paying for the program and offering the training. Stacy Gould from WHS will be helping with parts of this presentation for the students!
Stacy Mouat will be attending the BECCA conference again this year. The conference will be held in Ellensburg, November 7 and 8, 2019.
K-12 Nurse Services
Health staff are very busy caring for students daily for minor and major injuries/illnesses. The start of every school year is extremely busy learning about our new enrolled students and their health needs, ensuring parents bring emergency medications/orders and creating health plans.
Before the start of the school year our nursing team also works with our returning students’ families to ensure we receive all emergency medications and updated medication orders prior to the first day of school. This is a major task and we are proud to say that our nurses and families set the standard for getting this paperwork in order prior to school starting.
The State adopted a new law regarding the MMR vaccine, no longer allowing “personal exemptions”. At the end of the 2018-19 school year we had 137 students with exemptions for the MMR vaccine. The nursing team sent letters home in June 2019 informing parents of the new law. Then the nursing team made phone calls to parents to verify the information had been received and answered any questions they may have. Channtel reports: “I'm so pleased to say we had ZERO students excluded from school due to MMR non-compliance.”
Channtel and the SLP's teamed up together to conduct hearing and vision screening throughout the district (September 9th-11th) for all the required grade levels (K, 1, 2, 3, 5, and 7). They will complete additional screening for students who were absent on their screening day, as well as any students that failed their first hearing screening.
LAP Program
All of our K-4 schools — Columbia, North Fork, and Yale — are administering the Acadience and iReady ELA assessments as well as iReady Math. Intervention specialists and teachers are digging into the data to determine the best possible placement for intervening with students who are missing foundational reading skills. Each building uses different instructional materials for intervention, but the menu of choices is research based and effective. Students have begun receiving core instruction in their classrooms as well as additional instructional time and materials to firm up missing skills. Students who are missing foundational reading skills will have their progress monitored every two weeks to determine their response to intervention.
Lewis River Academy
We are back in full swing, and have hit the ground running! We are happy to have Annika Dukes back with us again, after being off for an extended leave of absence last school year.
This year we have had difficulty with our largest curriculum provider, K12. Our families and our teachers have been receiving incorrect material, wrong grade level material, material going to the wrong addresses, as well as material missing altogether. We are working with this provider to try to find solutions to these issues; we are also looking into other options.
This school year we have changed up our schedule a bit. On Mondays and Fridays, we will have learning labs, with teacher tutoring available. Teri Retter will work Monday through Wednesday and Annika Dukes will work Wednesday through Friday.
Our current student count is 41, with 28 being elementary and 13 in middle school.
TEAM High School
Over 30 students graduated from TEAM last June, which was 75% of our seniors. We are starting the year off with about 70 students and anticipate those numbers rising quickly. TEAM plans to graduate another 30 in 2020!
We welcome a new TEAM team member, Suzy Davis. Suzy is proving to be a great addition to our “TEAM Team”. Suzy works really well with our students and they love her already. She has fabulous ideas, and is a great coworker to us all. Her new ideas and strategies have already helped us streamline our check in/out process, giving staff and parents the information they need to support their students with school work and attendance.
This is a great start to our school year at TEAM HS!
Title Program
The WMS Title program is well underway for the year in the following areas:
Transitional Bilingual Intervention Program
Per state guidelines, ach of our students in the ELL program participated in the state mandated test, the ELP21, to start this school year. We are pleased to report we have 36 ELL students scoring proficiency status in our ELPA21 testing! We are looking forward to how many students successfully will exit our ELL program this year!
We expected to have 20 newcomers over the course of 2019-20 and we have more than 20 already, during our first month at school! Esmeralda and Maribel continue assisting our ELL families, providing support for our offices and teaching staff.
Special Services
This year, Woodland School District's first Special Education September count is 355 students, which is 10 students over the amount of students we had last year at this time. Also, this year we have 4 times the amount of Child Find referrals as we had last year. There's a steady increase of students being identified and qualifying for Special Education Services, which shows us the importance of our collaborating efforts to partner with early learning programs within the community.
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We are grateful to you, our Board of Directors, for your interest in and support of each of these programs!
~Jake