Brook Glenn Elementary, with a tradition for excellence, challenged by poverty and diversity, is dedicated to building a partnership among home, school, and community. We provide educational opportunity through standards-based curriculum and high - quality instruction so that all students will develop the World Class Skills of the Profile of the South Carolina Graduate by working alongside families and community. We encourage our students to be innovative, creative, and use critical thinking skills. At Brook Glenn, we celebrate our differences and diversity through achieving, believing, and caring in an inclusive, safe, and student-centered learning environment where everyone can learn and become better thinkers and independent learners. We provide a caring and academically challenging learning environment, which cultivates and nurtures lifelong learners to excel in an interdependent global society.
It goes without saying that the 2020-2021 school year has been unlike any other in recent memory. We transitioned to one-way hallways, masks, lunches in classrooms, new disinfecting practices, and numerous other protocols to help reduce the chance of COVID transmission. Brook Glenn housed 292 in-person students and 124 virtual students; seven teachers taught in the Virtual Program, and 20 remained as in-person teachers. Whether it was virtual, in-person or hybrid learning scenarios, we juggled it all with the realization that COVID -19 had impacted many students and created missed learning opportunities. Yet, we came together to meet the educational recovery, social, emotional, and physical needs of our students as we awaited the return of our students.
As we planned for the 2020-2021 school year, Social and Emotional Learning became a top priority in the new and sometimes changing learning environments. Each day and in every classroom, we began the school day with a SEL lesson and activities for students and the adults. Whether the classrooms were virtual, in-person, or hybrid, priority was given to relationship building and a sense of community so students could feel safe and supported before getting to the academics. To provide a bit of normalcy and fun to relieve the stress of students and teachers, we included special days/months with dress-ups such as Jeans’tober, 12 Days of Holiday Fun, Field Day, Fifth Grade Day, & etc. Both the principal’s and school counselor’s weekly newsletters provided healthy ways for teachers to cope with stress. Principal’s Staff Check-In and Staff Shoutouts Google forms were used to monitor staff’s well-being and something to celebrate.
To assist our students who experienced learning loss in reading, we utilized an instructional framework -RTI (Reading intervention) and our Literacy Coach which allowed small groups and individual students to get additional instruction tailored to student needs. Opportunities were provided for interventionists, literacy coach, and teachers to analyze data, to identify students who could benefit from extra support, collaborate, and plan the next steps.
To strengthen the teaching and learning in math, doing the era of COVID, we shifted away from teaching mathematics to students and moved to teaching children mathematics which enabled our students to become problem solvers and to have a voice in explaining how to solve math problems. To reduce the stress of learning math facts, we purchased the math on-line program, Reflex. Staff members engaged in a book study on guided math.
At Brook Glenn, the pandemic helped us break the chains of 51-year old traditions and look to the future in innovative and unique ways to delivery instruction and meet student needs. We acknowledge our responsibility to help our students connect learning with real life and provide them with the necessary skills to prepare them for success with world class skills and life and career characteristic to be successful in the 21st Century and beyond.
Bernice M. Jackson, Principal Henry Lee Wilson, SIC Chairperson
