Meeting Needs During Post-Service

Our educators are hard at work this week! All PreK-8 educators were together in one building on Monday and Tuesday  for a variety of opportunities. The mornings were spent in PLCs, allowing grade level teams, departments, and other cohorts to have time together. for reflection, planning, and working with data. 

In the afternoons, there was a selection of workshop offerings. 

SEL and Mental Health: Annie O'Shaughnessy facilitated Resting in a Community of Care and Debby Haskins hosted Healing Your Heart. 

Technology: Options included Getting Organized (anything tech-related, especially Gmail and Google Drive!) and updating team and department websites.

Art: Mindful Mark Making and Calming Collage

Physical Movement: Rally Ball

Comments we heard afterward: 

"I need more time to get organized!""This is just what I needed." "Thank you for providing this opportunity and the time." "It was fun and relaxing!" "It was great to reconnect with district colleagues and be together again."

The work continues back in school buildings for the rest of the week.

Evan Sivo Named CVSD’s Behavior Systems Director

 

Evan Sivo has been appointed Behavior Systems Director for the Champlain Valley School District (CVSD). Mr. Sivo will begin his leadership duties on July 1, 2022.

The Behavior Systems Director is responsible for overseeing the CVSD ATLAS program (a highly specialized special education program for students with social-emotional disabilities) as well as working with CVSD leaders to provide district-wide leadership in the development of our systems of support for students who struggle with social-emotional learning (SEL). This position will help move forward the work of implementing our SEL systems of support.

Mr. Sivo graduated from Saint Michael’s College with a Bachelor of Arts in History, and a Master of Education degree in Special Education. He earned a post-graduate Certificate of Study in the Florida Institute of Technology’s Behavior Analysis Graduate Certificate program.

Evan joined CVSD in August of 2016 as a special educator at the Hinesburg Community School. He moved to the role of ATLAS Program Coordinator and Behavior Specialist in 2019. Prior to joining CVSD, Evan worked with the Howard Center as a behavior interventionist, a teacher interventionist, and a classroom teacher at the Baird School, where he earned an Excellence in Service Award.

Evan had this to say about assuming this new role in CVSD, “I am excited for the opportunity to examine our Multi-Tiered System of Supports and further the development of SEL. I believe social, emotional, and behavioral well-being is imperative to a student's success and leads to greater academic outcomes.“

CVSD’s Director of Student Support Services, Meagan Roy, shared, “Evan Sivo (the current lead special educator of the ATLAS program), a Board Certified Behavior Analyst and special educator, brings extensive expertise in social-emotional learning and behavioral systems. The committee was most impressed with his firm commitment to ensuring that our classrooms are accessible to all learners. We are excited for Evan to take on this new leadership role.”

We are very excited to welcome Evan on July 1.

Mindfulness in CVSD Schools

 

HCS students

Last year, the Champlain Valley School District announced that Inner Explorer was made available to our schools. Access to Inner Explorer comes at a critical time when supporting the mental health of students and adults in our buildings is a priority. 

This was made possible through a generous donation from Project Hoeppner. Sue and Joe Hoeppner, who established Project Hoeppner, see Inner Explorer as a research-based, school-family-community, plug-n-play solution to support kids. 

“We created Project HOePpnEr in response to our 17-year-old son Paul’s death by suicide. Initially, our goal was to prevent teen suicide by encouraging teens to ask for help. Unfortunately one of the things we realized is that help is hard to find. As we find ourselves further removed from Paul’s death, we realize that preventing teen suicide is more than identifying and addressing the crisis. It’s providing tools, teaching strategies, and creating habits that kids can access their whole lives. We see Inner Explorer as an important part of an overall strategy to promote health and wellness for kids.”

Tony Moulton, CSVD’s Director of Integrated Wellness, has been instrumental in working with Project Hoeppner and Inner Explorer to make this happen. 

“I am excited to have this evidence-based, easy-to-use tool for our students and families. We know that stress and anxiety have increased over the past year. The practice of mindfulness, when offered and applied in a structured, easily accessible format like Inner Explorer, has been shown to reduce stress and anxiety. This tool in the hands of our amazing teachers, educators, students, and families can help teach emotional regulation skills and build resilience. We are so grateful to the Hoeppners for this opportunity.”

CVSD schools have started to implement Inner Explorer and incorporate it into routines. Some of our educators using it were featured in a recent Inner Explorer blog post. 

We will share additional information and announcements about Inner Explorer soon as it rolls out to more classrooms and eventually to families for use at home. 

WCS educators

About Inner Explorer
Inner Explorer was developed in 2011 by mindful awareness teachers with more than 30 years of combined experience. Understanding the difficulty in developing a daily practice, Inner Explorer created a technology platform that delivers audio-guided practices to teachers and students. This gives them the opportunity to practice together - reducing stress, improving academic performance, and enhancing the school climate. This unprecedented offering simplifies the implementation of mindfulness in the classroom and supports the national initiative called 2-Generation Approach by bridging the classroom and home. Especially now – Inner Explorer encourages families to join in daily practices with their children, extending the wellbeing benefits into the community. www.InnerExplorer.org One-page Flyer: Why Mindfulness


About Project Hoeppner
Project HOePpnEr is a 501(c)3 organization invested in providing tools, teaching strategies, and practicing habits that kids can access their whole lives. Increasing awareness around the catastrophe that is teen suicide. Offering courage for teens to say "I need help" and for their loved ones to hear.

Mobile Library Project from Empower Youth Leaders

The Empower Youth Leaders (EYL) have teamed up with CVSD Librarians to deliver “mobile bookshelves” to our K-8 schools. Empower Youth Leaders is a CVSD student organization that meets weekly, with a goal to promote Social Emotional Learning (S.E.L.) for our schools through community service projects.

The middle schoolers from EYL developed a plan to procure a mobile bookshelf for each of the CVSD K-8 schools. A Mobile Bookshelf is a moveable bookshelf on wheels. The bookshelf will house books that students can take home to build their home libraries. We are hoping that these books will promote social emotional learnings skills to kids, as they open doors to different journeys through reading.

Students will be able to keep the books that they choose from the mobile bookshelf. There is no need to return the book the the school library. Have fun reading!

 

Here are some potential questions you may have, answered by the EYL students.

How are the students expecting to manage the donation process? We are only using books that are planned to be thrown out from classrooms, and libraries. These books will already have been evaluated, so librarians, or students will not have to re-evaluate them.

Students may have some confusion about the mobile bookshelf and the school library: about which books are the library's - and must be returned - and which books are free for them to keep? How will we indicate that clearly enough between the library and the mobile bookshelf so that our students know the difference? The Mobile bookshelf will be in the hallways not the library. And it will have signs to explain the difference too.

Where will the bookshelf live? Will there be signage around it that indicates that it's not part of the school library? When will students have access to it? The Mobile bookshelves will be in the hallways so that it is more accessible to students. We will label it as the mobile bookshelf, and we will decorate it to show that it is the mobile bookshelf with decorations and signs, and we hope that we can make some announcements in the morning to inform about the bookshelf and help prevent any confusion.

Will it work like a free little library, in which students are swapping books when they take one? If so, extra management of content is required. These books are to be taken from the mobile bookshelf and taken home. This is a way for kids to get access to books that they may not have at home. They will not need to swap any books. These are just to take home without having to swap any book in return.

There is also the issue of the physical quality of donations. I have had many people enthusiastically donate books that are in terrible shape: ripped, stained, and not appealing. How will people know what the standards are for their donations? At this time, we are not accepting donations. We are planning on only using books that are being discarded from the library or classrooms.

The work with Empower School Leaders is done with the support of an SEL in Action grant from the NoVo Foundation. We'd like to give a special shout out to Katherine Batty, school counselor at Hinesburg Community School, for her work supporting the Empower Youth Leaders in CVSD. Thank you, Kathy!

Empower Youth Leadership

In the fall of 2020, Kathy Batty, HCS School Counselor, and Mary Muroski, HCS 5th grade Teacher, received a $25,000 SEL in Action grant from the NoVo Foundation and Education First for their Empower Youth Leadership Project. The Project is focused on the creation of SEL Leaders in the district’s middle schools. With this funding, they have been working to coordinate student Empower Youth Leaders meetings and have hosted two school-based Empower Youth Leadership Conferences.

Throughout the year, middle-level students from each of the CVSD sending schools and VLA have met weekly. The focus of these Empower Youth Leaders meetings has changed over the course of the year. Initially, the students worked to create a unified vision and logo. Then, they worked on community service projects in the Winter. This Spring, the students developed SEL lesson plans and provided leadership classes in K-2 classes. This effort was very successful - despite the fact that the instruction was all done virtually, using Google Meets.

Recently, Mary and Kathy hosted Empower Youth Leadership Conferences for all 6th graders at Hinesburg Community School and Charlotte Central School. The conference started with students discovering what they all had in common and identifying their hopes and dreams for a better world. Then, the students were engaged with students in Uganda in a live conversation on Google Meet. Based on student feedback this was one of the highlights of the day. HCS students heard from students in Uganda about their daily life and aspects of their culture. In both schools, sixth graders asked the students in Uganda about the effect that COVID has had on them. We learned that the students there have struggled to have enough food to eat and are still not back in school. The conference also included three workshops aimed at teaching the personal leadership skills of effective communication, financial literacy, and goal-setting. The day ended with students learning how to practice and express gratitude as a way to bring abundance and positivity into their lives.

In her letter of support for the project, Superintendent Elaine Pinckney wrote, “The Empower Youth Project complements our district’s commitment to meeting the social and emotional learning needs of all our students. The vision of CVSD is to help all students develop skills to understand and manage their emotions, show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions needed in order to be successful for school and life”. 

For more information, please feel free to contact Mary (mmuroski@cvsdvt.org) and Kathy (kbatty@cvsdvt.org). Please visit www.ourclp.org to learn more about the Children’s Legacy Partnership Foundation.

Photos of Empower Youth Leaders teaching in K-2 classrooms:

Williston Teacher Wins Award

In recognition of inspirational teaching nationwide, Lyn Porter, a Physical Education teacher at Allen Brook School in Williston, has been named a recipient of the National University System-Sanford Teacher Award for Vermont on a surprise Zoom announcement.


Here's an excerpt from the press release:
Ms. Porter has taught Physical Education for three decades in the same school district. She has coached three sports at the middle school level, plays a role locally in setting standards for relicensure, and has been a leader in the Society for Health and Physical Education in the Eastern United States. She notes that social and emotional learning is more crucial than ever, because students do not spend as much time outdoors and lack opportunities to develop communications, negotiation, and problem-solving skills that came from playing hockey and sandlot games or building snow forts. To support this growth and teamwork, she purposefully organizes young people of mixed ability levels in small groups that encourage conversation and cooperation. She teaches students about the value of inclusion and being able to work with everyone. As the school year progresses, she organizes students into larger groups to help them become even more inclusive. Ms. Porter explains, “Listening and sharing also provides a great deal of learning. As a teacher I facilitate this learning but don't always drive the direction of the discussion. I also talk a lot about how the best athletes are not always the most skilled. They are the best athletes because they know how to make everyone on their team better.”

During a year of unprecedented challenges for teachers nationwide, the Sanford Teacher Award honors the top teacher in each state and the District of Columbia with $10,000 for supporting student development and achievement in inspirational and harmonious ways. The award was established in the name of philanthropist T. Denny Sanford, who is committed to supporting inspiring teaching nationwide through PreK-12 programs focused on developing the social and emotional (SEL) skills of young people. Each teacher recipient is now eligible to be named the national winner of the Sanford Teacher Award, which comes with a total award of $50,000 and will be announced at a future date.

Congratulations Lyn!