Administration, teachers work to make school more friendly

What does “Strength in Numbers” mean?

Most people see it as another catchphrase tagged onto the end of principal Paul Robinson’s Week at a Glance emails. It’s written like this: STRENGTH in NUMBERS! — a sort of rallying cry before he concludes with “It’s Great to be a Falcon.”

“As a school I believe it can stand for achieving more as a team than as an individual,” Robinson said. “If we have an event like Stop Hunger Now, 10 people can put together about 1,000 meals in an hour. It’s all of us working together.”

Championing this slogan, teachers and staff have been trying to create a more friendly and stress-free campus, a mission that is now in full swing.

Various programs and activities have been implemented in efforts to achieve the goal. Among other efforts, the administration has scheduled in-home parent-teacher conferences, teacher collaborations to reduce student stress and the annual Speak Up for Change Week in January.

The revamped parents-teacher conferences are different from those in the past, which were confined to school.

According to assistant principal Kerry Mohnike, starting this year, a few teachers will go to students’ houses to talk to their parents about their children’s personal successes.

Robinson wrote in his weekly newsletter during conferences, teacher pairs will visit a family “for brief interviews around the educational journeys of our parents and how that affects and guides families as their students navigate the high school years.”

Parents can volunteer to participate in these conferences, and the administration hopes these conferences will help the staff learn more about students’ lives to make their time at school easier.

To further engage teachers in bettering the school environment, Mohnike said that the school has been using its staff development and collaboration time to address the issue of student stress.

For example, the administration has brought in workshops called Five Dimensions and Engaged Teaching, which inform teachers on how to create an interactive classroom. These workshops are sponsored by Passage Works, a nonprofit that aims to provide teachers “with innovative practices and principles that integrate social, emotional and academic learning.”

According to Mohnike, the lessons from these workshops will facilitate better communication between students and staff to create an even more comfortable learning environment.

“By not only encouraging connections within students, but also helping that staff to make student-staff connections, [we] create a place where everybody wants to be here,” Mohnike said.

The administration also hopes to tackle student stress with Speak Up for Change Week, which was first introduced two years ago.

“We do various teacher appreciation and student appreciation events, but our main focus of the year has to do with this week,” said senior Kanaai Shah, the current ASB board representative.

Mohnike was one of the organizers of last year’s Speak Up for Change Week, which had the goal of making the school atmosphere more comfortable for all students students.

To achieve this,  ASB officers and members of the Leadership class worked to schedule a school-wide carnival and find motivational speakers for the assembly.

Mohnike also said the administration has planned small-scale “fun” activities such as the Falcon Feather Initiative, which is already in action. Students who do a positive act are given a sticker that has a falcon’s feather on it.

Mohnike hopes this program will promote positive acts among students, she said, thus increasing and strengthening student-to-student relationships.

“When we make connections, we build a net for each other, and the more connections we make, the stronger this net is and so then we can support each other,” Mohnike said.