Happy New Year!!!

The end of the year is always an excellent time for reflection (though most times generally are).   On behalf of everyone who is privileged to serve your child(ren) and family, we want to extend a personal note of gratitude for how truly fortunate we are.  East Prairie is a phenomenal community of kids, educators, and families!

We wish you and your family a wonderful winter break and a very happy New Year!  We hope the coming weeks afford you the opportunity to enjoy extended time together with those you love and care most about.  We are looking forward to 2024, and to the many successes, challenges, and celebrations that lie ahead, as well as, the memories to be made along the way!

We look forward to welcoming our students and families back on Monday, January 8th.  All the best until then - Happy New Year!

2023 Highlights

 Dear East Prairie families,

As we approach the end of the 2023 calendar year, we want to take a moment to express our profound gratitude and appreciation for the love, care, and support our community continues to abundantly provide to our school.  Your efforts have considerably contributed to the ongoing growth, improvement, and success of our East Prairie community.

2023 Highlights

We are grateful to our students, teachers, support staff, families, Board, and community members.  Over the past year we have accomplished so much together.  Some highlights from 2023 include:

- Establishing a comprehensive, collaborative, and collective framework (RULER, plus other tools) to support the social, emotional, and behavioral needs of students;

- Creation of a Positive Behavior Team to develop tools like Pawsomes, minors, and majors to support the behavioral success of ALL students across ALL settings and parts of the school day;

- Development of the EPS/NN Mentoring Program.  The mission of the program is to enhance the academic, social, and emotional growth of the students in our community through meaningful connections with one another;

- Adoption of an extensive and comprehensive STEAM program for all K-8 students.  This adoption marks a commitment to fostering creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills among our students. Students experience going through a design thinking process that includes, exploring, planning using SMART goals, experimenting, reflecting and sharing; 

- Enhanced co-teaching and collaboration practices to support our multilingual students - these efforts led to a doubling of our exit rate on the ACCESS test for of our multilingual students;

- Addition of Tier 3 support for our students needing to develop foundational skills in math and reading - Developing systems, structures, and supports that ensure every child is met where they are at and has a collaborative team working to ensure their growth towards high expectations. 

- Adoption of a new elementary math curriculum - these resources paired with high-leverage instructional practices are a significant driver of student learning;

- New website to improve communication channels with parents and the community;

- Expanding family events throughout the school year to provide more opportunities for our community to gather, connect, and learn together;

- Increased partnership with community organizations (University of Chicago, Niles Township Government, etc.) to connect resources, ideas, and opportunities to our students and families.

For this work, and all that came before it, East Prairie has been recognized this year as:

- a top school as rated by U.S. News and World Report - we are part of fewer than 2% of schools nationwide by giving our elementary and middle school top school status.

- Niche.com has again recognized East Prairie as a top performing school - rating both our elementary and middle school in the top 3% in Cook County. We are number 18 of 617 middle schools and number 28 of 861 elementary schools. 

We take tremendous pride in serving our students, families, and community to the fullest extent possible and are committed to becoming the “premier school district in the nation” because we know in that pursuit of excellence lies incredible outcomes for kids and all of us.

We look forward to further building upon this important and impactful work together in the year ahead!

"Band" Books (the good kind :)

What a night!  We kicked things off with a fun and really well themed Family Reading Night (An Evening With Jory John Books)!  Thank you to our kids, families, teachers, and community organizations for coming together to provide another family event that brings folks into the school to connect and enjoy time together!

We then followed this up with our Winter Concert!  It was remarkable to see (and hear) the musical and personal growth made throughout the beginning of the year in each of the group's that performed!   It was an all around wonderful event, showcasing the immense musical talents of our students.  Thank you for to our student performers, Mr. Berlinghof, and Mr. Oliveira on all of the hard work, creativity, and energy that went into making a night like this possible and a huge celebration!

Physics With a Bang!

Thank you to the University of Chicago for partnering with us to provide our students, families, and community with absolutely incredible Physics With a Bang! experience!  It is our hope that this opportunity sparks creativity, imagination, and possibility within our students, growing and nurturing their dreams!

Mentoring Update

Thank you to our high school partners for their teamwork and commitment to launching the East Prairie-Niles North mentoring program this year.

The mission of the East Prairie-Niles North mentoring program is to enhance the academic, social, and emotional growth of the students in our community through meaningful connections with one another.

In its first year, the program will connect 25 middle school students with high school athletes serving as mentors. Through connecting our students with a high school mentor who directly reflects their identity and interests, we seek to help each child envision and develop the best version of their future selves. 

The longer term goal of this endeavor is to expand access to approximately 25% of our middle school students involving a wider range of high school disciplines (drama, band, orchestra, choir, fine arts, global languages, etc.), as well as, to then develop a reverse mentoring program whereby our middle school mentees would serve as mentors to East Prairie students in 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade.  Thus ultimately establishing a leadership pipeline involving over 100 third through twelfth grade students.

Family Movie Night!

 

Thank you to the PTA for sponsoring this week's Family Movie Night.  Our students voted on Elemental as our featured film.  The selection was beautiful as one of the key themes - not fearing what we don't know and understand - is a valuable lesson for both kids and adults.  Good company, pizza, candy, and buckets upon buckets of popcorn made for a very enjoyable evening!