After our school's Warm Woodland Welcome in August, and Fall Open House in September got our school community activity schedule off to great start, our school's well-attended and much enjoyed Fall Harvest Festival in October and Family Turkey Dinner in November kept the ball rolling, our WHS-PTO Polar Express Night in December has our school community partnership activities gathering steam. Truly, the frequency and pace of school activities that promote the growth of our school community continues to increase.
Community building efforts for students, families, staff, and the greater Laconia community (as outlined in the paragraph above)is the first of a three-tiered approach to continuous improvement of our school's climate and culture. 'School Climate' has to do with how our school looks and feels, how safe it is, and how comfortable and happy our school community members are when they are here.
In addition to our multi-layered community-building efforts, we continue to focus our attention to our ongoing character development program for our students. These efforts take many forms and are most frequently lead by our teachers and our entire school staff through our commitment to the Responsive Classroom Approach to help promote social skills and peaceful problem-solving, guidance classes and friendship groups offered by our school counselor, and DARE classes offered to our 5th Graders by the Laconia Police Department. Our goal is to help develop Woodland students who are smart, capable, and good! It is many of these 'soft skills' that will have a great deal to do with the success and happiness that our students will experience as they further their education and pursue their families and careers.
The last part of our school climate improvement initiative is a concentrated effort to promote student citizenship. In this effort we have two major components: developing a school-wide behavior expectation system (PBIS)that creates and promotes a positive code of conduct for our school community, and a program to address and support students who are challenged with persistent behaviors that are contrary to the safe and orderly conduct of our school.
Here is a link to the 'Prezi' slide show that I'll be sharing with the WHS-PTO meeting on Tuesday evening, December 13th, at 6:30pm. Please join us if you would like to learn more about what we are working on to further improve our school climate and all that we intend to do for our students beyond teaching academics.
