Our 2025-2026 Whiteside School Focus

Through the spring of 2025, our teachers, staff, students, and larger community scanned our students and their learning, reflected on that data, and discussed our current progress in our focus areas of literacy and social responsibility.

Our community continues to have strong connections with each other and look forward to coming to school each day. Our community continues to provide unique learning opportunities for our students through in-school resources, off-site experiences, and community events.

Our teachers and staff are grateful for the dedicated families and friends who support our school. We appreciate coming together with our community partners to ensure we provide the best possible learning environment for our children. We are also thankful for the love of learning that our students display every day, making our classrooms vibrant spaces full of engagement and curiosity.

During this year of reflection and scanning, our community sees two areas of growth: Literacy (specifically reading comprehension strategies and primary reading intervention) and social responsibility (specifically building school-wide expectations around “Respect to Self, Others, and Place”).

We are excited by the opportunities presented to us to grow our skills, enhance student learning, and engage our community.

In literacy this year, we are committed to:

• updating literacy assessments practices
  • school-wide Acadience reading screeners for decoding and fluency,
  • school-wide Richmond Formative Reading Assessment (RFRA) for reading comprehension and fluency.
  • SPARK (Screener for Phonemic Awareness in Richmond Kindergarten) - a phonemic awareness screener for Kindergarten and Grade 1 students.
• using data from our literacy assessments to guide our teaching practice and differentiate our instruction
• provide comprehensive and specific instruction to target specific reading comprehension strategies
• provide direct, targeted reading intervention for our primary students.

In Social Responsibility this year, we are committed to:

• introducing new social responsibility language – Respect to Self, Others, Place
• implementing school-wide activities to create shared, co-created expectations
• ongoing learning in classroom based on respect for self, others, and place

We will be successful when we see:

• our Wolfpack engaged in their literacy learning and can specifically name reading comprehension strategies that help them understand their reading.
• improved assessment scores
• common use of school-wide language
• our Wolfpack using learning from our social-responsibility framework to model respect in the classroom and around our community.