Ellen Hopkins Elementary representatives Marcy Jorda, Carla Smith, Erika Engelking and Christina Stoa at the 2025 BARR National Conference

In late April, representatives of schools from across the country gathered together for the BARR (Building Assets, Reducing Risks) National Conference in Rancho Mirage, Calif., to network, hear from speakers and share ideas about improving BARR at their schools. Moorhead Area Public Schools’ own Ellen Hopkins Elementary played a key role, leading a first-of-its-kind session to connect elementary schools to BARR resources.
BARR has been in use at Horizon Middle School in Moorhead since 2019 and was adopted at Moorhead High School two years later. Horizon BARR coordinator Rachel Lerum describes it as “a school improvement program that really focuses on building relationships—staff-to-student, student-to-student and staff-to-staff. The program achieves that by having intentional, solution-focused, strength-based conversations about students.”
Hopkins has been piloting the program at the elementary level since early in the 2023-24 school year. As part of their grant funding, Hopkins’ representatives were able to attend the conference in 2024—and their experience there led them to the idea for their panel this year.
“When we went last year, we were looking for ideas of how to apply different concepts to elementary school,” explained Hopkins BARR Coordinator Marcy Jorda, “for example: scheduling. Scheduling in elementary is very different from scheduling in middle and high school. But we didn’t find it, so we decided to find this information and then bring it back for everyone next year.”
This concept seemed to resonate with other elementary schools, as the Hopkins team of Jorda, Principal Carla Smith and Assistant Principal Erika Engelking presented to a capacity audience for their breakout session.
“In 2024, as a school new to the program, we had specific questions that there weren’t a lot of other elementary schools there to answer,” said Smith. “So it was really gratifying to come back this year and have so many elementary schools attend our session and have a reaction of ‘yes, we get it; now we know what to do.’”
In addition to the popular breakout session, Hopkins showed up around the event as photos of students and staff from around the school that Dr. Jorda collected were featured on screens and printed material at the conference.
“It was really fun to walk around a conference in California and see Hopkins all over the place,” added Jorda.