Category: Felicity News

One of Felicity’s part time clinical staff, Scott Gielow, has been working with a few of our paraprofessionals to start incorporating a weekly mentoring program with a few Felicity students. With Mr. Gielow’s extensive experience through agencies such as Allendale Association, Crossroads Counseling and Leyden Township Family Services, he is able to provide consistent support to our mentoring staff, Mr. Farca and Mr. Townsend to maintain guidelines for mentoring such as: academic goals, building social skills, developing new and healthy interests in and outside of school.

Scott also added the importance of mentoring for Felicity students by stating, “Mentoring is about building a connection with students- and to assist them identify and work on personal goals. These services take place outside of school hours, and on weekends- based on agreement with the mentor’s and students availability. Mentors create an individual plan with the student, based on that students interests and needs- but also in collaboration with parents and family, with family input being a vital component.”

In fact, one our mentored students who has been working with Mr. Townsend remotely over the past month for weekly Zoom calls has had his family notice some of the benefits during the mentoring sessions. This students grandma shared that her grandchild can “truly be himself for the two hour zoom calls with Mr. Townsend and looks up to him”. The family is hopeful for having the opportunity to incorporate in-person outings once it is safe to do so.

Felicity School has officially started off this unconventional school year with some big changes. We have been looking forward to reuniting with our students and providing necessary in person support, especially encouraging the social-emotional learning skills to be sharpened. Felicity staff has enjoyed seeing students get re-acquainted and has remained impressed by the students appropriately embracing the safety measures and policies put in place this year.

Additionally, our Felicity staff has been doing some behind the scenes improvements. In order to best smooth out these processes and IEP procedures, our Director of Student Services, Mr. Luskin, and lead teacher Ms. Wright, have started Teacher Mentor Meetings once a week after school. This will also further strengthen communication with our district and community partners.

Overall, Felicity is incorporating as much normalcy to our academic environment as possible. A dedicated 25’ X 18’ space was reconfigured to enable full classroom space. The ‘room’ has a new turf ground with lounge furniture and bleachers allowing for personal interaction combined with social distancing. With the fall and winter approaching, the addition of three outdoor space heaters will allow students to enjoy the outside for a few more months. The addition of a beautiful awning covering the space protects users from the sun and inclement weather while creating a cozy atmosphere conducive to learning, see a visual below!

Additionally, a dedicated area for several grills has provided outdoor cooking and eating opportunities for students and staff alike. Last but not least, no outdoor space is complete without opportunities to be active. A newly installed basketball hoop and court provides a physical outlet for the Felicity students. Cornhole/Baggo sets, a “life size” chess board (complete with all pieces), and other outdoor activities have highlighted the court usage throughout the early fall.

For some additional spaces to gather for meetings and encourage safety, a 20’ x 10’ portable tent is another outdoor space for students that is available. These areas have been great for clinicians, groups, and teachers to meet with students who need a breath of fresh air and a change of scenery.

Additionally, we have been working on creating some safe, “hands on” activities for academic and social emotional growth for students such as new types of groups, science experiments and new activities in P.E. We thank all Felicity students and families for taking this transition so smoothly and hope for a positive, safe school year!

Felicity had a record high count of graduated students for the 2019-2020 school year! Unfortunately, due to the COVID restrictions in place, our staff had to brainstorm how to honor our hard working students while still maintaining safety guidelines. We decided to collect staff volunteers and map our a driving route based on each of the graduating students in order to deliver a certificate of completion and customized Felicity lawn sign for each student.

Most importantly, we wanted to provide a shoutout to our high school graduates: Taylor Miller, Ani Shrestha, Max Salzmann and Schuyler Walker. A number of our high school graduates have expressed a desire to start online college courses or move forward in their working professions. Additionally, we also wanted to recognize of our eighth grade graduates and give a shoutout to the following students: Kevin Acevedo, Aiden Cruz, Brandon Molinari, Nick Pesce, Nora Serbe and Yousef Zmali.

Please see some of our featured graduate signs and students below:

During online learning over the past few months, our staff has found lots of creative shortcuts to improve motivation, consistency and maintain hope to move forward in all of our students’ academics as well as keeping focused on future goals.

Specifically, one of our high school classrooms, featuring Mr. Luskin and Ms. Wright, have come up with some incentives for students including weekly prizes for students such as $10-15 giftcards for students who completed the most amount of assignments on Edgenuity by Friday. In fact, Mr. Luskin and Ms. Wright worked with one of our paraprofessionals, Mr. Townsend, on creating a newsletter to publish the names of the students who completed the most assignments for the week.

Additionally, students have been offered alternative assignments to complete safely in their homes such as starting a garden and documenting plant progress as science credit, an ice cream creation experiment with homemade materials for our middle school students created by Ms. Horowitz and Mr. Bolek, as well as a COVID time capsule project, presented by one of our clinicians, Mollie Swillum, to find a creative outlet to document this time in history.