Greetings Team PSE Families,

 I am so excited and working hard with our team to welcome you to a brand new school year at Painted Stone Elementary!! August will be here before you know it. With a brand new year comes changes, challenges, and continued growth. The staff is collaboratively working hard to so that we all can continue to live out our school mission of Loving Each Other, Learning Together and, Leading the Way. As always, will continue our focus on educating the whole child: academically, socially, emotionally, and physically.

Each year we have a school theme that sets our focus for the year. This year's theme is"Panther Pride is Schoolwide "… with the hashtags for 2021-22 being #pantherpride. What does this mean?

It is going back to some basics like relationship building, teaming, and community outreach (since this is year will hopefully be a little more normal. It’s old school values, while still making school fun, engaging, and innovative. It’s trend-setting… we’ll be “showing our panther pride” and continuing our journey deeper into competency based education, presentation of competencies through exhibitions and defense of learning opportunities, Profile of a Graduate (Panther), pushing thinking strategies, passion projects, project based learning, personalizing student’s learning more through multiple avenues, panther service learning projects, and working the workshop model.

In the past I noticed several family members that tweeted or posted on Facebook and referenced our hashtags when we have school events or when they want to brag on their little ones for something they did. I encourage you all to do the same again this year and use the hashtag #pantherpride.

In closing, climate is how we feel, culture is what we do and who we are. We are so ready to do what we do, and welcome back our old families, and introduce our new families to why it feels good to be a Painted Stone Panther!!

Thank you for helping and supporting us as we continue to… love each other, learn together, and lead the way.

Your Partner in Education,

Mrs. Acklin

Greetings Team PSE Families,

I am so excited and working hard with our team to welcome you to a brand new school year at Painted Stone Elementary!! Although, we have not been able to greet you in typical PSE fashion, I still want to extend a heartfelt WE welcome you and are so grateful you are a part of the PSE FAMILY, because that is what we are...family.

September will be here before you know it. With a brand new year comes changes, challenges, and continued growth. Mr. COVID-19 simply adds to the challenges, changes and growth pieces. This too shall pass. The staff is collaboratively working hard to so that we all can continue to live out our school mission of Loving Each Other, Learning Together and, Leading the Way. As always, we will continue our focus on educating the whole child: academically, socially, emotionally, and physically....even during a global pandemic!!!

“Come Together Right Now...PSE”. This theme will likely mean more to us than any other theme we’ve ever had in my six years at Painted Stone. When this particular “idea” came up for a vote and won out ( it wasn’t my first choice and I didn’t know the song. I know... ) I was like what??? Ok... the tribe has spoken. I am a firm believer.. everything happens for a reason and during a season. THIS is our theme. When a parent is chatting with you on the phone and ends the conversation “ Oh, Mrs. A I almost forgot... do WE have a theme this year”? It is who we are. It’s a part of our family and how we go about doing business. We may not come together under the same roof soon, but we will come together! We need to come together as a school family to show a little grace, flexibility, and patience as we navigate a rough, but doable season in education. 

In the years past I noticed several family members that tweeted or posted on Facebook and referenced our hashtags when we have school events or when they want to brag on their little ones for something they did. I encourage you all to do the same again this year (#cometogetherpse). We have so much in store for Painted Stone...even during a global pandemic. We can’t wait to share it with you! As always, we encourage you and warmly invite you to be a part of our mission. Dr. Anthony Muhammad once said, Climate is how we feel, culture is what we do. We are so ready to do what we do, and welcome back our old families, and introduce our new families to why it feels good to be a Painted Stone Panther!!

Thank you for helping and supporting us as we continue to… love each other, learn together, and lead the way.

Your Partner in Education,

Mrs. Acklin

This is my 5^th year as the lucky principal of Painted Stone Elementary. As I write this I reflect on our growth as a school family and where we’re moving as a district and school organization.  I think about why we exist?  What do I want for the students of PSE?  What do I want for my own child that attends our school? I want my students to be excited about school and learning. I want them to be ready for the next level outside of the elementary experience. I want them to be loving students who embark on a learning experience through a competency based education system that will get them ready for the world after school.

 Competency-Based Education (CBE) is about personalizing learning so that students can master standards from wherever they “start” in their journey.  CBE is being able to apply and transfer knowledge and defend learning.  It’s full of good, sound, facilitated coaching (teaching) of deeper, engaged learning that includes students having voice and choice in the path that they’ll take to get to mastery.  Who wouldn’t want that for their student?

 At PSE we focus EVERYTHING we do around teaching our students to love each other, learn together, and lead the way.  We are creating loving and nurturing students that are starting to take ownership of their learning process because of our journey with CBE.  Not only that, but we are taking pride in the young leaders that we are creating and sending on to Middle School and beyond. It’s an exciting time to be a part of SCPS.  We warmly welcome you to join us at PSE on our path in this journey.

Thank you for helping and supporting us as we continue to… love each other, learn together, and lead the way.

 Your Partner in Education,

 Mrs. Acklin

Greetings Team PSE Families,

I am so excited and working hard with our team to welcome you to a brand new school year at Painted Stone Elementary!! September will be here before you know it. With a brand new year comes changes, challenges, and continued growth. The staff is collaboratively working hard to so that we all can continue to live out our school mission of Loving Each Other, Learning Together and, Leading the Way. As always, will continue our focus on educating the whole child: academically, socially, emotionally, and physically.

Each year we have a school theme that sets our focus for the year. This year's theme is “Run PSE” (like the old Run DMC tag)… with the hashtags for 2019-2020 being #comerunwithus and #runthisway. What does this mean? We want you all to think of what it means to “RUN w/US”. To work as a team with everyone doing their part to help push us all to our goals.. It’s...old school/vintage/classic. It is going back to some basics like relationship building, teaming, and community outreach (since this is year one (new school family) for a lot of our kids and many of our teachers in a new grade level. It’s old school values, while still making school fun, engaging, and innovative. It’s trend-setting… we’ll be “breaking tradition” and continuing our journey deeper into competency based education, presentation of competencies through exhibitions and defense of learning opportunities, Profile of a Graduate (Panther), pushing thinking strategies, passion projects, project based learning, personalizing student’s learning more through multiple avenues, panther service learning projects, and working the workshop model.

In the years past I noticed several family members that tweeted or posted on Facebook and reference our hashtags when we have school events or when they want to brag on their little ones for something they did. I encourage you all to do the same again this year. We have so much in store for Painted Stone. We can’t wait to share it with you! As always, we encourage you and warmly invite you to be a part of our mission. Dr. Anthony Muhammad once said, Climate is how we feel, culture is what we do. We are so ready to do what we do, and welcome back our old families, and introduce our new families to why it feels good to be a Painted Stone Panther!!

Thank you for helping and supporting us as we continue to… love each other, learn together, and lead the way.

Your Partner in Education,Mrs. Acklin

Greetings Team PSE Families,

Happy New Year! I hope and trust that you all had a restful and wonderful holiday break with your families. Hopefully, you spent a lot of time balancing the stress of the holiday season by practicing Habit 7, Sharpening the Saw a little bit. It's hard to believe that we have already completed one semester (the time flew by). It was a great one, full hard work, and growing together as a team.

With the close of one season, we anxiously walk into another. We are so excited about the second half of this year and what it holds for our school family. With a new year brings a renewed focus on student achievement, social and emotional development of our students. January will be a busy month full of learning and leading. School teams are planning and executing their next passion and Project Based Learning Units, a few service learning projects, as well as gearing up for Winter Exhibitions. We are so excited for the students to display their learning and exhibit the graduate profile competencies to family and community members in coming months.

I am so excited to start the New Year off with a bang!! If you or your business would like to volunteer or help out in any way…please do not hesitate to let us know, or better yet just stop on by. After all, we will be doing a lot of synergizing in this month, so why not join us. We welcome your help with open arms.

Don't forget to follow us on Facebook@1paintedstone (Painted Stone Elementary School) and Twitter@PSESCPS for updates, news, and reminders.

Thank you for helping and supporting us as we continue to… love each other, learn together, and lead the way.

Your Partner in Education,

Mrs. Acklin

Greetings Team PSE Families,

Last week we saw the draft proposal of the Redistricting Plan. I, like most of you and our families are concerned about the unknown. I was sitting at my daughters basketball game and my phone started blowing up with highly emotional texts, emails, IM from parents. I went through all sorts of emotions when I saw the plan and map in all of its color. If I am honest... I went back to my track coaching days and played this analogy in my head: We have been running a mile relay and have been behind the entire race (heck started last). We have done some great training, and have been running strong with some nice sticks, and finally we start to make a close into the third exchange (at year three). Bam!! The starter shoots, the gun and says... come back to the start line. Start the race over! Mannnnn... I hate when the starter shoots that darn gun again. It makes me NERVOUS!!

We may be in a sense starting the race again, but we will still have the same runners: with the same strong work ethic, the desire to deliver quality instruction that students deserve, and most of all the same strong desire to build loving relationships with our students and families. None of that changes!!

We have a culture of putting kids first. I know… you get tired of me saying it. I am kids first, kids second, and everybody else comes in third and fourth. After getting through crying parents and students on Thursday, I had to pull back reflect on our mission. Devine intervention on Friday, during Lead and Learn drove my reflection home. I sat through a session with Jonathan Vander Els, the co-author of Breaking Through Traditions. When he worked with us about a big idea of "We are committed to working together to achieve our collective purpose. We cultivate a collaborative culture through the development of high performing teams." I totally branched off from what he was driving home to bring it back to this. I am saddened by the possibility of what the plan holds for us. We are a school family like none other. We are the only family that some of our families have (as two different parents put it). I think about certain students having to leave and the effect change will have on them. There are sooo many other thoughts. In the end, I came back to the culture we have built TOGETHER.

Healthy cultures figure out what we need to do to tackle problems and adversity. A toxic culture explains their problems. As my husband preaches to our children...blaming, claiming, and defending the situation. We do not have a toxic culture. We have a healthy culture. We will work through change. Remember, nothing is written in stone yet. I encourage you to attend the forum December. I ask that you please go in with an open mind and clean heart. Respectfully make your views and opinion known. Please know that whatever happens, know that I will advocate for our babies regardless.

Climate is how we feel, culture is what we do. --Dr. Anthony Muhammad

Thank you for helping and supporting us as we continue to… love each other, learn together, and lead the way.

Greetings Team PSE Families,

I am sure you are aware that the state KPREP scores were released to the public on September 26th. There were three classifications that a school could earn: schools were identified as Comprehensive Support and Improvement, Targeted Support and Improvement (CSI and TSI), or "Other". I am pleased to announce that we earned the “other” classification. We have stayed the course and continued to do what is best for students and we have seen growth. We saw promising points within our student data.We are not where we want to be as a school, but we aren’t where we used to be.

We are embracing data and making changes as needed to ensure that we continue student growth. We’ll spend much of our October 15th Professional Development Day analyzing them and coming up with a plan to continue to tweak and strengthen our core instruction and better personalize learning. In addition, we will also focus on a plan to continue to reduce our novice students even more. Lastly, we will lay the ground work and start the development of our Comprehensive School Improvement Plan (CSIP) for the 2018-2019 school year that is due to the Kentucky Department of Education in early December.

Each year, I plan to make some changes that will help move us forward to becoming a model school. We made some nice gains this year, but there is still a lot of hard teaching and learning that has to be done. In addition, I want to remind all that the assessment is one measure of the work we are doing at Painted Stone. It is an important one, but not the only one. We are living our school mission each and every day. We are working hard to educate the whole child and develop strong student leaders and model citizens. We will continue to fall forward with our efforts. We will be a model school!

As always...we'll continue to love each other, learn together, & lead the way with your support.

Your Partner in Education,

Mrs. Acklin

Greetings Team PSE,

Wow! It’s hard to believe we have been back in school for a month. We’ve had an exciting start to the school year. As I stated in my back to school message late summer we are all about being “Wild Card” this year. . We are revamping some of our instructional strategies to make sure we are doing a better job at reaching and teaching all of our students. We have gotten some great baseline data on our students and are already to diving into that wild card experience of making education more engaging, and purposeful for students. We are intentionally working to make learning more fun, relative and engaging through personalizing instruction, engaging them is real-world project based learning units, and even working with students to pursue more of their passions (such as sewing, gardening, learning to play instruments, etc.) all while making sure that we are connecting that learning back to our common core standards and standards based grading. I am looking forward to a great school year with students and families.

As always...we'll continue to love each other, learn together, & lead the way with your support.

Your Partner in Education,

Mrs. Acklin

Greetings Team PSE,

I am so excited to welcome you to a brand new school year at Painted Stone Elementary!!  With a brand new year comes changes and continued growth.  The staff is collaboratively working hard to continue to live out our school mission of Loving Each Other, Learning Together and, Leading the Way.  We will continue our focus on educating the whole child:  academically, socially, emotionally, and physically through “The Seven Habits of Happy Kids”, but we a tweaking and adding on some new pieces.

This year we will be pushing boundaries, and breaking with tradition. It’s “All About the Journey…Be the Wild Card”… journeying into compentency based education, presentation of competencies through exhibitions and defense of learning opportunities, Profile of a Panther, pushing thinking strategies, passion projects, project based learning, personalizing student’s learning more through multiple avenues, panther service learning projects, and working the workshop model.

Most of you know start each year with a theme: This year's theme is “All About the Journey…Be the Wild Card”… with the hashtag for 2018-19 being #wildcards.  Last year, I noticed several family members that tweeted or posted on Facebook and referenced #gamechangers.  (that made me smileJ).  I encourage you all to do the same this year with #wildcards.   We have so much in store for Painted Stone this year. We can’t wait to share it with you!  As always, we encourage you to be a part of our mission:

We are a diverse school family that is loving each other, learning together, and leading the way.

Mrs. Acklin, Principal