SUN PRAIRIE COMMUNITY SCHOOLS
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As the new school year begins, our site coordinators are working actively with their school teams, families, and community partners to put together a plan for addressing the challenges our neighborhoods face by providing support programs and materials now while also collaborating to identify steps to address the needed systemic change. This is hard work, and we were happy to take a week out of the year to lift up, recognize, and honor the hard work that this team does every day. |
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We know that physical exercise is vital to both our physical and mental health, especially for our young people. This is why we have partnered with Prairie Athletic Club to provide a 20-minute brain boost workout LIVE via Zoom, Monday-Friday for our middle school and high school students. This class is FREE and no membership is required. Parents can go to https://web.prairieathletic.com/esp-brain-boost-register to sign up! Classes start Monday, and enrollment is rolling, which means you can sign up to join in at any point!
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Site Leadership Team
The CH Bird Site Leadership Team had its first meeting to discuss where things are at in the neighborhoods that CHB serves - what’s going well and what is standing as a challenge. This feedback will be combined with upcoming outreach and feedback from families to create the site leadership plan for the year.
CH Bird is the recipient of a five year 21st Century Community Learning Center grant. We are currently working through plans for how we can deliver out of school time programming.
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Stay Tuned, we are just getting started! |
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Site Leadership Team
A Site Leadership Team (SLT) is a focused planning committee, including principal, site coordinator, school staff, student leaders, family, community partners, community members, volunteers and service providers, responsible for creating a shared vision for the school, identifying desired results and helping align and integrate the work of partners within the school. The team works to assess needs, set priorities, plan activities and bring in new resources by:
- Helping connect the community school with the community,
- Contribute expertise to decision-making,
- Act as a sounding board,
- Help break down barriers to student learning,
- Sponsor and support school events, and
- Advocate for the community school. Our 1st site leadership team meeting of the school year was held on Tuesday, September 15. We meet monthly on the third Tuesday of each month at 3:00 pm.
PM welcomed our students back to school virtually on Sept. 8th. Since that time we have been working hard with volunteers from our new partnership with Heartland Church, and United Way to kick off Reading Jumpstar, an intervention to help kids overcome the COVID-19 slide.
Because we know school is more than just academics, we have also been working hard to convert some of our clubs into a virtual platform. Be on the lookout for some of the fan favorites from last year.
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Material Pickup
For me, the biggest highlight of September was getting to see so many of our students during Material Pick-up. The students' excitement at seeing the PM faculty and staff after such a long period of time, was contagious and uplifting.
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PRAIRIE PHOENIX ACADEMY UPDATE |
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CEO's of Tomorrow
The school year is off to a great start! Looking ahead to October we have CEOs of Tomorrow partner with us here at PPA; they will be collaborating with Community Schools and the PPA teachers to run virtual workshops for us. In another exciting program that is starting this month, Prairie Phoenix Academy students will become mentors for younger students in the Sun Prairie Area School District; I would like to thank Teran Peterson and the Neighborhood Navigators for all the hard work for this great program.
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Megan Merkes
PPA is thrilled to welcome a new social worker to our family! Megan Merkes joined us at the start of this school year, but isn't a completely new face--she spent a semester at PPA as an intern in 2018, and just couldn't stay away. Megan has already made a positive impact this year, especially when it comes to partnering with community schools. She’s been busy helping with materials pick-up, working with students, creating and streamlining programs, and meeting families. Please join us in welcoming Megan--we couldn't be more excited to have her back!
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Site Leadership Team
Our 1st site leadership team meeting of the school year was held on Tuesday, September 8. We meet monthly on the second Tuesday of each month at 5:15 pm.
- Mrs. Darga continues to be out at The Element community lunch site each week connecting and checking in with our Wildcats, their families, and community members.
- Mrs. Darga, along with our Westside student services team, continues to help meet the needs of our Westside scholars and their families. To date, we have performed over 260 acts of kindness to over 110 families. This can be as simple as dropping off curriculum materials, food and toiletries, connecting families with resources in the community, and even helping to get families to appointments.
- Planning has begun to offer some after school programming (some in person, some virtual) at the beginning of October while adhering to the SPASD and DCPH guidelines.
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How a Partnership Between a School and a church can change a Community!
Background history of the partnership between Westside Elementary and Door Creek Church:
Our partnership began in 2015
Why?
- The need: 1 out of 5 children in the US lives in poverty
- 2 out of 5 children in the US live in a single-parent home
- American children are more likely to be murdered, poor, pregnant, drug-dependent or incarcerated than the children of any other industrialized country
- Their ability to learn is seriously impaired if they do not have a relationship with at least one adult who cares
Benefits to our school, our students and their families:
- Impact on individual children - hope, academics, self-esteem, the greater chance of graduating, reduction in discipline problems, truancy, crime, pregnancy, drugs, alcohol, and so on. Impact on families - hope, less stress, help with basic needs, help with other needs you may discover after you've built a relationship. Impact on the whole community - hope, lower crime, healthier community members, a connecting point into the greater community
Benefits to the church:
- A variety of gifts can be used (relational, acts of service, encouragement, etc), your service builds trust with the families, the school, the district, the city for future outreach opportunities. The movement can spread to impact more families and churches.
- The partnership between Westside and Door Creek Church has led the way for other church and school partnerships in Dane County and even in Sun Prairie with our very own Patrick Marsh Middle School now partnering with Heartland Church.
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Fill the Van
Prior to our Safer At Home order, Door Creek Church collected items for our school food pantry twice a year - August and before Spring Break. Typical items collected and asked for were healthy snacks (granola bars, fruit snacks, etc.) and other non-perishable, easy to prepare food items such as soups, tuna, and noodles. We typically had 4 - 5 families use our school food pantry each week, often on Fridays so that they had items for their families over the weekend or a school break. While our SP food pantry at Sunshine Place is amazing, families were only allowed to visit the pantry once a month, so our school food pantry helped stretch their food supply until they could make that visit again.
Then, life changed when we were all sent home from school and everything seemed to shut down. Families were fearful to leave their homes and so they turned to our school as a trusted source. At the same time, Pastor Mark Deering called and said “what can we as a church do to help your school and families during this time”. We knew families would be struggling with food insecurities, so I said “we could use more food in our school food pantry”. Trying to figure out how to do that while the church building was closed, was when
Fill The Van was born. Fill The Van happens every Tuesday at Metro Market on Cottage Grove Road. Below are just two examples of the impact on our families. Please note the names and pictures have been changed to protect each family's privacy.
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Amber
Amber, a single mother of four children, moved to Sun Prairie in mid - February and enrolled two of her children in Westside Elementary. She was set to start a new job at the end of March, which disappeared when COVID happened. Now she had four of them to feed with little to no income coming in. She reached out to our Westside Elementary student services team for help and we were able to assist her with food, diapers, wipes, cleaning supplies, and toiletries. She used our school food pantry with our Door Creek Church donations almost weekly for two months until she was able to find employment in June and is now working full time. She has told us on more than one occasion without our school food pantry, she doesn’t know what she would have done during this time. Once they are a bit more settled and she is caught up on bills, she plans to donate to our school food pantry to “give back”.
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Beverly
After staying home to raise her three kids, Carole became a nurse for over 20 years. In retirement, her health slowly declined as the years of standing on her feet caught up to her. Last year to make life easier, she came to live with her daughter and family in Sun Prairie. Carole’s grandchildren attend Westside Elementary. She was eventually diagnosed with severe arthritis which brought on an expensive prescription. As time went on she found it harder to afford her medication and other essential needs. Eventually, like many other families we serve, she and her family had to choose: medicine or food. That choice caused Beverly and her daughter to reach out to our student services team. Our team was able to not only help the family with weekly groceries, cleaning supplies, and toiletries from our Door Creek Church donations, but also helped connect Beverly to a community organization to receive some assistance with her medication.
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To date, the Door Creek Church Fill the Van donations have helped over 100 families at Westside Elementary. These are just two examples of the impact this partnership has had for our families. We are truly blessed!
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- Mobile Pop Up Food Pantry at Westside Elementary every Tuesday from 4 - 5 pm or until food runs out through the end of October. If interested in volunteering, please contact Stacy Darga, our Westside Elementary Site Coordinator.
- Partner with our daily lunch crew, which along with the YMCA, provides free lunch and breakfast at Rolling Prairie apartment complex, The Element on Main or Vandenburg Park, by providing books, healthy snacks, juice pouches, and even small activity bags that kids can grab and go. If interested, please reach out to Stacy Darga (The Element), Lisa Goldsberry (Rolling Prairie), or Andrew McKinney (Vandenburg Park), our three site coordinators who are part of the lunch crew!
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FALL FESTIVAL
- Planning has begun to offer a community wide Fall Festival event in partnership with the YMCA in late October. Stay tuned for further details as they become available.
- Our partner, The Literacy Network, will be offering all their usual Adult ESL classes and tutoring via remote learning this Fall. In previous years, these classes were held at our Westside Elementary site. Students can now attend classes over Zoom or the telephone. Textbooks and workbooks will be mailed to students and they will continue to mobilize volunteer tutors in Zoom tutoring sessions.
- To register as a student or a volunteer, please call 608-244-3911.
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CONTACT US
Jamie Racine
Program Coordinator
608.834.6534
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Andrew Mckinney
Site Coordinator
C.H. Bird Elementary
608.834.7320
Tenisha Winn
Site Coordinator
Northside Elementary
Lisa Goldsberry
Site Coordinator
Patrick Marsh Middle School
608.834.7661
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Bobby Finn
Site Coordinator
Prairie Phoenix Academy
608.834.6920
Stacy Darga
Site Coordinator
Westside Elementary
608.834.7546
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