Jennifer Jimenez

Independent Newsmedia

The first day of school can be overwhelming for some students entering kindergarten, but the Deer Valley Unifi ed School District hoped to ease the big transition set to begin in August. A kindergarten preview night took place district-wide Feb. 1 and schools like Stetson Hills Elementary, 25475 N. Stetson Hills Loop, Phoenix, used the time to introduce prospective students to teachers and families to campus.

“This is our big community reach to get kids enrolled and lets kids come up to the school and see their perspective teachers and parents get a feel for the school, their perspective teachers and classrooms,” Stetson Hills Elementary Principal Carrie Mabee said.

While Ms. Mabee said she believes all the DVUSD schools are great and service the whole child.

“We offer a little bit of everything, for every kind of learner,” Ms. Mabee said. “So, our kindergartners get arts, music and physical education every day of the week for 45 minutes, with 90-minute reading blocks and intervention time built on that. Our kinder teachers do a lot of small group instruction to personalize it to student’s individual levels, but it also keeps other kiddos engaged and not just watching their teacher teach. And we do STEM centers in the afternoon.”

Ms. Mabee said because they offer so much engaging curriculum, students are not just sitting in their seats and all doing different types of things all day.

Activities like these is where kindergartners start their love of music, the arts and sports. With the classrooms being tucked away, getting to engage with the other parts of the school is exciting for them. Ms. Mabee described her four kindergartenteachers as on the cutting edge of what kids should be learning and attend multiple professional development to have the greatest research-based practices.

“They are not the sit-andget types of teachers, and they want kids to be moving and get their hands in

stuff and really that is the way our whole school is,” Ms. Mabee explained.

She said in kindergarten, the teachers reinforce positive behavior instead of being punitive and feel the social- emotional feeling of being safe is just as important as the academics as they begin to build their love for school.

“We want them reading when they leave kindergarten so having those early reading skills and letter sound recognition are great to have before they start. And parents can just read to them at home and having them be able to listen and talk about what is being read and just early literacy intervention,” Ms. Mabee said. “Also having number sense in math because this is where they build counting content and basic addition and subtraction are good to have some exposure to.”

Kindergarten is no longer about playing. It is rigorous, and Ms. Mabee said they have a lot of work to do to be at or above the bench mark for the next grade level when they wrap up kindergarten.

Stetson Hills has a substantial amount of community support and as a result, student have flocked to their campus, with over 300 families who attended on variances last year. Including the teachers, made up of Diana Armentrout, Angelina Bautista, Shelly Miller and Kerri Scheffler.

“We have a strong community and school with a lot of support and the four of us kindergarten teachers are a very strong team,” Ms. Bautista said.

Director of Communications and Community Engagement for DVUSD, Monica Allread, said looking back a year, the district is about 100 enrollments ahead of last year and that is good, but the real numbers won’t be available until the start of the next school year.