Our staff consistently builds positive energy for our school and students by continually looking for new ways to meet our students’ varying academic needs. One way they have been doing this is by planning differentiated instructional groups (also known as Response to Intervention groups) across grade levels. All students are involved, and our instructional groups generally meet 3 times a week for 30 minutes each. These instructional times are focusing on reading and math skills, giving students that need more instruction on the basics time to work on them, and students who already have these skills down a chance to be challenged by new concepts.  In the past, teachers had been trying to do this by themselves in the classroom. While this certainly still happens, this approach naturally creates planning time for student needs by our staff and the environment necessary school wide to continue working toward our goal of meeting our students’ wide range of academic needs.