Relationship Building Sparks Success at Cherokee

On a cold Friday in early March, the sidewalks outside Cherokee Middle School were quiet and blanketed in snow, but inside the gym was buzzing with energy.

Cherokee’s student leadership team was a flurry of activity, setting up activities like a half-court basketball shot or an air mattress relay race, while the rest of the student body filed into bleachers marked with their grade number. Everywhere you looked there were big smiles, excited chatter and an air of anticipation.

This was the Cherokee Middle School Rep Yo’ Grade Pep Rally, where students and their teachers faced off in a series of friendly challenges.

“Can you feel the energy in here?” Principal Roberto Moreno mused while students were taking their seats. “It’s so exciting — everything we do here is to build community within our school.”

Community is the mission for Cherokee, who has seen students' sense of belonging at school skyrocket from 65% in the 2022-23 school year to 84% in 2024-25. 

But it’s not just an increase in belonging. The school has also seen huge gains in attendance and test scores, plus behavior referrals plummet.

“I think that’s because we have a lot of things going on,” Student Engagement Coordinator Ebony Rose said. “We’ve reestablished a Black Student Union that has amazing attendance, we’re trying new things like our Science Expo and we have incentives for students who show up and do well in school.”

For Rose and the rest of Cherokee’s staff, the formula is simple. If you can get students to feel like they belong in school, success will follow.

The first step toward creating a community atmosphere started about five years ago, when Cherokee MSCR Afterschool Site Director Reginald Lee first introduced a new discipline system.

“It’s basically a warning system — after too many warnings you have to leave class and come see me in our reflection room,” Behavior Education Assistant Latasha Jackson said. “There we have a conversation about their behavior and write a reflection form, which helps them understand why their behavior was disruptive to their teacher and classmates.”

Once the reflection form is complete, students have the opportunity to have a “restorative conversation” with their teacher. By giving students space to talk through and understand why their behavior was unacceptable, rather than just punishing them, Cherokee has built trust between teachers and their students.

“We explain to the students at the beginning of the year that the warnings or time in the reflection room is not a punishment,” sixth grade math teacher Elianny Raquel Herrera said. “It’s time we’re giving them to sit down, really think about what happened, figure out what they need to do to repair the relationship with their teacher and improve moving forward.”

Jackson said that the warning and reflection room system has helped staff at Cherokee intervene and correct behavior that previously might have spiraled out of control.

“Most students we only see one or two times in the reflection room,” Jackson said. “After that they understand the expectations we have of them, and are able to carry that behavior through the rest of their middle school career.”

But the warning system and reflection room are only one part of the strategy to build belonging at Cherokee. Moreno and his staff have also come up with a series of incentives for students throughout the year that reward good behavior, attendance and grades.

To reinforce positive habits, Culture and Climate Coach Laura Kalscheur created the “Cougar Cash” system. Cougar Cash can buy snacks or Cherokee apparel when the school store, run by Kalscheur, is open on Fridays.

“If I have students that complete their lessons early, or I see them helping clean the classroom during free time or they help a classmate with their work, I give them a Cougar Cash,” Herrera said. “They really, really love Cougar Cash.”

There are also plenty of attendance and grade incentives. Each month, students with outstanding attendance are entered into a raffle for a range of activities or prizes.

In March, at the Rep Yo’ Grade Pep Rally, six lucky students who showed up to school nearly every day in February won either a brand new bike or electric scooter. There have also been trips to Chocolate Shoppe Ice Cream and free spirit wear giveaways. If students earn a 3.0 GPA or higher they get to have a pizza party.

“Our improvement has felt like everything coming together and working as a system,” Kalscheur said. “We also have a large student support team that is able to work within one grade and follow them throughout their middle school career, which allows us to form really strong relationships with our students and their family.”

Kalscheur also pointed to new advisory lessons focused on building a sense of community that have helped form bonds between students and their peers, plus between students and their teachers.

"Having kids start the day with advisory sets the stage for the rest of the day," she said. "It makes restorative conversations so effective because students now intrinsically feel like there is something to restore to, and the staff are able to help nurture that."

If you take everything together — the relationships and framework for discipline and incentives — Moreno says you end up with a system that lifts everyone together.

“It took some time to get buy-in when we first started to implement this system,” Moreno said. “But we kept working at it, tweaking our guidelines and expectations to a system that fit our school, and that work is starting to pay off.”

In the 2024-25 school year Cherokee saw a 10-point increase in students meeting the 90% attendance threshold, one of the largest gains across MMSD.

“We have been doing a lot of attendance initiatives, from the big stuff like the bike giveaway to small stuff like trophies for the advisory with the week's highest attendance,” social worker Lucerito Cid said. “It gives the whole staff the power to improve attendance and work as a team.”

Behavior, one of Cherokee’s priorities, has seen remarkable improvement. 

“We want to show students that if they show up and do well in school, they will see the benefits,” Jackson said. “It’s made a big difference.”

The final piece of the puzzle, test scores, are starting to see increases too — especially for Black students. 

Cherokee’s Forward English Language Arts scores improved 6% overall in 24-25, with Black students seeing a 14% increase in proficiency. Forward math scores saw a similar improvement, up 7% overall and 6% for Black students.

“The first few years of the new system were focused on getting behavior under control, but now the focus is more on instruction and rigor,” instructional coach Kara Purviance said. “We had to build our instruction from the ground up, and are now at the point where we have a group of strategies, like small group instruction, that are working well.”

But the work doesn’t end there to improve instruction. Over the spring and summer Purviance and her team at Cherokee will be evaluating the effectiveness of their strategies.

That might mean tweaks to improve current instruction, or testing out entirely new strategies to see if something different could lead to even better results.

Even with tweaks in the works, the result of all the effort Cherokee staff have put into their school is paying off.

“Seeing our students grow, seeing them happy in the hallways, seeing them come to school consistently, seeing them participate, seeing them take on responsibility and speak up — how much would you pay to have a job like that,” Rose said. “But I don’t have to sacrifice anything to have that job, it’s what I get to see every day I’m at Cherokee.”