Osceola Charter Preschool

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Osceola Charter Preschool

• History of conversation in community
• Start-up funding
• Existing community programs suffering to make 4K
  happen
• On-going state aid funding uncertainty
• Concerns about pushing children
• Space availability within schools
• Identified priority in parent education, not
  education of children

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Osceola Charter Preschool

• Why Charter?
• Funding availability
• Grants
• For planning
• For training
• For equipment and start-up costs
• Partnership opportunities expand with charter
  flexibility
• Flexibility in format
• Parent education and participation emphasis
• Strategies to address emotional needs of children
• Programming tailored to Osceolas unique needs
• Ability to ease in with format under charter
  umbrella

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Osceola Charter Preschool

• Role of Advisory Council
• Develop work teams in the areas of preschool
  curriculum, parent education, and addressing
  emotional needs of children. (Dec. 2004)
• Create working plans of key elements of the
  charter school (January/February 2005)
• Present overall plan and request for charter to
  School District of Osceola Board of Education
  (Spring 2005)
• Assist in development of implementation grant
  (Summer 2005)
• Continue in advisory capacity as programming
  begins (Fall 2005/Winter 2005-06)

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Osceola Charter Preschool

• Elements that make us unique
• Parent Education
• Preschool Curriculum
• Emotional development programming
• Research elements for the grant, for our charter
  contract, and to inform District practices in
  literacy and social-emotional development

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Parent Involvement Education Ways we Involve
Parents/Families

• PARENT INVOLVEMENT
• AT LEAST SEVEN CLASSROOM VOLUNTEER ASSIGNMENTS,
  OR NEGOTIATED ALTERNATIVES
• Communication during school year-
• Regular contact phone and email.
• Classroom News/ Newsletters
• Communication journals
• School to home bags
• Family Museums highlighting a particular
  family each week on display.
• Supporting the schools activities, such as Open
  House, Child Development Days, etc.
• Involvement in Advisory Council, or its projects
• Assistance in identifying resources for our
  expanded Family Resource Center

• PARENT EDUCATION
• AT LEAST THREE EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITIES EACH YEAR
• Orientation night-
• Parent/Teacher Conferences
• Fall Needs Assessment for identifying workshop
  topics
• Communication in all types of families.
• Anger management
• Aggressive and/or passive children.
• Effective positive discipline and consistent
  parenting
• Divorced, Separated and Blended families.
• Developmentally appropriate reading
  strategies.
• Motor skills.
• Multiple Intelligences.
• Healthy Cooking
• Balancing busy lives

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Preschool Curriculum

• Creative Curriculum as core curriculum
• Beginning work with cc.net
• Tracking selected objectives for research work
  with Kindergarten entry longitudnal data
• Exploring additional literacy elements from
  Teaching Strategies
• Incorporation of learning centers as part of
  lengthened day this year

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Social-Emotional Curriculum

• By accelerating our students social-emotional
  development in the PreK year, we hope to send
  children to Kindergarten ready to learn the
  academic curriculum available in our full-day
  program
• Core Guidance curriculum using Second Step,
  violence prevention curriculum
• Responsive Classroom Philosophy in classrooms
• Morning Meeting, Rules Logical Consequences,
  and Academic Choice elements
• Play Therapy screening and service available for
  identified students

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What is Play Therapy?

• Play Therapy is an effective therapy that helps
  children modify their behaviors, clarify self
  concept, and build healthy relationships.
  Through play, what a child knows best, the child
  engages in a dynamic relationship that enables
  them to express, explore, and make sense of their
  difficult and painful experiences in a way of
  communicating other than using words to describe
  their thoughts, feelings, and perceptions.

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What is the Play Therapists Role?

• A Play Therapist is a safe, consistent, reliable
  individual who develops an ongoing relationship
  with a child or group of children through play
  sessions. The therapist uses the play process to
  help children understand their feelings and
  behaviors.
• A Play Therapist is an support system to the
  teaching staff and parents and available to
  provide education and support.
• A Play Therapist can hold group play therapy
  sessions or individual play therapy sessions
  consisting of multiple sessions depending on the
  realm of behavioral issues, traumas with a given
  child.

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Challenges Growing Pains

• Served 60 children last year 75 this year
• Working on expanding to private sector partners
  and adding a parallel District program
• Development of off-shoot program to develop a
  Polk County Early Childhood Council to share
  resources, ideas, programming
• Blending our Early Childhood children into
  classrooms this year
• Keeping enrollment data clean for charter school
  entity and our EC-only students

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Challenges Improvements

• Working in second implementation year on training
  in literacy, Responsive Classroom, Second Step,
  Technology Integration
• Refining our parent education offerings,
  registration processes, carpool transportation
  assistance
• Refining our charter school handbook forms
• Helping our parents become more self-reliant and
  interdependent---encouraging them to make a
  friend with other parents now that their child
  is in school
• Exploring how to blend in foreign language
  options for young learners to promote literacy
  development
• Creating sustainable structures that will extend
  beyond the grant cycles

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For more information

• Osceola Charter Preschool
• C/O Osceola Elementary School
• 250 10th Avenue
• Osceola WI 54020
• [phone]
• Teachers Brenda Wheeler Stacey Baier