Thank You for a Fantastic Year!
As the 2018-19 school year winds down, I want to thank all of you for unwavering support of your children and Chaska Middle School West. Partnering with you to provide a safe and nurturing learning environment for all children is our number one priority.
Once again, we were just named "Exemplar PBIS School" by the state of Minnesota. We are proud to be the only school in the state who has earned this recognition every year. We believe parent involvement and partnerships help our PRIDE program succeed. Thank you for your support.
As I write this, our festivities and end of the year field trips are in the works as we celebrate another successful year of learning for your children.
Thank you and happy summer!
Sheryl Hough
Equity Work at Chaska Middle School West
West teachers have been focusing on learning by being students themselves all year long! When your students have late starts, West teachers are engaging in our own growth as educators! We take pride in how we work to build relationships with our kids and in how we value everyone's differences. It's important to us that students feel they have a special place in our community, where they feel seen, valued, and heard.
West staff members have engaged in conversations around equity since last fall. Fortunately, this is not the first year where we have focused on learning about equity and how it impacts students' experiences at West. We have had an Equity Coach here at West for the past three years. One step we took to deepen our understanding of equity this year was to hire Arika Mareck, an outside consultant, to facilitate us in our learning. Arika is a former West teacher and Equity Coach who has an understanding of the staff and students and was able to provide a more personalized professional learning plan for our school specifically. Arika is also a parent of two students in the district and works in Education Transformation across the nation. The primary focus was on leaning into hard conversations and creating safe spaces to learn from one another. Here we used our personal experiences in addition to the perspectives of others to develop a shared definition of what equity is: believing in and seeking out each learner's personal story, so that all learners, regardless of race, gender, or socioeconomic status, are valued and supported in order to reach their personal best.
To support our work this year and in the future, the following items were the focus:
-
Creation of a student group - VOICES
-
Creation of a staff Equity Team to learn about ourselves & support others in our work
-
A group, "Our Stories," was created naturally by students and facilitated by a teacher
-
21-Day Equity Challenge
-
LGBTQ group (created 3 years ago)
-
Adding daytime conferences to accommodate parents who work evenings
-
Equity Audit
In addition, we are inviting our staff to continue learning over the summer using resources including:
-
"Waking Up White" Debbie Irving
-
"Daring Greatly" Brene Brown
-
"The Pedagogy of Confidence" Yvette Jackson
-
TED Talks - "The Danger of a Single Story", "Every Kid Needs a Champion"
As we transition into 2019-2020 school year, we will focus our learning on:
