The Hilltown Cooperative Charter Public School in Easthampton will host four seminars this year to share aspects of its teaching and community building strategies.

“This is probably the biggest thing we are doing this year,” said Educational Coordinator Dan Klatz. “These will be afterschool seminars offered to teachers, administrators, parents and community members.”

According to Klatz, the seminars will be on creating community, arts integration, parent communication from the classroom teacher and folk dancing.

“The creating community seminar will look at the structure we use in the school to connect the students to the larger community,” Klatz said.

This seminar will explore everything from how lunch times are organized and the effects of school routines, to all-school meetings and ceremonies held during the school year.

Klatz said that the arts integration workshop will illustrate how Hilltown Charter educators seek to use visual arts, technology, music and the performing arts to create interdisciplinary units. There will be two sessions of this event, one focusing on kindergarten through fifth grades and another on sixth to eight grades.

A session on parent communication from the classroom teacher will look at how information is shared between teachers and parents or guardians. “Parent involvement is all about what we do here. It is part of our mission, it is mission-driven,” Klatz said.

“Folk Dancing for All” will examine how community is fostered through music and movement. “For this, we are collaborating with the Country Song and Dance Society, a nonprofit organization in Eastworks,” Klatz said.

According to Klatz, the Hilltown Charter has in the past offered day-long or multiple-day seminars, but given time constraints many people face, decided to shorten the events to a couple of hours. “We are excited to share what we do well and how that is relevant to parents and teachers in the area,” he said.

Klatz also noted that the school has recently created a position for a special education administrator and has hired Justin Smith for that role. “We haven’t had a separate administrator for special education but our population of special ed students has increased as our school population has increased.”

Klatz said that this is the first year that the school has reached its full enrollment of 218 students.

“When we moved here, it was with the intent that it would take three years to fill our enrollment,” Klatz said of the school’s shift from Haydenville to Easthampton.

New kindergarten and first-grade teacher Kerri Simonelli will replace Bill Farkas, who retired after teaching at Hilltown Charter for 15 years.

“We are very excited about both of these people,” Klatz said.