Photo from stonewallgardens.org
The day before Stonewall Jackson Elementary School celebrated its 75th anniversary, the school met with its parents for a heart-to-heart about the future.
For those who missed the meeting but are interested in the outcome, Tracie Fraley, the executive director of the Woodrow Wilson High School Feeder Pattern, summarized the meeting as follows:
We just talked with community members about the future. We do this with all our schools because we’re developing focus areas — Mata became a montessori school, Lipscomb and Robert E. Lee are doing IB — so we’re just talking to Jackson and Lakewood about where they want their focus areas to be. We’re just getting feedback.
Stonewall has this wonderful garden program, so we want to know where we see the garden being and how do we continue to do that. We’re talking about dual-language here and deaf education. Those things.
Our plan is to continue those programs but to do more integration with the garden so that it’s more an integral part of the instruction, so that the garden is the outdoor lab, not only for science but for math, reading and language arts. So what do we need to do to make that happen? There’s probably some development, some curriculum, those kinds of things.
Same with the deaf education program. We serve students right now, but there’s a huge interest here in having all the students learn sign language. So we talked about what that might look like. Is that an after-school program? Or a special program?Â
I don’t have answers yet because I’m in the data gathering phase to understand what the parents in the community really want. The parents really value these programs and they want to support us — both financially as well as philosophically, to really do the kind of work that needs to be done down the line. Everyone has been really supportive, so now it’s just a matter of developing that five-year plan.
We have a five-year plan for all the schools in the Woodrow feeder pattern. Next year for Stonewall is what we call the “exploratory” phase. Lakewood (Elementary) is next. It starts with data, feedback and discussions. Then we’ll craft a plan and everyone will be involved in that.
