SCHOOLS: Castle Heights begins new year with improvements

By Submitted by Carbon School District

Castle Heights Elementary has started what looks like a successful year, with some changes in the school program and on the campus.
“We are excited about having a new faculty parking lot,” said Principal Chris Winfree. “The new lot is in the back of the school and has 72 spaces. That is enough for everyone who works or volunteers here to park there.”
It’s also good news for parents, who can now use the front parking lot instead of parking on the street. “Our priority here is to keep kids safe and that will help,” Winfree said.
He also said that now when they have events at the school there are over 100 spots available for parking for those attending.
Another new feature at the school for security and safety is that this year the kindergarten rooms have security doors on them that can only be released from the outside with a card or from the office.
Winfree is also going to concentrate on a new bullying program at the school this year.
“The one thing that parents often want me to fix is the one thing that is difficult for the school to fix,” said Winfree. “They want me to make bullying stop. There is no way to change what comes out of kids’ mouths. Even with my own kids at home, no matter how much I work on getting them to be kind, they’re kids, and it’s going to happen. As a school we try to create an environment where students understand the expectation to be kind to each other, but in the end we spend most of our time dealing with the consequences of the bullying. What we hope to do is to flip things around and look at the positive by using a program that is being effective in Finland.”
Winfree said instead of encouraging kids to stand up to bullies, which has been done for years, they are going to do something different.
“When we have a kid bullied and other kids see it and report it those students often become victims of the bully,” said Winfree. “Instead of standing up to the bully that say just pushed a student to the ground, we are going to ask other students to go to the victim and ask them ‘Can I help you? Are you okay? What can I do? Do you want to play with me?’ I want the victims to feel they have a lot of support and friends who will help them through it. I want the bullies to become the isolated ones. The idea is that if someone is a bully we want everyone to turn away from them. It’s no longer cool because everyone is ignoring the bullying behavior and looking to support the victim. We want students to build up the victim. This will hopefully help keep kids from going home in tears because they have so much support from others.”
Building culture
Winfree says that the data show that that type of program has been very effective in Europe.
“It’s a different way of looking at it,” he said. “I like the concept. We have tried so many things in the past, like assemblies and other programs. But we found what we do only lasts for a few days. This is worth a try. This is about building the right culture, a community of caring, to get kids to be nice to each other.”
Academically he said that the school’s staff is excited about the new district reading program as well as using the Ready Math program in more grade levels. Last year they had the third grade use it all year and he said their “math scores were incredible.” A few other grades used it the second half of last year but we will be utilizing it school wide this year.
“We saw amazing results from that program,” he said. “When the Sage scores are released, it will show the progress we made last year.”