Hamlin Robinson School Summer Newsletter

NEWSLETTER

S U M M E R 2020

A publication for families and friends of Hamlin Robinson School

In this issue: Turning Community Passion into Action A Truly Legendary Week Program Enhancements to Meet the Moment

Summer 2020 | Hamlin Robinson School

Letter from the Head of School

BY STACY TURNER

Dear HRS Families and Friends, One year ago, I wrote in our newsletter, “Hamlin Robinson School is a school that never sleeps.”

Our hallways buzz yearround with students attending classes and camps, teachers collaborating in common areas, and parents volunteering in the art room, advancement office, and library.

When COVID-19 forced us to take our program online this spring, everything seemingly came to a halt. No longer were cars parking on the street, school buses dropping off kids, nor students walking our hallways.

What a difference a year makes.

•O ur community supported Our Students, Empowered Innovators for the 2020 Fund-A-Need, raising more than $202,000 and ensuring students can tap into their creative potential and tell their stories.

Spring comes to a very quiet HRS campus.

Yet, within a few days of the closure, we mobilized and launched distance learning. Students participated in Zoom classes and office hours, teachers collaborated on technology solutions and digital curriculum, and parents helped students stay organized, and, as a community, we embraced our first-ever virtual auction.

Our community truly never sleeps — especially in pursuit of our mission!

I’m incredibly proud of our students, faculty, and families. As we look forward to our next school year, I want to take a moment to celebrate a very memorable and unique 2019-20 school year.

E N H A N C I N G O U R P R OG R A M

•O ur entire faculty attended the International Dyslexia Association conference in Portland, Oregon, gaining new insights and skills to inform their daily teaching practice. Thank you to supporters of our 2019 auction Fund-A-Need for making this possible.

•A quarter of the 2020 Fund-A-Need — $50,000 — was directed to our financial aid endowment to expand access and strengthen our longterm sustainability.

G R O W T H & E X PA N S I O N

•T he school year saw another record enrollment of 305 students.

•P lans for our campus expansion and new middle school across the street continue, which will grow our enrollment by nearly 75 percent.

•T he new campus will allow us to serve even more students and teachers regionally and nationally with an expanded Learning Center.

•W e welcomed back Jen Fukutaki to focus on strategic growth and community services in the HRS Learning Center.

•T he HRS Board of Trustees launched a new five-year Strategic Plan.

Our Trustees confirmed their commitment to enhance our core program, strengthen our impact regionally and nationally, and expand our long-term sustainability.

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2020-21 Board of Trustees PRESIDENT

Susan Griesse VICE PRESIDENT

Winston Addis TREASURER

Geir Hansen SECRETARY

Alice Ikeda BOARD MEMBERS

Sending off our graduating Level 8 students in an all-school car parade was a bittersweet experience.

C E L E B R AT I O N S

•O ur first-ever virtual auction week brought our community together with fun videos, online auction, and a live toast. Bidding was spirited and the community was immensely generous!

•W e celebrated our students’ hard work with a social distanced end of year car parade. After months of distance learning, seeing student faces reinforced how much we love this work.

•O ur End of Year Program became an online graduation to celebrate the accomplishments of the Class of 2020. Their traditional speeches were heard by hundreds of people who joined the event. We’re incredibly proud of these 45 graduates and are confident they are well-prepared for high school and beyond.

To say the 2019-20 school year was memorable is an understatement — we are all living through a period of history to be studied and remembered for generations. As we look to the fall, I’m inspired by the resilience of our students, the dedication of our faculty, and the passion our community has for our mission. Together, we will do more than get through the 2020-21 school year — we will thrive.

Sincerely,

Scott Cunningham Mark Fordham Beth Golde Greg Headrick Simon Hindocha-Daniels Rachel Keen Craig Mitchell Luckisha Phillips Alan Robinson Mary Seifred Russell Smith Lizanne Vaughn HEAD OF SCHOOL

Stacy Turner

Our Mission:

Hamlin Robinson School ignites the academic and creative potential of students with dyslexia and other language-based learning differences.

Our Vision:

The world class educational program at Hamlin Robinson School is a catalyst for students to discover the joy of learning within a rich, comprehensive school experience.

Our Core Values:

Respect, Responsibility, Purpose, Perseverance The Newsletter is a publication of the HRS Advancement Office and is published three times a year.

EDITOR

Jami Sheets Summer 2020 | Hamlin Robinson School | 3

Turning Community Passion into Action

Since 2012, the HRS Learning Center has offered tutoring to HRS and non-HRS students with diverse educational needs.

BY JEN FUKUTAKI, DIRECTOR OF COMMUNITY SERVICES / HRS LEARNING CENTER

I have never met anyone involved with Hamlin Robinson School who isn’t passionate about dyslexia outreach. When the lightbulb goes on for each of us during our dyslexiarelated journey, it’s like being gobsmacked by: • the lack of awareness — on a grand scale — of dyslexia and other language-based learning differences.

• t he lack of national recognition that up to 20% of the population has some type of language-based learning difference.

• t he lack of comprehension as to just how much a personal trajectory can be affected when educational models don’t meet learning styles and children don’t learn to read.

• t he lack of a national educational directive to remedy this solvable situation.

Access to quality instruction is a social justice and equity issue.

Recent statistics show that 80% of incarcerated persons in the U.S. are functionally illiterate, and as many as 48% may be classified as dyslexic.

—Prevalence of dyslexia among Texas prison inmates, Moody KC, Holzer. Tex Med. 2000

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The community passion to fight for our students and others with dyslexia is why I love working at HRS, and it’s why I returned to HRS this past spring, excited to help expand the HRS Learning Center to ensure as many students as possible can be helped beyond the walls of our school.

Many of you have a general idea of what the HRS Learning Center does. For example, in 2018-2019: •M ore than 400 students (majority from outside of HRS) attended over 4,100 tutoring sessions with the specially trained staff of the HRS Learning Center.

•A lmost 500 teachers (majority from outside of HRS) attended specialized professional development events delivered by the HRS Learning Center.

•P arents, families, and educators from across the region and nation attended numerous community outreach events hosted by the HRS Learning Center.

But as wonderful as all of this is, it’s not enough. We are painfully aware of how many kids are not able to attend HRS or access our HRS Learning Center tutors; of how many parents struggle to find answers for their children; and of how many educators are not equipped to teach students with dyslexia.

We are encouraged by one major step forward — the implementation of Washington Senate Bill 6162. Beginning in 2020-2021, this bill requires the state to screen all children in Kindergarten, 1st and 2nd grades for indications of dyslexia. However, HRS also anticipates skyrocketing realized and unmet need for services in direct response to its findings.

So what are we going to do about it?

1. Strategic planning is currently underway to expand the HRS Learning Center tutoring program. This involves recruitment and systemic training of tutors, satellite tutoring locations, and expanding online tutoring options.

2. HRS is actively working with the Slingerland Institute to build curricular models to more efficiently equip teachers and tutors working with dyslexic students in reading, writing, math, and assistive technologies.

3. The HRS Learning Center will host informational sessions and create resources that parents throughout our state can access in response to SB 6162.

4. HRS is building a video series demonstrating the components of structured literacy — accessible to parents and educators in need of awareness and understanding of this reading approach.

After five years, the HRS Learning Center has outgrown its space. The entire fourth floor of the new HRS Middle School will be dedicated to an expanded Learning Center.

The HRS Learning Center is actively responding to community input by creating new resources, such as our college search page, tailored to families of students with dyslexia.

We’re also putting our money where our mouth (and heart) is. The entire fourth floor of the new HRS Middle School will be devoted to HRS Learning Center activities — including tutoring facilities and a conference center for large community events.

Through all of this long-term preparation, the HRS Learning Center will continue to maximize our: • Specialized tutoring services to students.

• Educational workshops, summer programs, and events.

• Specialized training for teachers.

The HRS Learning Center hosted 13 professional development workshops and events in 2019, training hundreds of teachers to incorporate structured literacy in their practice.

As a community, we can sometimes feel great frustration knowing there are so many kids unable to access instruction which both acknowledges and unlocks their potential.

It is useful to channel this frustration into actionable support. This is why the HRS Learning Center exists and why you can be certain we will do everything possible to turn community passion into action.

Summer 2020 | Hamlin Robinson School | 5

A Truly Legendary Week

BY DANNY KRAMER, PREVIOUS ADVANCEMENT DIRECTOR

The first-ever Literary Legends Virtual Auction Week was one never to be forgotten. Thanks to our incredible supporters, the week was a great success and vital funds were raised for our school.

The HRS Auction has always been our biggest fundraiser of the year, but it is also our largest community-building event, and this year was no exception. Our goal was two-fold this year — to raise funds for the school and bring people together in a fun and meaningful way. When we decided to move our auction to a virtual and online experience, we wanted our community to come together and offer new ways to engage with others in isolation!

With videos featuring students, current parents, and teachers, we were able to do just that. Throughout the week we saw parents and students dressed in costume, enjoyed virtual happy hours together, and even ended with a live toast with over 150 people in attendance!

Thank you to our community for helping us exceed our goals. Together, we raised over $292,000, including $202,000 for the “Our Students, Empowered Innovators” Fund-A-Need. Wow! One quarter of the Fund-A-Need

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will go towards our Financial Aid Endowment — that’s over $50,000!

Our students will feel the direct impact of this support.

Our community has helped build the foundation on which our current and future students will become empowered innovators. We will now be able to encourage students to tap into their true creative potential with cutting edge technology and the best curriculum available. By investing in our students now, we will continue to achieve our Vision to offer a worldclass educational program at HRS. By contributing to the growth of our Financial Aid Endowment, our program is more accessible.

Together, we showed what our community can do in the most difficult of times. Thank you to all who participated in the Virtual Auction Week and especially to all of our volunteers for putting in countless hours of work to help make this happen.

Program Enhancements that Meet the Moment

BY JAMI SHEETS, COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR

At Hamlin Robinson School, an unwavering commitment to understand how to holistically support students with language-based learning differences is at the core of everything we do. Decades of research and experience have informed our academic practices. With Slingerland at the core of our language instruction, we know direct, explicit, sequential and structured instruction benefits our students across all academic areas.

We also know that our student’s academic success links directly to the advancement of their social and emotional health. We have long understood the true measure of our student’s success is their strong sense of self and confidence in their role in education.

As our school grows, we’re enhancing our program to better support our students and the way they respond to and interact with their world. The return to school this year will be unlike any other in our history and will be emotionally charged for students and adults. From a worldwide pandemic, to social uprising over the inequities that persist in our nation, kids need the tools and skills to cope with new and changing emotions they have in response to these crises, compounded with the new and changing emotions that are completely normal in their development.

HRS is excited to add a full-time school counselor to our staff, bringing deep experience in mental health and addressing trauma. Nathan Howden will be an invaluable resource as students grapple with the images and messages they see every day on the news and on social media.

Thanks to the generous donors to our 2020 Auction Fund-A-Need, we purchased an updated social emotional learning curriculum that will be adopted and taught in each classroom levels 1-8.

Our new program, Caring School Communities by Center for the Collaborative Classroom, will support direct teaching of responsibility, empathy, and cooperation, in a setting where students feel known and cared for. The program is designed to help students become caring, responsible members of their school communities and, ultimately, to grow into humane, principled, and skilled citizens.

Sometimes the best way to process the news is to make it. Every one of our students has a unique perspective and they all have stories to tell. We’re introducing a new media arts class this year, teaching students how to use video, audio, photos and more to tell their unique stories, thoughts, and reactions to their world.

Enhancing our program in these ways will help our students become well-rounded, curious, and healthy members of our community. When you combine this with the ability to read and write with competence and confidence, you have kids who will change our world for the better.

Summer 2020 | Hamlin Robinson School | 7

Hamlin Robinson

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NEWSLETTER

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8 | Hamlin Robinson School | Summer 2020