WILLISTON — Garden Valley Elementary School has been growing alongside its students, having recently added a new grade of students, a new school counselor and a fresh coat of paint to all buildings. According to Principal Lyndee Heser, these changes are more than surface-deep, as she communicated a genuine eagerness to change what needs to be changed and to double down on the school’s core missions.
Heser presented a thorough report of Garden Valley Elementary School’s recent activities to the Williston Basin School District #7 board during its regular meeting on April 13, touching on student demographics, new additions, academic performance, recent innovations in education and the school’s culture.
Starting with demographics, Heser shared that over the past school year, there were 210 students enrolled at the elementary school. Of those students, the average class size was around 19. There were 40 special education students making up 20% of the school’s population, nine students on 504 plans to accommodate for disabilities, 15 multi-language learners and 74 students receiving free or reduced lunches.
Supporting these 210 students are 17 certified staff members (teachers, counselors, principal, etc.) alongside one long-term substitute teacher and one certified paraprofessional in the library, as well as 14 classified staff members (custodians, secretaries, bus drivers, etc.). Of the 17 staff members, four are a part of the J-1 program, a national initiative where teachers from other countries live in the United States for a year or more to teach students. At Garden Valley, these J-1 teachers are from the Philippines.
“We’ve found it to be a great blessing and joy in our school,” Heser said about the J-1 teachers. “They provide that cultural exchange. Our students have learned about a place that they wouldn’t have even probably known on a map before. They have many varied talents to provide to us … Their decorating skills, their creativity and how they bring it into the classroom has just been extraordinary for us.”
Garden Valley Elementary School has also had more support in the form of a school counselor, Tara Carson, who splits her time between Garden Valley and Del Easton Alternative High School. Heser said having a school counselor in the building has positively impacted students.
Fifth-grade teacher Hailey Smith has been piloting use of Navvy, an academic assessment tool. The school has already seen promising results with Navvy, with 45.5% of the Navvy group receiving an A+ in a reading assessment compared to 33.2% of the control group getting the same score. Similarly, 57.1% of the Navvy group received an A+ in a math assessment compared to 43.6% of the control group, potentially leading to more classes at the school adopting Navvy in the future.
Heser then shared three significant statistics representing different aspects of a successful school life. The first was 3,000 Navvy checks reflecting strong academic performance, followed by 83 rings filled for attendance. Heser then shared a more unique statistic of 444 acts of empathy noticed, an initiative that encourages students to show kindness to their fellow peers to promote social and mental wellbeing.
One continuing area of concern for the school is chronic absenteeism among some students.
“At our school, we have a very high percentage of chronically absent students,” Heser said. “We struggle to know what to do about it and what’s going to help improve it.”
Heser said the school is in its second year of using the BARR (Building Assets; Reducing Risks) framework, which aims to help reduce absenteeism as well as improve grades, increase teacher retention and reduce student disciplinary suspensions. Heser said that although there are visible benefits to the BARR framework, it has yet to result in significant improvements to attendance rates.
To help students be more excited about going to school, Garden Valley has a variety of activities that break up the typical structure of a school day. The school has three “travel days” per year, where students act out “in-flight” activities simulating a plane flight, a “boarding pass” where they make pretend passports representing the country they will learn about and finally arrive in a new country, which in reality is a classroom made to look like a particular country. Over the past few years, students have had the opportunity to simulate visits to countries as nearby as Canada or as far as Denmark, Japan, the Philippines, Greece and more.
“I love your travel days,” school board director Heather Wheeler said to Heser. “That is such a neat way to incorporate other parts of the world into a learning activity for the students to be able to learn about another culture and various things that people do in other parts of the world. I think that is absolutely phenomenal.”
Despite some concerns about getting attendance rates and some test scores up to where they should be, school board directors thanked Heser for her thorough presentation and acknowledged the evident enthusiasm she showed for doing the best for her students and staff.
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