India Hook Elementary School is helping all students develop world-class skills, using life and career characteristics of the Profile of the South Carolina Graduate, by encouraging innovation, critical thinking, communication, creativity and collaboration. We opened our doors in 2007 and are a school of about 600 students nestled in a small neighborhood off of Twin Lakes Road in Rock Hill.
Flexibility and adaptability were the words for this school year. Our instructional model changed three times throughout the course of the year - A/B day for everyone, A/B day for half our population and full time for the other half, and then full time for everyone. We constantly monitored and adjusted based on protocols and guidelines and even learned to livestream lessons in order to provide continuous learning for our student who were isolated or quarantined.
India Hook will continue with our school-wide Positive Behavior Intervention System (PBIS) CREW acronym (Creating a positive community, Respect each other, Excel every day, and Work together). With students returning from Virtual Academy and over 100 students coming to us from another school, it will be important to provide consistent expectations for students. In addition, our PBIS Action Team we will be discussing expected behaviors and creating a new referral system.
Our fourth and fifth grade students continued to collaborate with the City of Rock Hill, the BMX Center and Home Depot to design model BMX tracks. What started as a single grade level at India Hook has now grown in the district. We were able to include two grade levels and expand to another school. We look forward to continuing the plan next year and expanding it further so that more students in Rock Hill can benefit from this partnership.
Our school is beginning to shift its focus to the four big questions of a Professional Learning Community (PLC): What do we want our students to learn? How will we know they learned them? What will we do with the students if they have already learned it? What will we do with the students who haven’t learned it? These four questions fit nicely into our Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) process, which India Hook began implementing this year. It is a strategic, targeted, and purposeful approach to identifying students who need small-group intensive instruction. We were fortunate to be able to hire three highly-qualified tutors to work with these students and look forward to the work they will continue next year.
This has been a year like no other in my tenure as principal. I look forward to next year and the new possibilities that await.