Newsletters 2014-15 Focus newsletter, [1] fall | Page 9

ACCOUNTABILITY

PAGE 9

Board revises strategic investments
• An additional $50,000 for the biomedical
science program at Coon Rapids High School.
• $25,000 to plan a STEAM program at Anoka
High School. STEAM programs add an arts
component to the increasingly common STEM
(science, technology, engineering, mathematics)
programs. This builds on the arts strand already
available in Anoka with Lincoln Elementary
School for the Arts and Anoka Middle School
for the Arts (A stands for arts in STEAM).
Jessica Breneman, a kindergarten teacher at Mississippi
Elementary School, uses nonverbal communication skills
she learned through ENVoY to get her students on task.
With ENVoY, teachers are regaining lost teaching time and
increasing student engagement achievement, all thanks to
nonverbal communication.

• Contracts to maintain the district’s TelePresence
Immersion technology, which allows a teacher
to simultaneously teach a class to students in
several schools.

Programs being removed from the list include:
• All-day-every-day kindergarten for students at
schools with the greatest need was eliminated
because it is now being funded by the state as
the result of legislative action in 2013.

The School Board revised the slate of strategic
investments it initially approved in 2012 in an effort
to close the achievement gap and increase student
learning.

• The Naviance program for middle school was
not implemented; the district is exploring a
similar program being offered through the TIES
technology consortium to which the district
belongs.

Items totaling $700,000 were dropped from the
list and new items were added. The total annual
cost will drop from approximately $2.2 million to
$1.9 million. At the same time, the strategic investment period increased from four to six years,
extending through the 2017-18 school year.

• The original plan for an assistant director of
curriculum, assessment and instruction was
eliminated because the position was never
filled and the curriculum department was
reorganized.

New items include:
• A half-time elementary teacher to provide
targeted staff development in ENVoY classroom
management techniques and a full-time teacher
to provide staff development in culturally
responsive teaching and restitution. This will
allow the district to expand proven programs
that have resulted in significantly decreasing student discipline concerns and suspension rates.

• A position intended to help with expansion
of online learning at the high school level is
being eliminated. Instead, the need will be
met by giving current staff extra service agreements funded out of the General Fund, which
will make the program sustainable into the
future. ■

All-day-every-day kindergarten
“It is wonderful to be in a state
where this opportunity is
available for all children.”
- Paul Anderson, Sand Creek Elementary principal

The move was an effort to cut transportation costs
rather than slashing classroom budgets.
“We saved money in the turnaround time,”
Wolverton says. “There were no buses in the
middle of the day.”
But that wasn’t as desirable an instructional
model as all-day-every-day kindergarten, according
to Paul Anderson, principal at Sand Creek
Elementary School, which will be offering the new
program for the first time this fall.
“The consistency and continuity that it will provide our early learners will be a vast improvement
to the all-day, every-other-day model,” Anderson
says. “For example, students would attend
Mondays, Wednesdays and every other Friday.

cont. from page 1

Ames is also the parent of a child who will
be a kindergartner this year at an AnokaHennepin school. “I’m excited for my son to
have the rich learning experience that will
take place with having a consistent schedule
like all-day-kindergarten provides.”
Establishing daily all-day kindergarten in
Anoka-Hennepin’s elementary schools presented
something of a jigsaw puzzle for administrators.

At Sand Creek, for example, there were not
enough classrooms to accommodate seven groups
of kindergartners every day. So the school is putting the finishing touches on a 12,000-square-foot
addition, which will house four fifth-grade classrooms, a new music room and two classrooms for
special education students and those with developmental cognitive disabilities (DCD) who will transfer
from Madison Elementary School.
So, because of the new addition, both Sand
Creek and Madison will have the space they need
for all-day, every-day kindergarten.
“With an expected enrollment of 785 students, it
will be the most students at Sand Creek in my nine
years here,” Anderson said.

“This would result in circumstances where a student would go to school on Wednesday, not have
school on that particular Friday, and then sometimes miss the next Monday due to a holiday. An
entire week would go by between days of attendance, and that inconsistency of instruction was
difficult for students and teachers.”

Sand Creek is one of six elementary schools in the
district preparing new classrooms for the influx of
new students. Construction on the additional
60,000 square feet was paid for using money from a
maintenance fund, a capital fund and savings from
leasing portable classrooms, which will no longer be
needed because of the new construction.

Meanwhile, Tonya Ames, a Rum River Elementary
School kindergarten teacher, says adding all-day
kindergarten at all Anoka-Hennepin schools means
all children in the district can now benefit.

In addition to solving the classroom space puzzle,
Wolverton says administrators wanted to open the
district’s doors to [Y^H