A school must communicate well with its community, and Bess Maxwell has developed several programs to accomplish this. Grandparents and Senior Citizens Day, for instance, allows residents to spend a day at school. Families are invited to attend twice yearly to attend our Family Readers Picnic. Before the winter season, students and staff visit patients and sing songs at the convalescent hospital. Over thirty community businesses contribute rewards.
Guest speakers come into the classrooms for multicultural areas.
Field trips are taken to the local museums, parks and industries. The point is not only educational, but also to help non-parent residents to recognize that young children can do well, behave, and are intellectually curious. A very successful new program we tried this year was our Spring Read and Feast program. This was designed to meet two very important goals of our school, parent involvement and literacy reading improvement. We will invite our school families to attend an evening of good food and reading with their children.