Castle Country Radio continues its weekly spotlight on the Carbon School District. This week, we sat down with Castle Valley Center Principal Amy Bell to talk about the school’s summer activities, the start of the school year, and what’s coming up next for the Trout.

Opening our conversation, Principal Bell discussed what the Castle Valley Center and its students got up to over the summer. “ At Castle Valley, we have a summer program for all of our students. So, we have two weeks where we do a lot of fun things, and it’s great.” 

One of those summer activities is the annual special needs fishing day hosted by the Forest Service and Department of Agriculture. Principal Bell expressed her gratitude to the organizations who host the event,” they’re always so great with our students. It’s a highlight of our whole year. They volunteer, and they interact so well with our students, and provide such a great experience for us.”

Moving onto activities that the school has provided this fall, Bell spoke on a recent trip the students had to the Carbon Country Club golf course,” the Carbon County Golf Course had some individuals there willing to come out and provide an experience for a student, and it was a hit. They were fabulous again, and interacted, and helped our students have a great day.”

Speaking on activities that are coming up for the Castle Valley Center, first speaking on how the school celebrates different disability awareness days,” We honor and celebrate those by wearing the color that is associated with that disability as a school, and then hopefully bring some awareness to everybody else about the different disabilities that our students and individuals in our community have.”

One project Principal Bell was excited about is the school’s post-high students who are learning how to sew. “ We’re going to be making some pillowcases to donate out in the community. And we would love it if anybody is interested in helping us if they want to donate a yard of either bright-colored solid fabric or a yard of a character fabric.” Bell continued,” That would go a long way to helping us get the materials so that our students can then have that experience. They’re going to learn how to cut and do some basic sewing, but then also packaging it up, and putting it out there for the people that we donate it to.”

This led to our next topic of how the school melds in-class learning with teaching the students functional skills. “It’s a huge focus in our school, is those functional and daily living skills. We incorporate that even through our daily activities.” Explained Bell,” We have cooking that they work on during the week. We go out to community events. We try to build events in our building, that kind of help learning how to do shopping, and how to follow a list. And our students are great at it. And we’ve found that as this focus goes, it helps our families outside of school, but it also helps our students access the community, and go out and engage with other people.”

Closing out our conversation, Principal Bell shared,” We always appreciate any efforts that people put out … We just have so many community members that try to help us build some experiences for our students, and we love that.”

To stay up to date with the Castle Valley Center you can visit the schools website here.

*Photo Courtesy of Castle Valley Center