A Seventh-day Adventist Boarding Academy Serving Native American Youth Since 1946
Rebuilding for a New Academic Year
A
nticipation always hovers on the horizon just before the beginning of each new school year here at HIS. Staff members come to terms with the end of their summer break and then quickly switch gears as they eagerly begin planning lessons and preparing their classrooms for the return of our dear students. As with each new year, registration day is top of the list, followed by the start of school, which includes icebreakers, community-building activities, and the first few tasks and events of the year. This year was our largest enrollment that we’ve seen in quite a while. We had 80 students register, which means that our dorms and classrooms are bursting with new excitement and energy! With that in mind, faculty and staff were preemptively planning how to improve
efforts to live out our mission: “A safe place to learn, grow, and thrive.” We do our best to remain aware of our students’ emotional and mental health needs and make efforts to anticipate those needs. For example, a sensitive task that lay before us at the beginning of our third week was remembering our beloved Kiarra, who died in the tragic bus accident last year. As a way of honoring her memory, HIS students and staff, together with her mother, grandmother, auntie, and three brothers, planted a tree on campus in dedication to her life here with us and the impact that she had on the students and staff. As we made efforts to remember Kiarra, our counseling staff also extended their schedules to allow students time to process whatever emotions came up for them throughout the
LEFT: Staff members hug students as they reconnect during the first school assembly of the year. RIGHT: Staff and students participate in the “handshake” community-building exercise during the first day of school.
34 Pacific Union Recorder
Holbrook Indian School