North gets award, honors deputies

Charles H. Featherstone/Columbia Basin Herald Grant County Sheriff’s deputy K-9 Edo rolls on floor at North Elementary School on Monday. Edo and his handler, Deputy Tyson Voss, received an Excellence Award from the Moses Lake School District.

by Charles H. Featherstone Staff Writer
| June 5, 2018 3:00 AM

MOSES LAKE — North Elementary School was honored on Monday with an award from Imagine Learning, a company that produces materials for students learning English as a second language, as one of the ten best performing schools in the state.

“This is to students who have been working their heinies off at school,” said Principal Kelly Fredrick. “We worked so much.”

This year, 31 North students participated in the program designed to help teach kids who are learning English as their second or third language. The award, which honors progress, allows North Elementary to call itself a “Beacon School.”

“It works with kids at their level, and they learn English and how to read in a fun and engaging way,” said Andrew Brandt, an area partnership manager with Utah-based ImagineLearning.

“If you’ve ever learned a foreign language, then you know it can be daunting to speak it at the beginning,” he said. “This gives kids a safe environment to practice so they can engage in class more.”

Brandt said the company serves 800 schools in Washington and 20,000 nationwide. In Washington, the company honors 10 schools every year that have shown the most progress.

“We do this to recognize the hard work of implementing the program,” Brandt said.

Jennifer Hammer, who oversees the ImagineLearning program for the Moses Lake School District, said that North will likely have 114 kids in the program next school year, though it’s hard to estimate.

“They trickle in she said, and tend to stay English learners for a couple of years,” Hammer said.

In addition, Fredrick gave an excellence award to Grant County Sheriff’s deputies Ric Char and Tyson Voss and their K-9 companions Chicka and Edo. The two human and two canine officers were unable to attend the district’s award ceremony.

“Any time we call, anytime we’ve had a student who needs them, any time a parent needs them, anytime a teacher needs them, we get sheriffs, police and fire here to our school, to our neighborhood, to keep us safe,” Fredrick said as she introduced the deputies.

According to Voss, Char and K-9 Chicka helped kids cleanup broken glass and needles while Voss told kids all about his dog Edo as part of an emergency response to an nearby brushfire last year.

“It’s part of what we do,” Voss said.