Week of September 4, 2017

Every day, the schools of the DeKalb County School District are bursting with activities that supports college and career readiness. To keep you informed, we will share that news in “TRUST in the Schoolhouse.”

Below are some examples of that work. Got an idea? Submit it here.

Chesnut Elementary School
Jasmine Ennis, Chesnut Elementary School resource teacher, has been recognized with two prestigious professional awards from the Georgia Council for Exceptional Children (CEC):

  • She is the 2017 CEC Teacher of the Year – The award recognizes a CEC member who currently provides direct services to students with exceptionalities.
  • She was named by the CEC TED Policy and Advocacy Committee as one of four doctoral students to participate in the CEC Special Education Legislation Summit in July.

Dunwoody Elementary
Dunwoody Elementary students were challenged to memorize the entire school pledge, “A Pledge to Myself” by Michael Wynn, before the first Friday of school. Sara Cook (grade 5), Krisha Dhruve (grade 2), Anaya Robinson (grade two) and Tristan Czemik (grade 2) met the challenge and earned the right to recite the pledge over the intercom.

Coralwood Center
Coralwood Center will be participating in a research study conducted by Georgia State University. The research study is titled “Peer Mediated Early Social Communication Skills” and will be looking at joint and shared attention between special needs and typically developing early childhood students.

Redan Middle School          
Redan Middle School is proud to be the school that Rayshun Casey spends his days teaching the next generation. Casey is one-half of the talented duo Casey & Strick, two DeKalb County educators using their musical creativity to give positive messages to students. Together the friends have created and published videos on YouTube over the last few years. Their most recent music video, “Read a Book,” was featured as a part of WSB-TV’s Back to School coverage. While the video is fun and whimsical, the song’s lyrics have a much deeper message which target their young audience’s self-esteem.

Redan is using the video each day during Extended Learning Time to kick-off this year’s reading initiative. Casey and Adrien Stallings, the school’s new teacher-librarian, are hoping to engage students further by establishing a competition between the classes to create even more videos that promote reading later this year. The video published by Mr. Casey and his partner, Mr. Sheldon Strickland, can be found here.

Rockbridge Elementary School
T-Mobile will donate 350 backpacks to every Rockbridge Elementary School student! The presentation occurred on August 30, during the Title I Curriculum Night event.

Fairington Elementary School
Fairington Elementary School decreased the percentage of third-grade students scoring at Beginning Learner by 12 percentage points, and the percentage of third-grade Proficient Learners increased seven percentage points. In mathematics, the percentage of third grade students scoring at Beginning Learner decreased 12 percentage points while the percentage of Developing Learners increased eight percentage points.

Chapel Hill Middle School
The Southeast United Dairy Industry Association, Inc. approved Chapel Hill Middle School’s application to implement the Fuel Up to Play 60 program, the nation’s largest in-school nutrition and physical activity program. The imitative is used by 73,000 schools nationwide to increase physical activity, healthy eating habits and access to nutritious foods through student, teacher and parent involvement.