HK8 principal recognizes selfless staff members

This month's school board meeting, held at Hotchkiss K8 School, provided principal Carrie Coats with the perfect opportunity to publicly recognize outstanding members of her school staff.

The HK8 Superwoman Award went to Angela Flores, the school's literacy coach. But she impacts all aspects of instruction at HK8, Coats said.

"Mrs. Flores is the gifted/talented coordinator, and she developed a remarkable RtI program that soon will be wanted by many schools around the state and possibly the nation! She also looked outside the box and developed a program called HELP (Help Educate Little People). This program trains our seventh/eighth graders in a variety of intervention strategies. Twice a week those students work one-on-one with kindergarten and first grade students for 15 minutes. Beyond all these programs and duties she also progress monitors every K8 student and is our data coordinator for our school. Mrs. Flores serves on the LEAD team for our school. Mrs. Flores does all this because she has a passion and a love for every student at HK8 and seeing the growth of every student is what makes her eyes twinkle. Mrs. Flores does many of these duties on her own, as she is only contracted for 19 hours a week! HK8 is super lucky to have this superwoman on our team!" Coats said.

She also recognized "the team behind the team" — the general education paraprofessionals who go above and beyond every day to make HK8 a wonderful school.

Glenda Young, Rachel Oviedo, Manuela Fletcher, Jenny West and Amber Bayles have developed their very own professional learning community, or PLC, group, Coats said.

They are constantly meeting on their own time to discuss ways they can improve themselves to help our school, she added. On early release days these ladies come in and work without pay to help out our teachers. This past early release day many of them took a CPR/AED course. They spend their paid time doing instructional work, often volunteering their own time to finish up their clerical duties.

Under the guidance of certified teachers, the paraprofessionals teach electives such as cooking, Spanish, K-2 music, sixth grade life skills and intervention. They all have participated in professional development trainings on their own time and with their own money.

"We are extremely grateful to each of them," Coats said. "They truly are the team behind the team."

Next Coats recognized "The Red Heart Club of HK8," special education paraprofessionals Marylse Cunningham, Terrea Bear, Cindy Derby, Andrea Lofley, Dawn Cowden and Phyllis Pene.

"These special education paraprofessionals share their smiles and teach with their hearts every day to our resource students at HK8," Coats said. "Our resource paraprofessionals deserve the HK8 Red Heart Club Award, as they are extremely patient. Their duties range from teaching life skills classes where our students take walking field trips to City Market to learn how to shop and to manage money, to learning how to sew and to garden."

They work one-on-one with students to develop their social, emotional, behavioral, academic and other skills that are necessary for learning. They are truly making a difference in the life of the students at HK8, Coats said.

• < Prev
• Next >