AWSP Blog

In the 22-23 school year, my Building Leadership Team decided cell phones were limiting students’ ability to access their education to the degree that we needed a schoolwide intervention. By June of 2023, a survey to all certificated teachers showed that 98% of staff wanted a more stringent cell phone policy and that 88% of teachers were willing to support a common cell phone management strategy. In the 23-24 school year, we were poised to start our first year of being a phone-free school. Read more to learm about Interlake's road to being cell-phone free.

Ensuring children have health insurance coverage to keep them safe and healthy is critical. About half of the nation’s children are covered by Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). However, students across the country who rely on this coverage for health insurance right now risk losing it due to the ending of the public health emergency. Schools can play a key role in ensuring that doesn’t happen.

Ready Washington is a coalition of state education agencies, associations, and advocacy organizations that believe every Washington student should graduate prepared for a successful future. They have created many great resources to help your students, including this poster, which was co-created by four Washington young people, to encourage your students to use available resources to plan for their futures after high school graduation. We hope this poster engages students in accessing resources that will help them achieve their dreams.

As a recovering principal, you never forget the experiences you faced. Traumatic, high-stress events become permanently ingrained into the rest of our lives. And as much as we try to forget and move on, all it takes is one reminder and we are right back to the moment, the event, the decisions, and all the related emotions. On May 24, 2022, we were all given a reminder through yet another horrific school shooting and the tragic deaths of innocent students and teachers. For those in education, these unimaginable events generate additional emotions and trauma. And for principals and assistant principals, the emotions become even more complex and traumatic. Complex because we move from anger and defeat to shock, horror, sadness, and, unfortunately, the relief it wasn’t at our school.

Have you heard? High-needs schools that operate the School Breakfast Program (SBP) are required to implement a Breakfast After the Bell (BAB) program and give students adequate time to eat their breakfast for the 2022-23 school year. OSPI has all the information you need to create a plan to make this happen. Not sure if your school is required to operate a BAB program? Need some creative resources to make your program successful? Check out the School Breakfast Program page on OSPI’s website.