OnTrack Greenville Update                                    September 2015
OnTrack Greenville schools raise their hands for new student supports

Engaging Teachers:  
Launch Celebration

Before school officially began, school staff from the partner middle schools, including teachers and other key administrators, and implementation partners gathered to celebrate the launch of OnTrack Greenville! Because teachers and staff are critical to the implementation and success of OnTrack, this celebration provided a great opportunity to create excitement and share the vision, outcomes, and significance of OnTrack.
 
Superintendent Burke Royster gave motivating opening remarks to the more than 200 faculty, staff, and partners in attendance, and each school received their official OnTrack Greenville banners in their school colors to proudly display.
Berea MS Launch
Click the photo to see more pictures from the launch
Engaging Parents:
Back to School Nights

School bells rang on Aug. 18!  To ensure that all parents and other stakeholders were aware of OnTrack Greenville, we enlisted our implementation partners, as well as a few dedicated United Way staff, to attend Back to Sc hool Nights at each partner middle school from Aug. 13 - 17. We talked with parents and shared information about the many new resources that OnTrack Greenville will bring to their middle schools this year. This was our first opportunity to engage parents and share information about in-school health clinics, classroom supports, counseling and other community services that will help them and their students have a successful school year.   
Partner Spotlight:
Greenville County Schools Teen Leadership Class

Knowing how to communicate, handle peer pressure and develop healthy relationships is hard for any teenager. Students who have been exposed to toxic or challenging environments or witnessed violence in any form, have even greater challenges in developing healthy habits and skills. To be successful in life, students need to develop their own sense of self-worth, personal responsibility and interpersonal skills. This is the basis for a new "Capturing Kids Hearts Teen Leadership" class offered to students as part of OnTrack Greenville. The curriculum for this class was created by the Flippen Group and focuses on social functioning, communication, self-awareness, self-esteem, recognizing and resisting peer pressure and other character building and leadership skills. The class focuses on grades seven and eight for intervention . Each semester, about 40 students per grade level at each middle school take the class, for a total of approximately 710 students each year. Click here for more information: http://flippengroup.com/education/teenldrs.html
A partnership of United Way of Greenville County, Greenville County Schools, Greenville Partnership for Philanthropy, Riley Institute at Furman University, Social Innovation Fund and other nonprofits, OnTrack Greenville is an innovative new initiative to keep middle school students engaged and on track to graduation. To learn more, visit www.OnTrackGreenville.org.
A complete listing of funders and community partners is available here.