Where did January go? The first month of the new year saw a lot of athletics competitions and, overall, simply great learning opportunities for our students. The weather mostly cooperated, and we are looking forward to the months to come.
On January 20th, our staff partnered with the Southwest Health District and Dickinson Public Schools to train on strategies to reduce anxiety and challenging behavior in students. We worked with Dr. Jessica Minahan on building strategies to help engage students and teach them the skills necessary to react appropriately in stressful situations. The correlation between increased anxiety and trauma with the ability to access working memory was a theme for the day. There was much knowledge and experiences shared, and we hope we can include in our curriculum a method of teaching strategies that will help our students engage and make better decisions.
Our Cognia school improvement team is busy preparing for our accreditation review this coming March. We are collecting and analyzing data so that we can develop a plan moving forward to continue providing a well-rounded education for our students. We are taking a deep look at student performance data, survey perception data, student engagement data, and policies and procedures. This deep dive is time-consuming, and we feel we are ready to present to our outside evaluators to show what remarkable things are happening at Scranton Public School. Once our review is complete, we will put out some of our findings through our newsletter.
We continue to see our fair share of illnesses hitting the school. We want to remind everyone that we will take every precaution we can to keep our students healthy. Our custodians are fogging classrooms daily to keep everything disinfected. If your child is not feeling well with a fever or other symptoms, please keep them home as it seems to spread like wildfire here in our classrooms.
I want to take the time to thank all the community members who have given road reports and helped remove snow at the school so far this winter. The support we receive is second to none. We have plenty of weather yet to come, but we can see the end of the tunnel as the days are getting longer and the sun is getting a little higher in the sky.
February will bring winter sports tournaments and preparations for our spring extracurricular events. Good luck to those teams as they wind down their seasons. The math meet practice, and the science fair prep is heating up. Our students are busy and doing tremendous things. Onward and upwards, GO HAWKS!