COVER PHOTO: The winner of this year’s Christmas card contest is Lillyanna Terry, a fourth-grader at Pine Street Elementary. She is shown with her principal, Robyn Robinson.
Wayland High School this past fall was recognized as one of the top 20 percent of high schools in Michigan and Principal Santino DiCesare Monday night presented the Board of Education with some reasons why.
DiCesare said skipping school has been identified as the worst offender in behavior at the school and it was reported the practice occurs most often at the start of the PRIDE program at about 10:30 a.m.
He said staff then began to work on the issue at the start of the academic year and was able to reduce its occurrence by 30.8 percent.
DiCesare showed visual slides of art teacher Scott Gunderson explaining how changes to what he called “a clunky” signing out procedure has been streamlined to enable teachers to do less monitoring and more intervention.
He added that referrals for bad behavior have decreased as well.
It just so happened that board members had their most recent monthly meet at the high school.
In other business at the meeting, the board:
- Determined the performance of Supt. Tim Reeves to be “effective” in his evaluation. Whether or not he earns a pay raise will be determined in July.
- Was told the school lunch program experimented with serving foreign chicken curry recently and it ran out of food because it was wildly popular.
- Approved on a 6-1 vote lumping a couple of speculative bids for resurfacing of the parking lot and roof for the district’s new administration building into the large bid package for the new pool project. Becky Hohnke dissented because she said the board was told earlier this year that the need was three to five years away.
- Glad handed two board members, Janel Hott and Dan Cassini, who were attended their last meetings after serving 10 and eight years, respectively (See Photo)
