Bayside’s P.S. 46 makes news

The School Wide Enrichment Educational Time (S.W.E.E.T.) program began this year at P.S. 46, The Alley Pond School, in Bayside. As part of the ambitious plan, the school launched “It’s News To Me,” a combination of journalism class and actual elementary school newspaper taught by speech teacher, Mrs. Barbara Vella, and the technology teacher, Mrs. Janet Elias. Together they use their individual talents and creativity to instruct 20 students every six weeks on how to create a newspaper.
“It’s exciting for all of us to be collaborating on our project to produce our school’s first newspaper,” Mrs. Vella said. Mrs. Vella thought a good name for our newspaper would be “The Alley Pond Press” and the students really liked it too. This page highlights their students’ hard work and superb creativity.
The School Wide Enrichment Model (SEM), developed by Joseph S. Renzulli and Sally M. Reis, is a detailed blueprint for total school improvement that allows a school the flexibility to develop unique clusters based on local resources, student demographics and school dynamics as well as faculty strengths and creativity.
Enrichment clusters are blocks of time in which students and teachers are grouped together according to their interests. The students work together to make authentic products and services for the real world . . . like practicing professionals. Its major goal is to promote both challenging and enjoyable high-end learning.