McKinney students have been engaging in activities to increase their sense of belonging to the school and participating in activities that connect to our SOAR school philosophy. SOAR stands for safe, ownership, accepting, respect. During the second half of the school year, we:

• Continued to have school-wide assemblies where we learned about the SOAR acronym
• Engaged in SOAR activities with our buddy classes. We read SEL books together, made friendship bracelets, and even had a school-wide “playdate” where we all played outside together while focusing on the R in soar (being respectful to each other).
• Read books in the library with Ms. Marco that were on SEL themes and worked with our peers to build shared understandings.

Our next steps:

As a staff, we have met and decided that we really want to continue to work on building our students’ social emotional learning. Staff has met several times about our SOAR acronym and we are looking at new language for the 2025-26 school year. We will continue to connect this SEL goal to literacy, and have purchased many new books recommended by Adrienne Gear to help us do this! We are also putting in a sensory pathway so students can use their bodies and physically regulate when needed. And we are committed to focusing on our students’ sense of belonging at McKinney. Our data from term 3 shows that approximately the same number of students feel like they belong, as compared to term one. 75.6% and 77.1% respectively. As such we know that we absolutely need to continue to work on this.  We want every single student to feel like they belong here at McKinney!