The Orion School is Finalist in the Clorox Company Bright Future Grant Program

To contact us Click HERE

The Orion School is a finalist in The Clorox Company’s Power A Bright Future grant program.  Starting on Monday evening, November 12 we need as many votes as possible for The Orion School at www.PowerABrightFuture.com  This is a large grant that would really help the Orion School expand our Greenspace with Grace outdoor classroom Program that is integrated into every part of the school week.  

The Orion School offers an enriched and multi layered curriculum. The emphasis is on authentic experiential learning opportunities outside that ensure a love of learning and school success for our students.

• Currently our students plant, maintain and harvest crops in our organic garden.
• We use rain barrels to water our garden and compost the remains of snack.
• We feed food scraps to our red wiggler worms and use their castings as fertilizer.
• We  watch caterpillars grow, form chrysalises, and become butterflies in our pollinator garden. 
• Specialists from the community frequently come to our school to enrich the curriculum. Visitors have included a beekeeper, a bat educator and a reptile expert.
• The students also visit community gardens such as the Atlanta Food Bank Community Garden to as community service learning, to learn more about gardening best practices and to inspire the Orion School garden.
• A portion of our garden's crops are hand-picked and used as a healthy snack at our school or donated,by our students,to a community kitchen next door to our school.
• Concepts that align with the Core Georgia Performance Standards are reinforced through authentic connections made in the outdoor classroom.

The Orion School serves students ages 5-13 with neurobehavioral conditions including ADHD, anxiety, OCD, Tourette Syndrome, Asperger's Syndrome, SPD and learning disabilities. Research has shown that time spent in outdoor settings lowers the symptoms of ADHD and naturally increases attention. By increasing time our students spend in our outdoor classroom, we provide critical opportunities for our students to learn lifelong skills and increase their focus for other educational activities throughout the day. We plan to expand our gardening efforts to include selling some of our harvested crops to our families, connecting the importance of healthy eating to home. We will also be able to increase the amount of garden-to-table food we provide for our students and be able to help disadvantaged members of the local community in the neighborhood surrounding our school.

All we need to do to be able to continue to be on the forefront of special education is for the Orion School supporters far and wide vote daily for us on the Clorox website. We just need a click a day :)