By Aidan Mortensen | KOAL News
As the second semester approaches its end across the Carbon School District, students and faculty alike are partaking in midyear testing alongside a healthy dose of holiday activities. At Creekview Elementary, this midyear progress is showing that students are “accomplishing a lot of great things.”
Creekview Principal Jennifer Black joined the KOAL newsroom to discuss this progress and what lies ahead for the coyotes.
“We’ve had a lot going on, and so time has definitely gone by very quickly. We are actually right in the middle of our testing for our middle of the year. We’re completing all of our state and district testing. It is great to see how much improvement the students have made through the first two quarters,” expressed Black. “The students are working really hard. We’re accomplishing a lot of great things, and we’re excited to get our data back and look at how much improvement we’ve made.”
A big credit to this growth is the dedicated work of the school’s faculty and staff, who work tirelessly to ensure the most desirable learning environment for students. “Give them lots of credit every day coming here, planning the lessons, prepping, getting everything ready for them, working with students one-on-one. They do it all. Kudos to all of them for all of their hard work,” said the principal.
She added,” Also, our support staff is incredible. They’re here every day helping with the students during our tier two and tier three times. So it definitely takes all of us working together to ensure that every student’s learning and to the best of their ability, and we’re providing all of the interventions and support that they need.”
Moving from academics to extracurriculars, Black discussed the school’s stellar archery program: “We have a great archery teacher, Mrs. Housekeeper, who does a phenomenal job at making sure that the students have weekly practices. She actually went with a different format this year, dividing the kids into smaller groups, and they come once a week so they have lots of time to practice and shoot. So she’s done a great job running that she’s even made sure that on short weeks, such as fall break and Thanksgiving break, that we change our schedule so that they can come in and still get the practice time that they need during the month of December.”
Also coming up for the school is the spelling bee and science fair for its upper-grade students, providing an opportunity for students to engage in depth with their education.
“Those are some good opportunities for our fourth and fifth graders. They get to participate in them. So we’ve actually started with our class spelling bees. Fourth grade held their class spelling bees. We have the top 12 Candidates from fourth grade and then fifth grade held our class spelling bees, and they had their top 12 candidates, so now those 24 students have advanced on to the school spelling bee, which is going to take place,” said Black of the bee. “We’ll see how many students can qualify from that to advance on to the district spelling bee in the spring, and then maybe even advance on to the regional spelling bee. Which would be awesome to see our students here succeed that much.”
Moving to the science fair, Black shared,” It’s also for our fourth and fifth graders, so we’re just barely getting going with that to the two teachers. The teachers in our school are going to send home notes to parents to let them know where we’re headed with that. And so we’ll get those sent out in a couple weeks, and then after Christmas break, we’ll start having students come back to school, designing projects, working on projects.”
Our penultimate topic of conversation saw Black reminding parents where they can go to find the schools lost-and-found bin: “We have just put a bin out in our foyer where we are having all of the lost items put into that So it’s right by our front door as soon as you walk in so definitely come in and check that out if your student is Missing a jacket a coat gloves hat any type of winter clothing that you may have misplaced that you really need right now.”
Closing us out, Black stated,” We are doing well. The students are really focusing on respectful behavior. They’re doing well this month, even with the craziness of the holidays. We’re still giving out lots of P.A.W. Cards, and we appreciate all the parents at home who are continuing to read with their students and help them with math facts. So thank you to all of you who are helping support our school goals.”
To stay up to date with what’s happening at Creekview Elementary, visit the school’s website or Facebook page.