Keystone earns two awards from National Heritage Academies

Keystone Charter Academy in Sumpter Township has received a School of Excellence Eagle Award and a Student Enrollment Award from National Heritage Academies.
Keystone received the two awards at NHA’s 18th-annual Eagle Awards ceremony on July 16 in Grand Rapids.
At the regular meeting of the Keystone school board on Sept. 13, Keystone Principal Keturah Godfrey showed off the trophies and the banner over the school’s entryway announcing the awards.
Godfrey said Keystone received the four and a half stars School of Excellence Award for being in the top 10% of the NHA schools in academic quality. Keystone has been asked to take other schools to teach them how to do better.
The Student Enrollment Award was for low attrition and low erosion in the student population.
While the Young-K though 8th grade school has a capacity of 768, it currently is over-enrolled with 775 students. The school’s current wait list is 119.
Godfrey also passed out copies of an article by the Chalkbeat Jobs Board that named the top-10 Detroit area elementary schools by proficiency rate in English Language Arts, based on the recently released M-Step scores.
Detroit Edison Public Academy was #1 with a score of 60% and Keystone Academy was #2 with an ELA score of 58%.
“I’m very proud of the work we do in intervention,” Godfrey said.
She said NHA wants Keystone to be a pilot school for math. Keystone uses Dreambox, a role-playing game with math skills, and NHA will see if all NHA schools should use it.
Godfrey said the school has had strong gains in reading and now they will focus on math.
Fire in the boys’ room
Principal Godfrey gave a report to the board on the fire in the middle school boys’ restroom on the fourth day of school.
Godfrey said the fire alarm went off at about 11:50 a.m., Friday, Sept. 7, and the fire walls closed. The teachers kept the students in the classrooms until she could check on the source. She said she touched the door handle and it was warm, so she evacuated the school.
“We dumped the school in a matter of minutes,” Godfrey said. She said the middle school was in the middle of lunch and the students walked out to their fire drill staging areas.
There were 90 new Kindergarteners who had never practiced a fire drill and they just followed what the older students did, Godfrey said. There were vests and emergency back packs.
They let the parents know there would be early dismissal and that was accomplished in two hours. The PTO came with water and the police and fire departments “were incredibly supportive.”
Godfrey said the social media sites were loaded with positive reviews of the evacuation and “we are incredibly proud of how it worked.”
She said the cause of the fire was still under investigation.
The sprinkler system caused some water damage in the boys’ restroom which seeped into the hallway and ran across into the room across the hall. The sprinklers only went off in the restroom.
She said the restoration company arrived while parents were still picking up their students. She said fans were on all weekend and by Monday they were able to come back to school.
She said there was minimal damage to the school. Godfrey said the fire department went into the restroom and picked up things so they wouldn’t be damaged.
“People were impressed with how well it went,” said board secretary Connie Shull.
Godfrey said the fire marshal is looking into an award for the middle school. And, she said, a group from Facebook would be providing lunch for teachers on Sept. 14.
PTO member Geri Milton baked monster muffins to thank the fire department for its work and took them, by mistake, to the Van Buren Township Fire Department instead of the Sumpter Township fire fighters who were at the scene of the fire. After she learned of her error, she took the muffins to the Sumpter fire hall and then went home and baked another batch to take to the VBT Fire Department because she felt so bad. She said the same fire fighter was there on both of her visits.
Dawn Bandy of the PTO baked brownies and cookies for the Sumpter police officers to thank them for their efforts.