21-22 School Year Changes

 Dear CPS Community,

I can’t tell you how many times CPS staff hear from alumni that they wish they would have taken school more seriously, that they feel like this place is part of their family, and that they wish they would have come to school more often and not put it off so long. 

We know that there are reasons why our students will sometimes avoid coming to school and working hard. There could be mental health challenges like social anxiety. There might be academic challenges like a struggle with reading. There might be a lack of purpose and direction that may make it hard to understand the point of getting a high school education. There may be substance use and abuse challenges.

Whatever challenges our students face, we aim to confront them head on, help students overcome them, and support our students to find success in their schooling and in life. With those aims in mind, I want to share with you some changes we will be making to our program for the next school year starting July 19, 2021. These changes fall under the categories of advisory and advocacy.

Advisory

Advisory has consistently been a successful aspect of our program with teachers who have a group of advisees they work with outside of their academic classes, but next year we will be altering it a bit. Students will have an advisory period every morning as their 1st period class. This period will count as 1 elective credit per year and will contain several components. 

1. Reading Plus: Each morning, students will spend about 30 minutes on a program that has been highly successful in raising a student’s reading level and vocabulary. It also helps train the users’ eyes to track words on a page more effectively. Reading difficulties can be addressed, and becoming better readers help students in all their learning. You can see an overview of Reading Plus here: https://youtu.be/WMXWksdBhD0. Reading Plus is now a required part of our core English credits, but will be able to be completed in Advisory.
2. Character Strong: One day per week in advisory, students will be covering a lesson that aims to strengthen their social and emotional intelligence and develop their character. Research tells us that emotional intelligence is a greater indicator of success than intellectual intelligence. Things like self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making are all key indicators of success in life. We address these in our Discovery Class, and will continue this learning within advisory. See an overview of the Character Strong curriculum here: https://characterstrong.com/
3. ICAP: One of our required credits is ICAP, which stands for Individual Career and Academic Plan. This credit aims at helping students explore their post-high school plans whether a job, learning a trade, attending a two or four year college, or enlisting in the military. Previously, this was a class a student enrolled in. Now we will devote one day per week in advisory on the ICAP curriculum, and students will be able to complete this class within advisory.
4. The final part of advisory will focus on goal setting and academic planning. Students will have worked out the credits they will work on that year and will track progress on the accomplishment of those credits. We require 40 credits to graduate, so to be on a normal high school track, a student will earn 10 credits per year. Students often will earn more than that if they are aiming to catch up or graduate early. But, 10 credits per year will be the baseline expectation we will support students in attaining.

Hopefully, the above information about advisory shows how important it is for students to attend 1st period next year, and regular attendance to 1st period advisory will be an expectation. 

Advocacy

In the past, advocates have been advisors who were assigned to students who were experiencing a lack of engagement in school. These students were placed with an advocate instead of the regular teacher advisors. The change to this program for next year will be that students will stay with their advisor and be expected to attend that 1st period advisory class. However, if students are struggling to be engaged in school, an advocate will be assigned to them to provide additional levels of support. 

The heart of the new advocacy program will be a re-engagement meeting and plan that will be attended by the student and the parent/guardian. The meeting and resulting plan will focus on identifying the barriers that are getting in the way of students succeeding in school and will set a plan to address those barriers and re-engage the student in school. Please see the following link for more information on the advocacy program: https://sites.google.com/communityprepschool.org/cpsstudentflowchart/advocacy

Our goal at Community Prep School, as stated in our mission and vision statement, is to treat each student as an individual, help each student uncover a plan for life, and develop the necessary skills and habits to find success. To achieve this goal, we need to be able to count on students and parents/guardians being partners with us in this effort. We are confident in our ability to help students gain skills and knowledge when we can have them here in our classrooms on a regular basis. Therefore, we will be diligent in expecting regular and consistent attendance moving forward.

If you have any thoughts or questions, please feel free to contact me at rsolanki@communtiyprepschool.org or call the school at 719-227-8836. I look forward to our ongoing partnership.

Sincerely,

Raj Solanki

Principal