Through the Wellness Program, the New School:
At the core of the Wellness Program is the Wellness Team. The team members are school staff whose larger roles within the school focus on providing academic, emotional, and health support to students. The school principal and assistant principal are also part of this team. The Wellness Team helps teachers and staff identify, evaluate, and treat problems that interfere with a child's learning and overall wellness. Each grade level has a representative on the Wellness Team.
Individualized early intervention, rather than later, more complicated remediation;
Prevention of future problems such as:
Promotion of whole-child well-being;
Greater effectiveness of the entire school in nurturing academic growth and developing a caring community;
Reducing imbalances in the representation of different groups of students in more restrictive remediation activities and settings;
Alignment with the Response to Intervention (RTI) special education approach, including improving the outcomes for all students.
Every classroom teacher monitors each student's academic, social, emotional, and physical health through wellness tracking protocols.
Wellness representatives meet every other week with teachers to review students' status as indicated by the protocols and to discuss needs for intervention and/or supports.
The wellness team meets weekly to discuss interventions and match resources to needs.
Interventions take place on an ongoing basis. Their effectiveness is monitored and adjustments to the intervention plan are made as needed.
If a pattern of need beyond the scope of Wellness Team interventions is seen, students are referred for a Student Intervention Team (SIT) meeting. This meeting triggers the involvement of District-level resources to aid the child. Referrals for SIT meetings are made as early as possible in the school year.
Intervention is something that happens at all times throughout the entire school, not just when a student fails, nor only as special education.
Within-school resources: The Wellness Team maintains a resource list of staff within the school and their particular areas of specialization, interest and experience. The following are some specific examples from a larger continuum of interventions:
District resources: Behavior Intervention Team observation/functional behavior assessment
Community resources: The Wellness Team mainatins a resource list of community-based resources for interventions that include but are not limited to:
