BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE WOODLAND HILLS FOUNDATION.
WOO DL AN D HI LL S S C HOO L D IS TRI C T NE WS
oodland Hills
WOODLAND HILLS SD
MOVES FORWARD WITH THE
PLAN FOR EXCELLENCE
By Mr. Al Johnson, Superintendent of Schools
On behalf of the Board of School Directors, administration,
faculty, and staff I would like to welcome all the readers of IN
Woodland Hills to the new 2016–2017 school year. This is the
second year of our District’s Plan for Excellence and I wanted to
take this opportunity to share with all of you a few of the plans
and initiatives we have in place for this year. Our theme for the
year is “Empathy and Expertise”. By “Empathy” we mean that
we are rededicating ourselves to building new and improved
relationships with all of you, the residents and stakeholders of our
school district. To that end we are moving forward with our efforts
to introduce a concept known as Positive Behavior Intervention
Supports, or PBIS for short, in our primary and intermediate
schools. PBIS is a new way of working with students to improve
behaviors by focusing on recognizing students for the good
things they do every day instead of the traditional approach
of only singling students out when they make mistakes. PBIS
is not a “give away” program as some of you may have heard.
Rather, it is a joint effort between the teacher and his or her
students to identify all the ways classrooms can work together,
and then recognizing students for their efforts when they do so.
It is a solid and research-based program that has shown results
across the country. At our secondary campus we are instituting
a concept known as Restorative Justice (or RJ) for short. RJ seeks
to help students become their own best critics when it comes
to intervening in difficult or problematic situations. Trained
student peer mentors, working under the direct supervision of
a trained teacher, sit down together to address problem issues
within the school. This effort has already shown great promise
and we are anxiously looking forward to watching it grow and
34 Woodland Hills
become even more effective as the year moves forward. At the
community level, we have this year established the position of
Family and Community Engagement Director. Through this office
we will work to build better and stronger relationships with all of
our families and neighborhoods throughout the Woodland Hills
community. Dr. Debbie Vereen has been appointed as the director
of this office, and she is hard at work planning a variety of events
and activities that we hope all of you will attend during the year.
Our second theme is “Expertise.” We believe that the answers to
our challenges are to be found within the men and women who
work in Woodland Hills, along with the many talented people who
live in our school district. This year we will be working to build
a vision for our Junior/Senior High School and our Intermediate
School as we look to consider renovations at both facilities.
We have retained the firm of Reynolds Construction and Pierce
Architects to assist in these plans, and as we move forward we
will be looking for interested members of our community who
may wish to step forward and join us in the planning process.
We are considering, among many other things, renovations to
our auditorium with an eye towards making it a true performing
arts center. We are also looking at upgrades to our science labs,
maker spaces, and at the possibility of bringing true career and
technology education programs into the district. Please watch our
district web site at www.whsd.net for updates as we move along
in this process.
It will be an eventful year in Wolverine Country and I truly hope
that you will join us and become a part of the greatest school
district anywhere—Woodland Hills!