It’s summer time and living’s good. Students and teachers alike are rejoicing – no more long hours being cooped up inside, no more assignments, and no more tests!
Our clients spend the months of July and August doing exciting ‘summer only’ things like camp trips. But with fall creeping up around the corner both students and teachers must prepare for going back to school.
We talked to programs north education director and Ellen Gunn Education Centre principal, Shawn Ly, about some of the things that our teachers do to ensure our client’s successes continue when the lazy days of summer have passed and they are back in school.
Because many of our clients haven’t had great experiences with traditional school, it’s even more important that they don’t regress when they return in September.
While all teachers prep before a new school year, most of the time it’s for a new class full of new students. At Ranch Ehrlo, things are a little different. Without a traditional “pass or fail” grading system, we have created a system that works for us and our clients. At the end of each school year, all teachers make individual recommendations based on a student’s progress over the school year and their specific goals, which look different for each youth.
We know, and in fact plan for, each of our client’s eventual discharge from our programs. We want to make that transition as smooth as possible, so if a youth discharges over the summer we make sure that we pass along the recommendations to their new school placement so everyone involved knows exactly what our educators were focusing on and where it would be helpful for them to focus in the future. If youth return to our programs in the fall, the recommendations serve as a reminder for Ranch teachers of the youth’s goals for the future, whether they are with the same teacher or a new one.
In short, these individual recommendations ensure continuity for the youth and allows the summer to pass without concern of whether a student will be able to pick up where they left off in June.
