We are on a mission to cultivate learners who are courageous and empowered so they are prepared to tackle any challenge that comes their way. We are on a mission to create personal relationships so that during life’s adventures, you personally have the tools to guide you through. We do this by creating a courageous and kind environment that embraces each students uniqueness, while fostering creativity and collaboration.  Our staff is trained in Responsive Classroom, which is an evidence-based approach to teaching that focuses on engaging academics, positive community, effective management, and developmental awareness.

Courageous Environment

“Be Courageous” is the foundational piece to who our students and staff are at Ivy Hill.  We are all confident to try new things and we realize a challenge does not stop us. We own any challenge because we see them as learning and growing experiences.  Students and staff embrace their mistakes and embody the fact that we can learn through failure. Through our Social Emotional learning experiences, students learn the value of kindness and supporting each other. Developing the comfortable and confident muscle within our students to try new things with an open mind is what our courageous environment fosters.

Responsive Classrooms

A Responsive Classroom is an educational philosophy that believes every student should experience some sense of joy, significance, and belonging everyday within their classroom. We adopted this belief and 90% of our current classrooms are trained in Responsive Classroom. Since implementation, our teachers have created responsive classroom environments with activities like, but not limited to, morning meetings, energizers (whole group brain break activity), encouraging students to develop and document personal goals and dreams, and through logical consequences to student behavioral issues and setting and modeling clear expectations for classroom functions and behavior.

Beyond the classroom, there's a community

It is important that Ivy Hill creates the space and time for students to pursue, share, learn, and express their passions. Within that, our students embody kindness at its most pure form through student-run fundraisers, community engagement activities, clubs, and collaborative efforts. The message “Be YOU” is common language among our teachers as our students are allowed the space to learn what makes themselves unique. Because of our community created and through the example that our active PTA sets, our students own their strengths and share them with others.

Academic pathway...

Our academic pathway begins with exploration. At Ivy, we value providing students the opportunity to discover subjects and topics creatively and purposefully.  Students are encouraged to find various pathways and focus on the process of learning rather than the product. We judge academic success based on our student’s ability to answer the question “how did you learn?”, as opposed to, “what did you learn?” We encourage our students to question, and our goal is for our students to share their understanding of the curriculum, rather than, simply, the answer. Our student success is just as important a piece to our puzzle as the other items listed on this dashboard.

In order to guide our students down their academic pathway, we utilize our standardized academic results as information for our teachers. Test results, assessment and classwork, is taken in by teachers and staff and utilized to further their knowledge about their individual students, which helps inform teaching strategies personalized to their student’s needs.

Principal: Mr. Scott Kaese