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Academics

Overall Academic Mission 

Literacy Goals

  • Create a place for students to share their voice and stories through reading and writing
  • Read texts that speak to identity and allow for discussions and activities that give opportunities for students to share their thoughts and respond to texts/books. 
  • Guide students in learning to critique and evaluate what students read within social context and to think critically as a result of what they read
  • To use literacy as a means to unearth histories, learn about their own communities and the community at large. 
  • Provide students with instruction in beginning reading skills and support them to become proficient readers

Math Goals

  • To build foundational math skills and fluency so students can apply math skills to real world problem solving
  • To teach students the math skills of: 
    • Make sense of problems and keep working on solving them
    • Reason about a problem
    • Make arguments and think critically about the reasons of others
    • Model how to solve a problem
    • Use tools to solve problems
    • Be precise 
    • Use patterns and structures to solve

Transformative Social Emotional Learning 

What is Social Emotional Learning (SEL)?

Social Emotional Learning (SEL) is the process through which students and adults learn, understand and manage emotions. It helps us as humans to establish and maintain positive relationships and make responsible decisions.  

SEL Placed in Social and Racial Context (Transformative SEL)

At Oak Ridge we believe that SEL must be placed and taught within social and racial context.  To teach conflict resolution skills, it is important that students understand the conflicts that exist because of social and racial systems.  We spend the year looking at three tenents of humanity: 

Identity

We support students in building pride in the identity and cultural wealth they bring with them every day. These lessons and activities are designed to build the way students love themselves and see their identity in a broader social context.

Solidarity

Our solidarity unit focuses on individuals discovering allies and having their connections confirm the experiences they are having.  It includes a heavy emphasis on developing community so that we can navigate conflict with collective accountability. 

Agency

We finish the year with a focus on agency where students engage in community based projects and brainstorming that supports them seeing the voice and empowerment each of them holds to create collective change in their communities.  

Emotions

We also talk with our students about emotions working to overcome the idea of “good” and “bad” emotions.  For example, anger is a strong emotion that can sometimes make it hard to make responsible decisions.  However, anger is often a signal that something in our environment needs to change and without anger many of the social movements that have occurred in our country wouldn’t exist.  So the goal is not to eliminate anger but to recognize it - both the feeling and the physical response that happens in our body, to in the short term manage that anger in a way that keeps our classroom community safe (take a break, use the slam ball, close your eyes and count to 10, walk away, listen to music) and then in the long term to reflect on the reason for the anger and how to advocate for change to what caused the anger. 

A look at the fantastic elastic brain

Each week students learn about a particular part of their brain and how it impacts their emotions and/or their learning.  Students learn simple strategies they can use to strengthen their parts of their brain.  This focus on the brain helps students to reflect on a growth mindset and feel empowered to be able to learn and grow. 

Relationships, Relationships, Relationships

We believe that at the heart of any community is the relationships that exist.  As a school staff, we work hard to build strong, authentic relationships with our students and our families.  Home Visits are one way we build relationships with our families.  They are a chance for our staff to learn about your hopes and dreams for your child.  Ask your child’s teacher about a home visit!

Oak Ridge Elementary Restorative Justice Principles



One of the most significant ways that systemic racism is seen in schools is through zero tolerance policies in school discipline.  The results of these policies has led to what is known as the School to Prison Pipeline.  At Oak Ridge, we believe that there is great urgency in breaking this cycle and disrupting the inequitable practices that exist within school discipline.  Our Restorative Justice practices work towards dismantling this system and seeing behavior through a different lens. 

The Restorative Justice practice is based on the idea that we must teach students rather than punish them.  Restorative Justice strives to help students understand when harm has been caused to another person or to their community and to UNDERSTAND, ACKNOWLEDGE and REPAIR that harm.  The best way to do this is for the parties involved to come together (if both are comfortable and willing) to discuss and decide how to move forward.  This allows for fundamental changes in people, relationships and community. 

The proper mindset, relationships, and community building being done by staff with students and families is a critical element to Restorative Justice.  It isn’t about waiting for something to happen to fix, it is about doing so much work on the front end on a human level, so that when/if something happens, there is relational trust involved that makes the process of solving the harm less challenging.  

A fundamental idea closely connected to Restorative Justice is how we view people.  All people make poor choices, but those choices don’t define who they are.  All people need to be viewed as a glass half full so that we can see the potential in everyone.  As a staff, we work hard to model these concepts for our students and practice them within our own lives, not just at work.