By Aidan Mortensen | KOAL News

Castle Valley Center Principal Amy Bell joined the KOAL newsroom for this week’s Carbon School District Update. In our conversation, Bell discussed the first quarter of the school year, provided an update on the hydroponic gardens the school fundraised for last academic year and put out a call to action for more guest teachers at the school.

“We’re doing really great. We’ve already been able to go out and do some community Access activities,” said Bell of the start of the year. “We’ve been to the Homecoming Parade, which is always fun for our students to go out and celebrate the school spirit for Carbon High. We have an opportunity to go out to the golf course. We have some individuals who have been great to go out and give our kids an experience to go out and do some things like that.”

Speaking on the importance of community access activities, Bell shared,” Our students always learn if we can have a real-world experience with it. It always makes the concepts better understood and helps them grasp them better. And their learning is so much better in those kinds of situations.”

One of those situations is a set of hydroponic gardens purchased by the school. Bell explained how this addition has been beneficial for the students. “We had lots of businesses and lots of people who supported us in our fundraising. We were able to purchase one of the gardens. Right now, we’re trying to get some of the learning pieces that go with it to get it up and going. We’re hoping to start our first batch in the next couple of weeks, and it’s going to be so great because they can watch the growth and see things happen. There’s just a lot of different skills that they can do in trying to monitor the water and then get them going planting the seeds.”

Community support is a significant factor at the Castle Valley Center. As such, the school is searching for more guest teachers to step in and assist at the school: “Our students, because they take such a high level of care and have some different challenges. Not everyone’s comfortable coming to our school, so we try to match people with specific classrooms because each one is different at my school. But we are really struggling right now with guest teachers. Every one of my classrooms has High support, but if just one person is absent, we can’t get a substitute in there; it really impacts what we can do and manage the students and help them with their needs.”

Bell continued,” I would just ask if anybody’s interested at all to apply. They have to go through the process and apply through the Carbon School District. They can go on and find the guest teacher link and do the training, but we call our subs individually. We keep a list of who’s there. We’re very good at saying if you’d prefer this classroom over that one, or these students over those, or if you’re OK with going across the board. We’d love for people to come and give us a shot.”

Looking ahead to the remainder of the year, Bell shared exciting news about a new sensory experience coming to the school,” Our autism and behavior team has been helping me this year with some sensory room experiences. So they’re building me a whole sensory experience that our students are going to be able to do about five times this year. We did one already and it was such a big hit, so it’s not only going in and their sight, sound, touch, and smell, they get a full experience that we’ve been able to create.”

Closing our conversation, Bell shared,” We’re so very grateful and have such a great staff and love what we do.”

To stay up to date with the Castle Valley Center, you can visit the school’s website here.