This time of year we are thinking a lot about endings—but for our new teachers in Bellingham Public Schools, this was just the beginning. All year long, our first- and second-year teachers are mentored through Beginning Educator Support Team (BEST), a grant-funded program sponsored by the state of Washington. Facilitated by veteran teacher Andrea Quigley,…
For the past three years, volunteer coordinator Jennifer Gaer has been growing the volunteer program in Bellingham Public Schools. She’s organized and streamlined the process for volunteers to register and find opportunities. She’s also built relationships and connections with many of the more than 5,000 volunteers. She noticed that many of her volunteers were retired…
Newly-constructed Happy Valley Elementary school is the most energy-efficient school Bellingham Public Schools, a Dec. 2017 energy use audit showed. The data point is the Energy Use Index (EUI). This index expresses a building’s total energy use as a function of its size or other characteristics, and is expressed as energy used per square foot per…
Elementary school librarians created the You’ll Enjoy These Incredible Books! (YETI) Books competition to challenge students to read books from a variety of genres and to work together as a team. A year in the making. Each year school librarians from across the Pacific Northwest nominate the best, recently published novels for middle grader readers…
Students from Happy Valley Elementary School and Shandong Normal University joined hands as they danced and sang together at the direction of music specialist Katie Tully. This interaction was made possible through a partnership with Can Edu Consultants in Vancouver, British Columbia. A group of 19 students and three adults from Shandong Normal University came to Bellingham to…
How does your garden grow? In Bellingham schools, it grows and flourishes with the constant and passionate involvement of Common Threads Farm, a non-profit organization dedicated to teaching kids where food comes from, how to grow it, and how to become a healthy eater. In Bellingham Public Schools, 13 of our 14 elementary schools and two of our middle…
A tenet of The Bellingham Promise is “all children should be loved.” At the end of last school year, we asked staff members to tell their students they love them, catch it on video and send it to us. Our hearts are full seeing the responses from staff all over the district. Please take a…
Through one of the partnerships with Allied Arts of Whatcom County, teaching artists worked with fifth grade classrooms. Each class received up to 12 hours of arts education that focused on one theme. These included stone carving, watercolor painting, paper mache puppets and concrete pavers. The partnership emerged after an anonymous donation was given to the Whatcom Community Foundation.…
Four Bellingham Public Schools students were selected as National Geographic State Bee semifinalists and competed in the 2017 Washington Geographic State Bee. The semifinalists were Christian Schwarz, a Happy Valley Elementary fifth grader; Lucy Bankowski, a Lowell Elementary fifth grader; Diane Park, a Fairhaven seventh grader and Nigel Naylor, a Whatcom eighth grader. The state Geography Bee was held…
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