Estill Elementary School Report Narrative 2019
Estill Elementary is a Pre-K to 5th grade family oriented school that believe in our students, staff, and teachers. Our teachers and staff have created an engaging, challenging and dynamic learning environments with creativity, dedication, and enthusiasm occurring on a daily basis. This atmosphere has provided a rigorous personalized environment of academic excellence that prepares Each Child, Each Day, and in Every Classroom to be college/career ready and citizen ready with no excuses, as we continuous demonstrate our BEST. That is Behave Responsibly, Exceed Expectations, Scholarship First, Team work Always.
Our school is assisting all students with becoming a South Carolina Graduate by providing them with the world-class skills necessary by providing programs, services, classroom instruction, and interventions that are student centered and allows for critical thinking, communication, and collaboration. We challenge and support our students to become college-ready through Relationships, Relevance, and Rigor. With the goal of individual student success, the staff and administration work to promote differentiated approaches to meeting students' academic, social and emotional success.
We collaborate daily to become a school of excellence where our students want to learn and teachers are committed to teach. Through collaboration, we provide the utilization of data-driven instruction to provide interventions, acceleration and remediation for improved student learning that results in flexible grouping and station rotations. Also, given our students targeted support when they do not meet a year’s growth through our Response To Intervention (RTI) programs. As the students are provided with opportunities to collaborate, our teachers are giving high job-embedded professional learning which include, but not limited to Standardized Test for the Assessment of Reading and Math (STAR 360), Early Literacy, Gizmo, Wordly Wise, DNA Illuminate, School Improvement Process (SIP), and Instructional Technology (IT) training. Our Positive Behavior Interventions and Support (PBIS) program is use to support positive school culture and award both students and faculty for displaying positive behaviors. STAR 360 is implemented as our formative assessment system and administered three times per year to determine the learning needs of our students, to gauge academic growth in reading and mathematics and to make informed instructional decision regarding personalizing student learning. The professional learning community’s framework (SIP) is implemented at Estill Elementary school as a tool to engage teachers in strategic data analysis, establishing SMART goals based on results from common formative assessments, and engage in action research. The DNA Illuminate allows our teacher to create assessment based on instruction provided by the teacher. Our state assessment data SC READY and SC PASS allows the teachers to advance student progress on personalized plan benchmark goals.
We believe our parents are an integral part of our learning community and they support student achievement and success. In an effort to cultivate engagement, we have created a positive working relations with all stakeholders. We send home our Gator green folder for each student every Tuesday. The contents of the folder includes but not limited to a weekly parent newsletter, flyers communicating specific school or community related events, and graded student work. Parents really appreciate the weekly newsletter as it communicates relevant activities taking place at the school, points of celebrations regarding student and staff accomplishments, as well as safety tips reminders. Also, we use our One Call Now communication service system to send out calls, emails and text messages to our community. As we continue to educate our nation’s children, we cultivate engagement with our community and families at large in activities such as Back to School Bash, School Improvement Council, Parent Teacher Association, Family Literacy and Numeracy Night, Beautification Projects, Night of the Oscars and parenting workshop.
Patrice Smart, SIC Chairperson Julia B. Lee, EES Principal
