Woodland Kindergarten Through Fifth Grades Select Colors Over Cats for House Names
Cats are out and colors are in for kindergarten through fifth grades at Woodland District 50 as students voted for new names related to the classroom house structure that exists.
Starting with the 2017-2018 school year, students in those grades will either be Wildcat Green, Wildcat White or Wildcat Gold. Earlier this month students at Primary, Elementary East, Elementary West and Intermediate voted on whether to use cat names or color names. The results were as follows: Primary, 73 percent for colors and 27 percent for cats; Elementary East, 54 percent for colors and 46 percent for cats; Elementary West, 87 percent for colors and 13 percent for cats; Intermediate, 59 percent for colors and 41 percent for cats.
"We wanted to encourage the students to have a voice in choosing their house identity and the students have spoken. In each school, the majority of students voted for the color names," said Dr. Joy A. Swoboda, Superintendent.
In an effort to maintain a small school feel, each of the schools at Woodland has a student grouping structure in which there are houses and within each house are classrooms. A student who enrolls at Woodland comes in with the name of his or her Woodland house and stays with that house name up to sixth grade. Once a student reaches sixth grade, they are at Woodland Middle School, which has its own set of wildcat identification used for houses as well as team names.
Prompting the student vote is a new house structure in the Primary, Elementary and Intermediate grades that came about following budget reductions for the district. Under the new structure, there will be three house names (Wildcat Green, Wildcat White or Wildcat Gold) rather than five (Cheetah, Tiger, Leopard, Panther, Lion) and the number of students in each classroom contained in a house will be more equal.
Dual Language students will be Wildcat Gold instead of Lions while Leopard or Panthers will be Wildcat Green, and Cheetahs and Tigers will be Wildcat White. The cat names at Woodland Middle School will stay in place.