The shine of a new school year has not worn off at Helper Middle School as positive things continue to happen.
“The kids are involved in all of the different things we have going on at the school,” principal Mika Salas said. “We finished football season very successfully and got to play under the lights at Carbon High twice. I was extremely proud of our kids for their victories.”
She said that they had a lot of students participate in volleyball this year and wrestling has started and the kids are doing well. Both teams for basketball season have now been set, too.
Beyond athletics there are a lot of other after school programs and clubs.
“We have an RPG (Role Playing Games) club that is very active and has a number of students in it,” said Salas. “ Violin, filmology, and Lego League are held after school. The school newspaper that Mrs. Brown advises publishes an amazing paper every quarter. It is a digital newspaper emailed to students.”
The school also divides up students into “houses” randomly, not by class or alphabetically. The houses in the school are red, black or white. They have to work together to achieve their goals. One of those was just before the deer hunting season this year.
“The kids wore camo or orange to school and we had a hunt around the school,” Salas stated. “Students submitted their own photos of their hunting experiences which were used in the hunt. They were so into it. They looked all over the school for the photos and it turned into a big competition between the houses.”
The school’s great rating from the state this year is something everyone at the campus is proud of but Salas says the staff and the students are not sitting on their laurels. She said that the staff has been having very professional and profound discussions about mastery grading and how to do it fairly, how to maintain high standards for everyone yet make accommodations for the kids to be successful.
“We have done this with the understanding that equal and fair are not the same thing,” she said. “We are finished building programs and structure for our school, and now we are more into an adjustment stage, which in some ways is easier, but in other ways harder to achieve. We have shown that we can have success with what we have built, but we don’t want to relax, we want to improve.”
She said that while the school is proud of the grade the school got this past year and the growth the school has shown, there are still some things, such as reading, that needs improvement.
“We take our PLC (professional learning community) time on Mondays very seriously,” she said. “There we focus on mastery of essential skills and continuing follow-through with our behavior program. In that area there have been some surprising changes that we are very pleased with. We are very proud of how the kids did in the first quarter.”
Salas said that each year there is a new batch of kids that come into the school and that what may have worked for one group may not work for another.
“We are constantly trying to retool and get better at our practices,” she said. “The core curriculum also changes from time to time. This year it is the science core that changed. Last year it was social studies. When that happens you just need to start the whole process over again. Students rely on us to be professional and to make the necessary changes.”
One of the things that is done to keep improving is to look at the generated data from assessments and find the places where improvement can take place.
Salas said the one of the best things that has happened in the school academically is the proper utilization of flex time.
“I don’t believe you could have a solid intervention program without flex time. It does so much for us and the students to be able to pull them in small groups for very specific reasons and to improve skill sets. That has been a keystone of our success.”
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