School Overview
Centre Mountain Lellum Middle School is a new school that opened on November 14, 2022. It is one of five middle schools in the Sooke School District, and it is located on Constellation Ave, just off Westshore Parkway in the new Westhills community in Langford, just north of Victoria, BC. This school is built for 700 students in grades 6-8 and will employ approx. 60 staff members. The opening of this school was a very exciting time for all of us in the Sooke District. The building looks amazing, but we are still working on a few deficiencies on the property around the school. We are very happy with the construction and the layout out of the school. It is beautiful.
The name Centre Mountain Lellum (pronounced Lay/Lum) was gifted to our Sooke School District by Chief Russell Chipps of the Sc’ianew Nation (Beecher Bay) and carries the meaning of ‘House’ and the idea of ‘Community, where we raise our children’. Chief Russell Chipps said, ‘To me it means a place of coming together’. We are thankful we were gifted such a beautiful, unique name.
This is very fitting as we welcomed students from 13 different elementary schools and 4 middle schools within our district, as well, we have accepted many new students from other districts, other provinces and even other countries. Our staff are all Sooke District employees, who have come from 15 different schools. We are truly excited to bring everyone together, and we look forward to building a strong community with a culture that is safe, calm, welcoming.
Our Learners
Centre Mountain Lellum Middle School consists of students in grade 6 through 8. We accept students from 4 elementary schools that make up our family of schools. Enrollment for September 2023 was 629 students, and we continue to welcome students into our school as they move into our catchment. As our community grows, we will continue to build our vision and values together to create a calm, safe, welcoming learning environment.
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All students will have a voice, they will be heard, and they will contribute to the goals and values of our school community. Last year, once we settled into our new school, we immediately established routines and procedures to create a safe, calm, welcoming Learning environment. We also focused on creating our values that we all believe in and stand by.
All teachers introduced the definition of 'values' and taught lessons to their students, encouraging discussions about values and provided examples of values. Once the students understood the meaning of values and the importance of the exercise, each student submitted their top three values to their teacher. Then each classroom submitted their top 3 classroom values, and we quickly developed the top four values that were important to our student body. We did the same for our staff and our parent community.
Once we had our top 4 values, we shared the values and designed an exercise that dug a little deeper into the feeling these values create for our school community. It was important for us to involve and recognize our indigenous lands and the incredible name that was gifted to us. Rather than create our values and then translate the words into the Sencoten language, we wanted to understand the feelings behind our values and then involve our indigenous leaders to help us translate these feelings into a Sencoten word or phrase that would become part of our mission statement for our school community.
We are still in the process of translating the feelings behind our values, but once this is complete, we will introduce this to our students, practice the language and then every member of our school community will be able to pronounce the words or phrase, and will be able to explain the meaning behind our mission statement. We are very excited to see the final product.
Focus and Planning
What focus(es) emerge as goals to pursue?
School Goal 1
Our goal is to simply have every student in the school feel safe, calm and welcomed. We will celebrate Equity, Diversity and Inclusion throughout the year and encourage our young learners to be honest, kind and respectful to the whole school community and to the environment.
1. Create, learn about, and celebrate the unveiling of our Sencoten Language Mission Statement. As stated earlier, this was a full school community project where all members engaged in the creation of this mission statement. Once the statement has been created, we will mount these words or phrase in the school and begin to learn the language and the meaning behind the statement.
2. We have started to create traditions with the focus on 'One Mind' and 'One Spirit'. On the first day of school, we have all the students and staff lined up on back field and once our community elders begin to sing and drum, we all walk in a line, one class at a time, past our elders, around to the front of the school, and walk to class. It is a very powerful, moving experience and it sets the tone for the entire year. Once we are in class, we invite our elders to speak to the staff and students and explain the importance of the song, the meaning behind our school's name, and they remind us of the importance of 'One Mind' and 'One Spirit'.
We also show the video of Chief Russell Chipps and Chief Gordan Planes where they explain the meaning behind our school's name and the importance of tolerance and the celebration of coming together as one. These videos are played in the classroom, during assemblies, and during parent and community functions throughout the year.
3. Celebrate Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in the classroom, during grade assemblies, during full school assemblies, and during community events throughout the year. We want all people to feel safe and welcome, so we have done some great work displaying visual representations throughout the school. We have more work to do, but by the end of this year, we will be able to point to artwork, displays and projects that represent Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.
Showing representation of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion throughout the school, builds a culture of coming together and shows all people they are loved and accepted. Creating a safe place for everyone entering our building creates a feeling of calm which leads to a positive, welcoming climate in the school. We hope people like what they see, and we hope people feel good in our school.
How can the district support your goals?
We continue to learn and work toward our goals every day. In order to show growth, we will continue to learn from and work with our Na'tsa'maht Indigenous Education Department. We have established our Equity Team, and we are very happy and proud to have a large group of interested people included in this process.
We lean on our NIE Teacher and support worker every day, bring in our elders to learn from and work with, but now we would like to have our leaders of the NIE Team come join us and be part of our vision and help us create ways to improve in these areas.
We are trying to find creative ways to cover fees for artwork, celebrations and other projects we are working toward, so maybe our NIE Team could help us get creative to raise funds for further projects.
Centre Mountain Lellum Middle School is a brand-new school, and we are very proud of everything we have done to create a safe, calm, welcoming learning environment in such a short time. However, we know there is room for growth and improvement, so we would like to invite or District Leaders of Inclusive Education, NIE, ELL and SOGI into our building to get further advice as to how we can improve the work we have done to create a safe place and welcoming environment for all people coming into our building.
Reflect, Adjust, Celebrate
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1. Sometimes we can base our progress on what people say about our school or how people feel in the school. We can judge the engagement level based on the participation levels of staff and students. We can look at the numbers of clubs we run, the number of sports teams we have, the number of events we run in the school and the number of community events we base out of our school. According to this theory, we are doing remarkably well in this area. Many staff and students are engaged in different activities around the school and students have many opportunities to feel a sense of belonging.
2. During our School Planning Day in September, our staff focused on the results of our Student Learning Surveys from the 2022-23 school year. Knowing that these students are now our leaders in the school this year, we felt it was important to analyze the results of our student voice. Staff at each table reviewed the results of one page of the Student Learning Surveys - approx. 4 questions each. They discussed what stands out from the results, where we need to put our attention and any action plans we could develop to help improve the results. Each group recorded their work on one piece of chart paper, posted it on the wall and then took time to walk around and see the work from all other groups.
Once this was done, the PVP summarized the sheets and will use this information to present back to the staff to celebrate our success and focus on areas to improve and the action plans related to the improvements needed.
We have realized that most action items fell under the category of relationships and the first action item our staff will focus on is to match up our vulnerable students with an adult they feel close to in the school.
This is an area where data is very useful. We can use the results of the survey to get a sense of how students feel at school, what is important to them and any behaviours we may need to address.
Now that we have analyzed our student learning survey results and categorized the action items, we are going to present the plan moving forward at our October staff meeting. This will give the staff time to think about the plan and then, in the November staff meeting, we will be forming small committees to work on and complete some of the action items.
In the January staff meeting, we will have committee members report out their progress and encourage all members to complete the action items by the February staff meeting.
We will also share our findings during our Grade group assemblies and encourage some of our leadership students to attend committee meetings to express their opinion and provide feedback. It will be very important for our current grade 7 students to understand that the results of this year's Student learning Survey will be reviewed, and we will follow the same process in the future.
Once we have completed our action plans, we will create our own Centre Mountain Lellum survey for our grade 8 students to compare the results from the 2022-23 survey with the results of our 2023-24 survey. The staff are very interested to see if the questions around 'sense of belonging' and 'student safety' have improved over the last school year.
During our recognition assemblies in April and June, we will be sharing the results with the students and hopefully we will be celebrating our success in creating a safe, calm, welcoming learning environment.
All of this will be shared with PAC throughout the year as I know they are very interested in seeing the evidence of our progress.