Whole Child Initiative

Contact Information

Dixie Grunenfelder
K12 System Supports Director
360-878-0138

To ensure that every student realizes their full potential, OSPI's Whole Child initiative ensures students feel safe, healthy, engaged, supported, and challenged. The whole child initiative recognizes that access to safe, welcoming learning environments, as well as rich learning experiences outside of the classroom, is crucial for students' educational and life outcomes.

Evidence-based whole child strategies include

  • designing relationship-centered learning environments;
  • developing curriculum, instruction, and assessments for deeper learning;
  • providing integrated student supports;
  • preparing educators for whole child practice.

Jumpstart your Whole Child initiative with the Family & Community Engagement Modules and the Powerless to Powerful leadership framework. Build a solid foundation for whole-child programming by strengthening relationships between staff, students, and families.

Family & Community Engagement

We want to help your school team jumpstart authentic family and community engagement. When schools and communities partner together, students and communities thrive. These online learning modules are accompanied by a resource toolkit to support team discussions and action planning.

Fact Sheets

To support schools and school districts in providing informative resources to their families, OSPI subject matter experts have partnered to create a series of fact sheets about subjects concerning safety at home and in school. Each fact sheet contains data from reputable sources, action items for families, conversation starters, and links to additional resources.

Powerless to Powerful (P2P)

Leaders’ beliefs and behaviors are key to building cultures from learning. Powerless to Powerful is a leadership framework that combines academic press, social support, and relational trust to create systems that support everyone—students, teachers, counselors, administrators, and parents – to create a culture for learning.

Assessing Your Efforts

Knowing if our hard work is having the impact we intend is a critical step in providing student supports. From resource mapping to implementation assessment to student voice, information on our system efforts from various views is necessary to support continuous improvement.