Honorees Words of Wisdom
Several of the honorees at Education Update’s award ceremony at the Harvard Club share their wisdom. Their words appear below.
Eleanor Greenberg,
Principal
P 4K, Brooklyn, NY
Positive Behavior Intervention Support (PBIS) has given us a way to organize the school environment and create a positive school climate by providing proactive supports and interventions along a three-tiered continuum of strategies. By conducting a needs assessment, our team established a simple way for students, parents and staff to understand and remember what the school-wide expectations for behavior are for P4K. We call it "Be a SPORT". "SPORT" represents Self-control, Prepared, Organized, Respectful and Try hard. We believe that all students, regardless of disability can achieve success in meeting the behavioral expectations in each of the SPORT areas given opportunities for practice and positive recognition of progress.
P4K is a District 75 cluster school located throughout Brooklyn and consists of one main site and five (5) off-sites. Our students are pre-k through sixth grade with a variety of special needs including but not limited to: autism, severe emotional and behavior disorders, hearing impairments and deafness and varying degrees of cognitive and developmental delays. Most of our students have communication and social skills deficits and ALL of our students present challenging behaviors. We use puppets to teach the behavioral expectations in a fun, creative and memorable way. The SPORT KIDS puppets have helped to create a positive school climate and have served to unify our five sites into one school with common behavioral expectations; common language to discuss them and a way of teaching those skills and expectations to our very special students. #
Barry Kevorkian,
Principal,
IS 62,
Brooklyn
In all my years in education the one piece of philosophy I have tried to live by is this: As educators our job includes much more than just teaching our lesson. We have to meet the needs of our students academically, socially, and emotionally. In a society such as ours it is easy to find a child in need of guidance. One never knows if the few minutes you take from your day to help a child will change that child's life forever. So, it is necessary to take every opportunity possible to support our children.#
Sharon Aiuvalasit,
Teacher,
Urban Assembly School for Careers in Sports
As an educator, I have found that the most exciting part of my job is helping students to discover aspects of themselves and experiences that they never expected. Many of our students enter high school with a very vague sense of their own futures and what they want to accomplish with their lives. Whether it is through college enrichment programs, internships or independent reading, exposing students to new adventures and nurturing a lifelong love of education and the courage to explore new opportunities are without a doubt the most important and the most rewarding aspects of my job.
