Healthy Kids Program
Cooke families may enroll in the Healthy Kids Extended Day program at Cooke. This program provides care before and after-school, and also drop-off care based on availability. For more information, please contact Healthy Kids.
Social Emotional Wellness
The George L. Cooke Elementary School recognizes that social, emotional and behavioral issues can impact learning and academic performance.
To further support student success, the school has a Social Emotional Wellness (SEW) Facilitator to assist in identifying and meeting students’ social, emotional and physical needs.
As SEW Facilitator, Ms. Barbara Bitjeman plays a critical role in supporting the school in the implementation of a wellness regime that focuses on the whole child, whole school and whole community. As the SEW facilitator, Ms. Bitjeman conducts a push-in program in all 31 Cooke Elementary School classrooms on a five-day rotation. She teaches lessons on social emotional wellness, which address topics such as identifying feelings and appropriate expression, social skills, teamwork, empathy, compassion, anti-bullying and respect. She also incorporates yoga and mindfulness activities into her lessons as a way to teach our students ways to self-calm, focus, and become more in tune with their bodies and emotions. Each teacher participates with Ms. Bitjeman in her lessons.
The benefits of social emotional learning are vast. They include helping the students to find an outlet for their feelings so that they are more able to focus on learning. It also helps them to deal with social conflict and feel a stronger sense of community and belonging in our school.