Exciting Changes for the 2023-2024 School Year!
Dear Worldmind Community,
As we prepare to open admissions for the 2023-2024 school year, we are excited to share updates with you. Our experiences over the past three years have taught us an immense amount, and these changes reflect our learning.
Parents are an integral part of a child’s foundation and together with the teachers, students, and community form an unbreakable partnership for the betterment of each student. To that end, we are working on improving communication between home and school in these ways:
Parent education sessions
The preschool through 1st grade staff will do periodic check-ins with each family and schedule meetings as needed.
The 2nd-9th grade levels we will be getting rid of parent/teacher conferences and will be implementing monthly family check-ins.
In order to create smaller class sizes and utilize students' interests as well as staff expertise, the 2nd through 9th grade will be using a block schedule Tuesday through Thursday. Mondays will be Forest School and Environmental Literacy days, and Fridays will be Community days which will include field trips and interest-based lessons. We will work with each student and family to create a schedule that best meets their needs before the start of the year.
With this new schedule, we will be moving from homeroom teachers to each student having a mentor teacher. This will be a teacher that each student connects with most often. All communication regarding your child will go through the mentor teacher.
As we will be focusing on utilizing each team member's strengths, starting after spring break 2023, I will begin transitioning Darcy Ocamb, our current Preschool and Operations Director, into a Principal role. She will be the Principal for all grade levels (preschool through 9th grade). She will train with me for the remainder of this school year, and next year will fully take over this position.
I will focus on my Head of School position, which includes fundraising, strategic visioning and direction, thought-leadership, and writing. I will also teach middle and high school science.
As of right now, it looks like we will be able to stay at the Milheim. We will be making adjustments to the outside, including adding a fence along the back alley and a privacy cover for the front. We will also be rearranging the interior to better fit our new block schedule and create more communal areas for community gatherings.
We are moving the first grade back over to the park with the preschool and kindergarten. Having worked with this age group at both the park and the Milheim, we have discovered that this age group thrives at the park.
We’re excited about the 2023-2024 school year!!
- Megan Patterson, Executive Director and Founder of Worldmind School
P.S. - Below is a letter from the Worldmind Board President.
To the Parents and Staff of Worldmind,
First, I want to welcome you to 2023 and praise you all for a wonderful 2022. Even though the Board of Directors is comprised of fresh new faces, the Board’s mission is still to ensure the viability as a forestry-based school and protect the learning environment that has been established for our children. Nothing means more to us than knowing there is a place that welcomes our kids with opens arms while understanding their specific learning abilities.
We have much planned for the remainder of this school year all the way through the end of the 2023-2024 year. Nothing make us prouder than being part of an entity that is leading the way, not only in the Denver community or the great state of Colorado but around the Nation. Our plan as the Board, is to support Megan in bringing her visions to life one step at a time. What does this look like you might ask. We are still in the early phases of the planning process, but we intend to establish a community center in the Denver area, institute an Employee Inclusion Program with local business and create a curriculum that can be modeled at schools across the country. More information to follow about our strategies to expand our reach, not only as a school for neurodiverse / twice-exceptional students but as an educational resource.
Lastly, changes are being implemented at an administrative level that will better support you as a parent and/or a staff member at Worldmind. If you have not already heard, you will be receiving information on new software, SchoolCues. This app will better allow you to communicate with each other as well as take away the burden of using multiple platforms for processing payments, conducting sign-ups and searching for resources to use at home and school.
In conclusion, please help us support this amazing entity as we bring the creative ideas that are much needed into our ever-changing world. As always, please feel free to voice your questions or concern either though the Executive Director or the Board at Board@worldmindnatureschool.com
- Matthew Baird, MSM, Worldmind Board President