Everything I Know About Graduation, I Learned in Elementary School

How does a community know that its children are ready to navigate the world that exists beyond high school graduation? 

This is an essential and urgent question that so many of us in public education are wrestling with right now.

Traditional schooling, the kind that we are most used to, often operates in disconnected silos where educators view their work in isolation. Elementary teachers naturally concentrate on foundational skills, while middle and high school educators focus on content, post-secondary pathways and meeting state graduation requirements. Of course this division isn't born out of a lack of care. It's rooted in tradition, comfort, and how established systems have expected our structure to operate. In South Glens Falls, this is where the development and rollout of our Portrait of a Bulldog over the last four years has become a powerful unifying thread across grade levels that is reshaping what collaboration looks like. 

Here’s an idea that I think we can all unite behind: You don’t miraculously start building a graduate in 9th grade. 

If high school is the launching pad to adulthood, then the construction on the foundation of that launchpad begins the moment a future graduate walks through the elementary school doors. Therefore, it serves our entire community to communicate this vision early and often. 

Here in New York state, we are in the midst of a big shift in the benchmarks we use to signify our oldest students are ready to graduate. This shift away from using traditional summative assessments, also known as Regents Exams, to indicate readiness has required all of us to look at our institutional approaches, hold them up to the light, and consider whether or not they are still relevant as we exit the first quarter of the 21st Century. For us here in South Glens Falls, having an established Portrait of a Graduate has made embracing this work a little bit more accessible and the necessity of engaging our elementary community in the work a lot less daunting.

Making the Vision Accessible

We have six attributes that were established several years ago through many conversations with our district community including staff, students, families, and local industry. These guiding ideals - adaptable problem solver, collaborative learner, creative innovator, critical thinker, empathetic influencer, and responsible citizen - now show up wherever we talk about student growth and achievement. You will see their presence in our district’s mission and vision, in our guiding core values, and even in how we recognize our staff. What we’ve discovered, though, is that while these concepts are fairly straightforward to adults, they are less so when asking a five-year-old to explain them. 

So, how do we translate these attributes into something a kindergartener can understand and identify in their daily life? 

The answer is through social emotional learning. SEL has become a bridge. We didn’t hand elementary teachers a brand-new curriculum based on the Portrait or ask them to find a place to squeeze in another instructional block to their day. That would be an immediate non-starter. Instead, we mapped our attributes directly into the PK–5 SEL routines in classrooms and through monthly community meetings where counselors, teachers, and leaders work together to bring the attributes to life. What does that look like?

• Kid-Friendly Translation: We removed the barrier created by educational jargon and created multiple learner behaviors for each attribute  in the form of “I can…” sentences to be displayed in classrooms throughout our four elementary schools. For example, "Collaborative Learner" became, "I can recognize that others have different ideas while sharing mine." "Empathetic Influencer" turned into, "I can respond with kind words and actions toward others." We also crosswalked our attributes with the built-in character traits that appear throughout our district’s formal SEL curriculum.

• Cross-Curricular Integration: Beyond SEL lessons, school staff have the option, for example, to share monthly read-alouds aligned with our ELA curriculum through virtual book rooms where students and families can easily access stories in print or on YouTube. These stories highlight one attribute at a time, connecting characters’ choices to our SEL character traits and Portrait of a Bulldog attributes.

• Real-Time Recognition: When students display these attributes, whether sharing on the playground or working through a tough math problem, they’re recognized with attribute-focused praise and school wide awards during monthly community meeting assemblies in each building. We’ve also created a visual badging book that accompanies our trimester report card throughout the year. Students can earn sticker badges whenever someone catches them living the attributes. This builds agency for them, and it’s a great way to communicate to families how our Portrait shows up for their children in daily life. 

A Foundation for Lifelong Success

By embedding our Portrait of a Bulldog attributes directly into elementary SEL routines, we’re setting our students up to understand how their actions now impact their options for the future. 

Early practice in critical thinking and adaptability creates the scaffolding students rely on when facing complex secondary coursework and post-graduation challenges. This work ensures that the skills formed in elementary school directly support post-secondary pathways and long-term career readiness. 

Ultimately, by investing in students being able to embody these learner behaviors from day one, we empower them to navigate the future confidently and thrive as engaged members of the community.