This year we began our year with a school-wide scan of decoding skills.  Decoding skills are how fluently a student can read printed text.  These scans, alongside our report card data, show us that investing our time and resources into exploring how we can support all of our students in further developing their literacy skills, would be worthy inquiry.  We wish to continue to investigate how we can move all of our students along the proficiency scale in literacy... and increase the number of students who are proficient in the critical skills of reading, writing, speaking, and listening.  

Unfortunately, our evidence indicating a need to focus our SEL efforts on anti-racism are situations where we have directly heard students using racial slurs, or where students have reporting to have seen or heard racial slurs- online, as graffiti, or from peers. We feel that very rarely, is there actual malicious intent behind the use of these slurs... but intent does not lessen the harm that these words and biases can cause.  We want to support our students in understanding the impact their words have on others, and that racism is not okay.  

McKay is already a great school with dedicated, caring, and skilled staff, and our students are bright, engaged, and kind.  We have a wonderful, and diverse school community.  Visitors to our school often comment on the warm and caring culture that is palpable here.  Our school community is full of wonderful people.  By focusing our inquiry efforts this year on literacy, and anti-racism (SEL) we believe we can make our school an even better place to learn, and further develop our students' growing skills.