Danville Independent Schools

PRESS RELEASE

Mellane Crowe, middle school teacher at Sunrise Children’s Campus, and Greg Foley, elementary teacher at Sunrise Children’s Campus, received Central Kentucky Educational Cooperative’s Outstanding Educator Awards on May 26.

Sunrise is a PRTF (Psychiatric Residential Treatment Facility) that provides specialized treatment programs for up to 27 male students age 6-18 from across the state, who need long-term, comprehensive professional care. The average length of stay in the facility is 10 weeks.

The PRTF setting poses some unique challenges, as the classrooms serve up to five different grade levels of students with a broad range of abilities, who experience as many as 10 different placements in a given school year.

Crowe’s classroom is alive with student work, project based learning artifacts, her artwork, and energy.  Sunrise staff report that the boys are eager to get up and get to the classroom each morning to see what adventures await. 

Tina Wray, director of special education for the district writes, “She is a real-life Ms. Frizzle!”

Crowe recently received a $4,000 grant from the Kentucky Educational Cooperative for State Agency Children to fund a greenhouse project that she entitled Growing Knowledge.  Students will develop community partnerships, engage in project-based enrichment activities in the areas of math and science, and  research careers and opportunities of employment from field to table.

“Greg Foley is one of the most talented elementary teachers I’ve ever observed,” Wray said.

He utilizes a wide variety of multimodal instructional strategies to meet the needs of individual students and his classroom is a vibrant showcase of their work.  They sing, dance, create, learn, and grow.

“While I greatly appreciate their creative instructional talents, the thing I value most about the two of them is their genuine passion to instill a sense of belonging and foster a love of learning in each student who is lucky enough to be a part of their classrooms,” Wray said.