‘Movement paths’ give kids outlet for activity

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Local News

February 26, 2019 - 10:20 AM

What 5-year-old doesn’t have energy to burn?

On Monday, McKinley Elementary principal Angie Linn briefed USD 257 board members on a “movement paths” project adopted by the school. The endeavor involves placing a series of semi-permanent vinyl stickers on the school’s hallway floors  — one sticker depicting a lily pad, another a log or an arrow; some marked with letters, others with numbers — and then encouraging the students, when they encounter these constellations of stickies in the course of their school day, to skip or walk or hopscotch atop the strategically arrayed pattern, obeying the stickers’ subtle prompts (e.g. if the arrow points north, face north; if you come to a water hazard, bound over it). There are three pathways now. More are planned for the future.

“It really helps them to stay calm, focused, and regulated,” said Linn. Plus, it’s a great way to evaluate their gross motor skills, which — among this very youngest group of school-age children — are as wide-ranging as their academic talents. 

“I like it,” continued Linn. “It’s not distracting. The kids are quiet. And it’s fun to look out of the office and see a child walking out of the library with their folder and their book; they’re just walking and then all of a sudden they hit that path” — leap, leap, turnaround, hopscotch, touch your toes, jump up, turnaround, big leap, little leap — “and then as soon as they’re off the path, they immediately start walking back to class.”

 

IN LESS adorable news, Superintendent of Schools Stacey Fager informed school board members that one of the high school’s HVAC chillers is on the fritz, and may very well be on its way out. Whatever the district decides — whether to repair the leaking unit or replace it — it won’t be cheap. The 29-year old chiller is one of two 80-ton units used to cool the IHS campus. Both chillers have exceeded their respective life expectancies by nine years.

The leak was discovered by a member of the maintenance staff Monday afternoon. Fager told the board to expect proposals for the repair or replacement of the chiller unit at the group’s next meeting.

“In the 18-month planning of the steering committee for the bond issue,” said Fager, “we talked about what to pick to go through a bond. I think we felt that we could take capital outlay and put it toward the high school. And obviously we’re going to have to get into that for this. We just made the decision that we could spend capital outlay [funds] on the high school and try to do bond money on the middle school HVAC, and if you have a new building [built with bond money], then there are three grade schools you don’t have to put much capital into…. So we knew that capital outlay would end up going toward the high school. Now, it may hit us faster than the April 2 [bond election] date perhaps. But we kind of expected that. The high school is our oldest building; it’s going to incur costs.”

 

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