Granby Elementary is a special school in many ways. For the Granby staff, students, families, community members, and alumni, Granby is special because of the wonderful people that work together to help children grow and are proud to be called “Gators.” Granby is special in many other ways, too.
In Worthington, there are eleven elementary schools and Granby is the only one with NO walkers. All of our students have bus transportation because of the location in proximity to the neighborhoods of attendance. 
However, not being a “neighborhood school” doesn’t keep our families from being actively involved in events at the school. This was recently apparent with the huge turnout at our LipDub Premiere as well as the Dark, Dark Woods Night for our kindergators on Friday night. We also had a waitlist for Bike Club where parents had to drop off the bikes!
Now here’s the really cool thing… Granby is also the ONLY elementary to be a part of a K-12 “campus”. Situated right behind McCord Middle School and across the street from Worthington Kilbourne High School, the “feeder school” flow for our Gators is pretty neat. We have wonderful opportunities for collaboration with our Wolf partners and we are working hard to build on those unique opportunities at Granby. We already have Project MORE mentors that walk from both Kilbourne and McCord to tutor our students as well as Wolves for Cubs mentors (WKHS) for our little Gators. Some of our sixth graders walk to their Algebra class at McCord daily and we are just beginning to tap into sharing some transportation resources as well as collaboration with special programs.
As soon as I knew I would be at Granby this year, I contacted Sandra Kucinich-Horn, Kilbourne’s News Team advisor and teacher, to see if she was interested in collaborating with Granby’s news team. She was happy to work together and our collaboration began. She helped us plan our LipDub (having had experience in the process) and provided a couple of reporters to assist on the day of our filming. 
Kristen Barone (a Granby graduate) and Colin Schlaegel (who happens to be my son), came to film the “behind the scenes” process of creating the LipDub. Kristen went to work immediately to edit a story about Granby’s LipDub for the Kilbourne News and in just a week, it aired for the student population at Kilbourne. I was lucky enough to make it over to Kilbourne to watch it air live and hear the conversation among the news team as they critiqued their broadcast and received some very helpful feedback from their teacher. The stories these high school students put together are quite impressive. Here is the story that was aired about Granby’s LipDub:
Granby’s “On Fire For Learning!” LipDub was posted to YouTube the night after our big family “premiere.” The next day, Kilbourne was apparently buzzing with conversation about Granby’s LipDub and I received an email to check out the Kilbourne sign out front.
Being a campus school has its privileges and we are just scratching the surface of the collaboration potential we have with our middle and high school Wolves. I am hoping to take our GNN (Gator News Network) news team for a behind-the-scenes visit to the WKHS news studio soon.
Our Fine, Fine School is located on a fine, fine campus with some fine, fine staff who are willing to collaborate to make great things happen for kids K-12. It’s definitely a win-win situation!
P.S. Colin is still working on an even more “behind the scenes” compilation as he was also at Granby when we were working on the LipDub on days without students. Let’s just say that a group of adults can get pretty goofy when brainstorming a video geared for elementary students. Whether or not this video will be aired for public viewing is yet to be determined. Stay tuned.
A Fine, Fine School! 