Ponemah School has expanded and will be implementing more new ideas this year

By Michael Barrett

Freelance Writer

       With the Red Lake Indian Reservation population continually growing, more people generally mean more kids going to school.

       The Red Lake School District has been addressing those needs with expansion projects to their existing facilities, a new Early Childhood Center which houses Headstart and Kindergarten students, and a new middle school which could begin construction in 2004.

       In Ponemah, they have also expanded to their current school with a new gym and additional classrooms a couple years ago, and just recently they finished with the addition of another wing on the west side of their building. And with the space they had for school facilities, they were pretty much out of room if further expansion projects were planned.

       The Ponemah School enrollment this year was similar to last year with 182 students in K-8th grade, and according to PES Principal Ramona Gehlert, she said most of the kids from the Ponemah community that didn’t go to their school, went to Red Lake for whatever the reason. Of course there were some kids who attended schools off the reservation such as Kelliher and Blackduck Schools, also.

       Gelhert said they weren’t as overcrowded as they were without the expansion, but they could still use more space. But they were doing all right, she said.

       Still a 1^st grade - 8^th grade school, it is their second year of expanding from a 1^st - 6^th grade school. And with all the talks of budget cuts, there hasn’t been any reductions in staff from the previous year.

       They were able to expand their library this year as well, since last year they were so short of classrooms that they had to use library space for that purpose. Portions of the older school additions had also been remodeled.

       With the new addition, they now have five new classrooms and two office space areas. They have two new kindergarten and first-grade classrooms, and a new second grade classroom. The classroom sizes were an average 15 students per classroom.

       Another change for the Ponemah School was that they were utilizing “Responsive Classroom Behavior Management”, which was a way to build relationships between the kids within the classroom, and between the kids and the teacher.

       “Every morning they have a morning meeting–in each classroom–that involves a greeting so they learn a new way to greet each other,” Gehlert said. “Sometimes it’s a handshake, sometimes it’s a high-five–there’s some fun things with greetings. But everybody gets acknowledged or greeted by somebody, so that’s everybody’s acknowledged right away.”

       Everybody in the whole school has these class meetings and does this.

       “After that there is a sharing time where there’s some sort of activity that students share something–like a story, a personal story, or something,” Gehlert explained. “Sometimes only 3 people get to talk and sometimes everybody gets to talk if it’s a short subject.”

       She said they started out this year and a lot of students talked about their trips over the summer, or what was the furthest they had traveled to do something.

       Also, since some kids were shy when it came to talking in front of the class, she said a student didn’t have to participate and it was all voluntary. However, she said kids were really getting good with overcoming their shyness, opening up more, and talking to each other.

       “Then we talk about current events, like the older kids can talk about how they feel about the shooting in Cold Springs and that do they think,” she said.

       There were also a ton of activities to do and they try to make it really kind of a fun thing–a game type thing to get the students going in the morning.

       The morning meeting is usually 20 minutes and it goes by quickly.

       “Then they do announcements so I try to get my announcements out so they can tell them what’s for lunch and etc.,” Gehlert stated. “But when they first walk into the classroom they actually have something to do. There’ll be a place in there, either to sign ones name, guess the number of beans in a jar, guess what they think was the temperature was on that morning–so that every kid writes something down.”

       There was also a problem part where teachers could look at some of the answers given by the students.

       Gehlert said it was something they just started this year and she wasn’t sure if any other classes were doing it in the District. Many of the Ponemah School teachers and some teacher-aides went to Cass Lake and took some training on it.

       “We brought it back and wanted to do a whole school training–which is the goal eventually–if they get enough staff development money,” she said.

       The training was a week-long course that was very intense. Teachers spent a lot of time actually doing the games and their were a lot of processes.

       “During the day then, it affected our discipline policy, because our discipline policy changed,” Gehlert said. “We have time within the classroom to take a break if kids are having trouble maintaining or they’re not focusing.”

       There was an area within the classroom that a student could just go and take a break, then they could come back when they were ready to come back. If they needed more time, the teacher would tell them to come back at such and such a time.

       Last year the Discipline Policy was one that was really punitive–a punishing type of policy–and it wasn’t really geared towards showing kids ‘how’ to behave or teaching kids what the expectations were on discpiline.

       “This program everything is totally different because the whole focus is, okay, this is what happened, what are we going to do to fix it,” she explained. “What can you do to fix it, like if they hurt somebody else, what can they do to fix that. And the other person has a say in that. They have a say in–this person did this to me, and that person says, well I’m going to apologize, and if I did this, is that okay–and enough. Then the other person gets to say, yeah, I accept, or no, it’s not enough.”

       It was an idea of really showing kids what the expectations were at school, and giving them a chance to learn.

       Responsive Classroom was something that was not new either. She said Cass Lake has been doing it for about 4-5 years, and Laporte just started it. Other schools were also going to implement it.

       “It takes some time to do, time to get into it, and I think a lot of times, people want things to be really fast, to have like–okay, this kid did this, I want something to happen right away,” she said. “It takes a long time to teach accepted behavior–especially if they haven’t been doing it for a while–if they’ve never figured it out.”

       One of the things they said at their institute was, never assume that a child knows what you mean when you ask them to do something, Gehlert said.

       “You say, get ready for class and you assume they know that means bring your pencil, bring your paper–you mke that assumption,” she said. “But, some kids may not have gotten that message, or they need reminding, so you have to teach them. When I say this, I mean do this, and when I say, everybody get ready to learn, I mean, sit quietly and show them exactly what that looks like, and then practice it.”

       Gehlert said they do a lot of practicing now. Even with things like taking a break.

       “When we first started doing ‘take a break’, we thought, well the kids take a break means go sit in the chair quietly and don’t bother anybody–just sit there until they were ready to come back,” she explained. “We thought they knew that. But then very quickly we found a bunch of kids that thought ‘take a break’ meant crawling under the chair and that, “oh good, I’m taking a break, now I can play”. They didn’t know what we meant by taking a break. So they spent a lot of time with them explaining how to take a break, how to sit, that they were there to reflect and etc.,”