Your safety and the safety of your students is of the utmost importance to us. In accordance with state and federal guidelines, IslandWood has developed COVID-19 policies and guidelines to ensure that you have a safe and healthy experience on our campus.

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Our School Overnight Program has three main goals:

1. Provide a Foundation of Stewardship

We engage learners in critical thinking, investigations, and actions that build awareness of and concern for the wellbeing of people and our planet. The program’s content is strongly aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) for Ecosystems and Washington State’s Integrated Environmental and Sustainability Learning Standards (ESE).

2. Ensure Equitable Access and Culturally Responsive Instruction for All Students
We are committed to ensuring equitable access and culturally responsive instruction. We do this by:

• Allocating resources to ensure at least 50% of the students we serve come from low-income households
• Offering differentiated programming that meets the needs of each school
• Preparing our graduate student instructors with best practices in justice-oriented experiential education
• Integrating art, garden, and food education to engage all students
• Facilitating opportunities for students to work across boundaries to identify and solve small systems issues and practice critical social skills

3. Develop Meaningful and Sustainable Relationships with Schools and Communities

In addition to providing support for classroom teachers, we also intentionally partner with student’s communities. We meet directly with parents at our School Orientations and host Community Engagement Forums to listen to, learn from, consult, and develop strategies to better engage each unique community.

We are working with and within our communities to better understand how the various aspects of culture influence attendance, retention, curriculum, policy, and instruction and to:

• Extend the experience into the classroom before and after
• Shift the values and narrative of the program to incorporate multiple cultures
• Identify and transparently address barriers to attendance
• Celebrate common ground as well as differences
• Understand the systemic sources of differences and intentionally design learning experiences for students to engage across boundaries
• Partner with community-led organizations
• Communicate regularly and effectively with families
• Learn about and incorporate students’ home culture in the design of the experiences
• Shift away from the deficit modeling so prevalent in the field

Learn more about our approach to culturally responsive teaching here.