By Tamra Taylor, Superintendent Live Oak School District
From the Editor: As part of our support for education we believe that the community needs to hear from the school systems that are teaching your children and grandchildren. Tamra Taylor has been superintendent of the Live Oak School District for six years and brings not only knowledge, but also a true concern for the physical, emotional, social and educational welfare of the children under her care. The Capitola Soquel Times welcomes the Live Oak School District to its pages.
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From the spring of 2013 through the fall of 2014, the Live Oak School District engaged in an extensive visioning and action planning process. Parents, community members, teachers and administrators worked together over an extended period of time to create plans to accomplish our highest aspirations for Live Oak students. As a result of this work, we agreed upon four key goals to focus our work with students:
- Increased outreach to parents so that they will be actively engaged in their child’s education
- Collaborative inquiry-based instruction that has a culminating activity in Live Oak classrooms
- A comprehensive physical and emotional wellness program
- A rigorous academic program that results in all students being academically ready for A-G high school requirements.
In this issue, I would like to share with readers our efforts in the Live Oak School District to create a comprehensive wellness program (Goal #3). We have selected wellness as one of our four focus areas because we believe children are more likely to succeed when their physical and emotional health is a district priority.
To that end, we have greatly increased programs that promote physical and emotional health.
This school year we hired two mental health counselors to work with students who need social emotional support to be successful in school. All of our schools have a referral process to the counseling program and parents who are interested in utilizing this service may provide the district with consent to work with their child.
We all know that students perform best in school when they form positive peer relationships and when they feel physically and emotionally safe at school. To ensure a safe environment for students, last year we focused our attention on bullying prevention. District staff was trained to recognize and prevent bullying behavior. Each school uses the Solution Team® program that consists of a team of adults who work with students to help them come up with ways to stand up for others and find solutions for students who they know are being bullied. Additionally, every week teachers at all grade levels teach students social skills from the Second Step program. The Second Step social skills lessons focus on four key areas: skills for learning, empathy, emotion management, and problem solving.
John F. Kennedy once said that physical activity is the basis of dynamic and creative intellectual activity. The American Academy of Pediatrics has found that the average child sits in front of some type of “screen” over 7 hours per day.
Their recommendation is no screen time for children under two years of age and no more than 2 hours of screen time for children over 2 years of age. Excessive screen time has been linked to obesity and poor physical health. To counter this growing societal problem, we have hired a full time PE teacher for our elementary students and instituted a new PE program, GameDay. The GameDay curriculum provides activities that challenge students both physically and mentally, advancing children’s skills every year while developing a commitment to lifelong health and fitness with grade-specific content.
Being active requires sound nutrition and in the last two years we have transformed our Child Nutrition Program by offering students nutritious whole foods at lunchtime. The transformation was in direct response to our District Wellness Goal and it has met with overwhelming staff, parent, and community support. Rachel Otis, our Director of Child Nutrition, has developed the new lunch program with fresh meals cooked daily at our Del Mar Elementary School kitchen and then transported to our other school sites. This change in our food service program has been expanded through a Nourishing Generations Grant and a Harvest of the Month Grant, which provide mid-day and afterschool snacks of fresh fruits and vegetables, nutrition lessons, and cooking classes, which teach students to prepare healthy and inexpensive meals.
We fully expect our students to perform better on their academic tasks and to be more successful in life as a result of our efforts toward improving their physical and emotional health.