Educational opportunities extend beyond the classroom to enrich learning, develop student awareness of the global community and promote intellectual and civic engagement.
Goal: Participate in Tri-State Consortium professional development and member consultancies and plan for a district visit/consultancy.
- The district completed its second year of membership to The Tri-State Consortium, whose members include high-performing school districts from Connecticut, New Jersey and New York. F-M is the only Upstate New York school district included in the consortium, which has nearly 50 member districts.
- Consortium members support each other through external peer review of programs and practices, study groups, conferences and topic-based seminars designed to deepen professional learning.
- During 2019-20, F-M staff members made three trips to high performing districts in Westchester County that were facilitated through the district’s consortium membership:
- Bronxville Union Free School District: focusing on The Bronxville Promise, which is a project-based learning approach embedded into the school culture and curriculum;
- Mount Pleasant School District: focusing on writing in kindergarten through grade 5;
- Croton-Harmon Union Free School District: focusing on how the district has immersed critical thinking through problem solving in all grade levels.
Goal: Establish student service learning opportunities that are aligned with the curriculum and enhance classroom learning.
Mott Road students learn about veterans and host an annual Veterans Day ceremony in which they celebrate and honor local veterans’ service.
Schools looked for opportunities to have students build connections across grade levels. For example, Enders Road partnered with the high school to create opportunities for high school students to volunteer weekly in third grade and art classes. This allowed teachers to mentor high school students interested in an educational career. At Eagle Hill, high school students involved with Dance Marathon and the Positivity Project kicked off the middle school’s January Wellness Day assembly.
Goal: Create community service partnerships to support personal and social growth and development.
- Mott Road created a career survey for grade 4 students.
- Staff organized many service learning opportunities for students to give back to the community, such as at Eagle Hill where students made and donated sandwiches to local nonprofit We Rise Above the Streets Recovery Outreach and at Wellwood where students learned about and supported nonprofit In My Father’s Kitchen. Both organizations serve people affected by homelessness. Other organizations schools worked with include Sleep in Heavenly Peace, FM Food Pantry, Helping Hounds, Upstate Golisano Children’s Hospital and The Salvation Army.
- Wellwood and F-M High School partnered with InterFaith Works of Central New York, which focuses on building bridges of understanding among people of different religions and across racial divides. Students participated in the organization’s Ahmad & Elizabeth El-Hindi Center for Dialogue, which promotes racial and social equity using a dialogue-to-action model. The program will be expanded in 2020-21 to include Eagle Hill Middle School.