Hutchinson Elementary School gears up for Friday’s Wellness Field Day

Hutchinson Elementary will host its annual Wellness Field Day on Friday. All of the grade levels, including pre-K, along with the educational partners, the PTA and the parent patrol will sponsor a booth with snacks for the students. The students can earn “Hutch Bucks” valued from $1 to $5 to purchase the snacks. (Learn more about Hutchinson’s burgeoning banking skills here.) The Hutch Bucks will be given based on the following:
* Good behavior
* Class work
* Completing homework
* Completing Success For All (SFA) assignments
* Completing Move It Math assignments
* Never Been Absent (NBA)
* Hutchinson Blue and Gold uniforms
* 20 Books Read

Students will be engaged in age-appropriate athletic competition that requires individual and interdependent efforts. All participating students will be awarded.

This portion of the school’s Wellness Field Day is aligned with its concept-based unit (CBU), PG-Math initiative, and the Georgia Performance Standards. This experience gives students the opportunity to use basic math skills that are applicable in their daily lives (adding, subtracting, multiplying and budgeting).

Forrest Hill Academy prepares students to return to their original schools

As the head of Forrest Hill Academy, Tricia Rock (pictured at right, with student) is a principal whose job it is to get her students out of her school even sooner than usual. And by measurable data, she’s getting really good and getting her students out – and back into the “home” schools that sent them to Forrest Hill in the first place. That’s because Forrest Hill is an alternative school inside Atlanta Public Schools whose main mission to take students with any number of challenges – usually behavioral – and help them transition back to their home school and hopefully graduate.

The 2009-10 school year marks the second for Principal Rock and the first since APS reassumed complete control over the school, and the change has been remarkable. According to Rock, of the 180 Forrest Hill students who were returned to their home schools in December, only 6 percent were returned to Forrest Hill. Previously, 50 percent of the students were returned. Both of the school’s juniors passed the Georgia High School Graduation Writing Test, while the middle-schoolers enjoyed a 30 percent pass rate on the state writing scores. And perhaps more to the point with Forrest Hill, disciplinary actions decreased by 40 percent from the previous year, Rock said.

Communities In Schools (CIS) of Atlanta gets families excited about reading

UPDATE: Check out even more images in this photo gallery.

We just got this great news from Communities In Schools (CIS) of Atlanta…

In many schools, low levels of parental engagement can pose challenges for students and school staff alike. For that reason, Communities In Schools (CIS) of Atlanta, an award-winning, Atlanta-based dropout prevention organization, makes parental engagement a priority at its 75 partner schools in Atlanta and DeKalb County. When the organization was one of just three programs across the country presented with the chance host a family literacy event in partnership with Reading Is Fundamental and Pitney Bowes, they immediately seized the opportunity.

“We look for every opportunity to involve parents. We believe in building genuine relationships with our parents and empowering them to get more involved in the educations of their children. Having a strong base of support at home is a critical part of kids succeeding in school,” said Patricia Pflum, Executive Director of Communities In Schools of Atlanta.

The event was hosted at CIS of Atlanta partner school, Cleveland Avenue Elementary, on May 20 and invitations were extended to the parents and students of CIS partner school Heritage Academy. Both schools are a part of the organization’s Reading Is Fundamental program which provides each student in participating schools with three new books to build their home libraries each year. CIS of Atlanta is the largest Reading Is Fundamental partner in the state of Georgia, distributing more than 22,000 new books to over 6,700 young people annually.

APS captures the caps and gowns of graduation (updated!)

We’re at the midway point of Atlanta Public Schools’ high school graduation week, and our media production staff is hard at work bringing back the most memorable images from the ceremonies being held at the Boisfeuillet Jones Atlanta Civic Center. While you have before you a sampling of some of these images, we invite you to check out our Media Gallery, which will be updated continually throughout the week. Tuesday brought us images from Crim Open Campus and North Atlanta high school graduations. Wednesday brought images from The New Schools at Carver and Maynard H. Jackson. Thursday brought images from Grady and Mays. Friday brought images from Washington and Douglass. And Saturday brought images from Therrell and South Atlanta. Enjoy!