Civil Municipal Magazine - Nov 2023

241 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 4, ISSUE 11 THE WEST OT TAWA SCHOOL DISTRICT making, providing a wide range of educational offerings to help the children find their niche and adopting an outlook that places the school district in the center of the West Ottawa community. Programs for the district’s youngest students Most modern educators agree that children have a greater chance to achieve future academic and personal success if they can start learning early. Bearden says that the district has several programs for its preschoolers. One is its partnership with the Outdoor Discovery Center, a non-profit education and conservation organization situated on a 155-acre nature preserve in Holland. “They run a couple of early childhood learning centers,” he notes. “They’ve worked with us, particularly with their summer school offerings that provide programs that we otherwise wouldn’t be able to offer.” There’s also the Great Start Readiness Program (GSRP), Michigan’s state-funded program for four-year-old children who are deemed at risk for educational failure. “We offer it in our schools to give students a pre- school experience,” Bearden says. “We also partner with the Ottawa Area Intermediate School District (OAISD), which has a robust early childhood program, including early childhood special ed – ECSE. We offer those programs within our buildings, too, so students with special needs are identified at an early age.” For its elementary-age population, the district recently instituted a program it calls Panther Pathways. “We identified a lot of students whose families had the means to give them extracurricular opportunities outside of school,” says Bearden. “We also had a lot of families who didn’t have the means to do that. To make sure that everybody had an equal opportunity, we created Panther Pathways, which is a broad program across the upper elementary grade level – 4th, 5th, and