Community school remains dedicated to SEL
Leaders of Hot Springs Community School have proved to be flexible with changes to their education model, but they remain dedicated to the benefits of social emotional learning.
The school will open the school year after Labor Day for the second time since it was founded more than a decade ago. The schedule shift is one of many minor modifications the school has explored.
More than two dozen students are enrolled in grades 6-12 for the 2017-18 school year. Enrollment peaked at 45 students several years ago and the school enrolled 30 students in its final year with kindergarten through fifth grade.
“We looked at what we felt like we are good at and we are good at 6-12,” said Bill Vining, superintendent of Hot Springs Community School. “In elementary, we are just OK. That is no reflection on the teachers. It’s just that our focus has been on perfecting what we are doing here on the social emotional learning.”
The campus has long used the HeartBridge Learning System for a total approach to education. The system calls for mastery of core content, use of teamwork and community learning, growth mindsets instead of fixed, positive learning strategies, development of community skills and preparation for life after high school.
Tuition is income-based as scholarships and various methods of financial aid keep the average cost to about $200 per month. Full tuition is about $6,500 per year. Vining said
about 70 percent of the school’s students qualify for free and reduced price meals.
Vining said the school’s principles of social emotional learning are key to the alternative they offer to standard public school models. Social emotional learning core competencies include relationship skills, responsible decision-making, self-awareness, self-management and social awareness.
“We started teaching social emotional learning, literally, 10 years ago,” Vining said. “Five years ago, we decided to do it on a regular basis.”
The school began by incorporating the principles for about 30-45 minutes per day before embedding them into the full curriculum. Teachers at several schools throughout the state have met with Vining to utilize the principles in their own classrooms.
The most interest has been expressed by alternative learning environment programs, but two teachers at Charleston are working to adapt the curriculum for middle school. Vining said a campus in the Stuttgart School District is integrating the curriculum in a more widespread manner than any previous partners.
Social emotional learning has become a leading approach for educational organizations such as the California Office to Reform Education Districts, Washoe County School District in Nevada and the Austin Independent School District in Texas. Vining said the results showed academics improved by 10 percent, absences decreased and disciplinary issues decreased.
“You are looking at this and you are going, ‘Why doesn’t everybody do this?’” Vining said. “People that are involved in it, that see it, ask that very same question. It is not just good for academics. It is good for your community.
“What we have done here at this school is use this as a lab and said, ‘What is working to change the mindset, from destructive mindsets to where they are constructive mindsets?’”
Vining said a strength of HSCS is personalized education. Most public schools only have individualized education program plans for students in special education, but HSCS develops plans for all of its students.
All HSCS students participate in all of the school’s programs and projects. Each student is able to use the school garden, shop space and MakerSpace.
The school’s curriculum heavily incorporates project-based learning. Staff member Mike Foshee, who taught drone classes this summer for National Park College’s Innovative Technologies Center, will lead drone lessons for students to build their own devices this year and coding will become a more significant component of the curriculum.
“We are allowed now to substitute a math credit for coding, but it has to be a full course,” Foshee said. “It can’t be just like we have been doing in the past. We are expanding to where we can have that offering for the students.”
Vining said the school’s strategy is to expose students to a range of interests. He said the model is meant to help them develop life skills and soft skills that will benefit them after they graduate.
“I think we taught it innately in the past,” Foshee said. “We got so focused on passing that standardized test and the amount of academia we involve in the kids. We forget all about the social issues. We feel like there is a niche here. That is why our curriculum works if we can get in the door.”