Built in 1975, Pepperhill Elementary School is among the last few neighborhood schools in Charleston County School District. As a school, our commitment to our community is to provide educational opportunities and develop every scholar with world-class skills that will prepare them to become South Carolina graduates and productive citizens within our community. Our teachers and staff focus on providing our scholars with rigorous curricula that promote literacy, student engagement, critical thinking, and collaboration. Our teachers recognize that social-emotional learning is essential; therefore, they provide a supportive learning environment that supports our young scholars’ social and emotional well-being.
To promote literacy, our young scholars read texts with academic topics relevant to their world, allowing them to make connections and have rich discussions with their peers. If you walk into our classrooms, you will see teachers facilitating discussions with our scholars using collaborative discussion protocols. These protocols allow students to think and exchange ideas, encouraging all students to participate and be engaged.
Our scholars have opportunities to improve their numeracy skills, and each day, they become more versed in the rules of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, and decimals. Understanding these areas of math is essential in school life and future careers. Our scholars learn math concepts by using visual models, using a variety of ways to solve complex problems, and discussing and defending their answers with their classmates. It is a joy to hear our scholars making sense of math concepts to make sense of their world and connect those concepts with their environment.
Beyond academics and extracurricular activities, we focus on maintaining a safe learning environment that promotes positive behaviors for all of our scholars. We are a Positive Behavior Intervention System (PBIS) school. We use the PBIS framework and the corresponding lessons to teach students our academic, behavioral, and safety expectations. We rely on the lessons from Second Step to foster social and emotional skills. We celebrate the students who demonstrate these behaviors by awarding them Dojo points that they can use to purchase items from our school store, and they can attend our PBIS celebrations that we hold each semester.
Pepperhill aims to create a positive school environment that meets our students’ social, emotional, and academic needs. All adults at Pepperhill Elementary are committed to this goal—equipping our scholars with the skills they need to be effective contributors to their community, compete globally, and be ready for their future in their careers or college.
Lebanaye Smalls, Ed.S., Principal
SanTonia Singleton, SIC Chair
