This week’s Carbon School District weekly update shines a light on the Castle Valley Center. Principal Amy Bell stopped by Castle Country Radio to share some information about what is taking place at the school.

There may be some folks that don’t know how unique the Castle Valley Center is to the community, as Principal Bell explains, “Castle Valley Center is a special school in our school district, it’s for students with severe disabilities, who have a significant amount of need that we need to increase their instruction, and so we educate them and we have an opportunity to kind of take a different approach to their education.” So, the school has smaller classes and offers lots of support to their students. They also offer intense occupational and physical therapy to students who are in need of such services.

The school has implemented a Lifestyles Class that prepares students for real-life scenarios out in the community. The district’s autism specialist has implemented an area inside the school that gives students an opportunity to practice those lifestyle skills. “So she has really single handily built us a life skills room. It has a miniature grocery store, we have our library in there, a little post office, we’ll have a little bank, little car center for them to kind of go. What we do is we bat our math and reading into those instructional settings. The intent is to give us a place to practice there, so then when we’re ready to go out to a real-life setting, then they have already had some experience with it, and we take the next step and go out into the community,” stated Principal Bell. The goal is to build and increase the student’s independence so that they can go out into the real world.

The students have been working really hard on their lifestyle skills at the mock grocery store and will host a luncheon in the next couple of weeks to commemorate this accomplishment. “We’ve been working on a Hungry Caterpillar, there’s a book out there called the Hungry Caterpillar, many people are aware of that. We’ve been doing a practice with our grocery store; it’s been our lead in this year to work with our instruction and then we’re going to be having a Hungry Caterpillar dinner in a couple of weeks. Which is going to be a culmination and give kids a chance to go in to a practice again, in another setting there, more of a restaurant kind of experience,” explained Principal Bell. Students are looking forward to the dinner and the practice they will get from the experience.

For more information about Castle Valley Center visit their website at https://www.carbonschools.org/o/castle-valley-center