Mariel Williams
editor@mitchellnews.com
The Mitchell County Schools Board of Education voted to accept a $750,000 bid from AMY (Avery, Mitchell, Yancey) Wellness Foundation to buy the old Harris Middle School property in Spruce Pine.
According to Superintendent Chad Calhoun, the foundation intends to use the building as a youth center, daycare and nonprofit hub. Calhoun recommended that the board accept AMY’s offer, which is for the minimum amount previously set by the board.
The intended use for the property is largely in line with neighborhood preferences expressed by local citizens who attended a recent community meeting to discuss the future of the school.
The board’s attorney, John Henning, noted that even after this vote the board would still need to allow him to review the specific terms of the sale contract in order to complete the deal.
Snyder to take over Greenlee
After going into closed session to discuss personnel, the board returned to open session and voted to approve hiring several new staff members, including transferring Adrienne Snyder from the Career and Technical Education Department at Mitchell High School to serving as principal of Greenlee Primary School.
Graduation honors
The board approved several policy changes at Mitchell High School, in accordance with recommendations from Principal Cole Chester, including a decision to have less focus on class valedictorians and salutatorians at graduation.
“I would like to phase it out,” Chester said. “We have a lot of kids who work very hard to achieve that academic success, and academic success looks different for every kid.”
Chester told a story of an unnamed student he worked with earlier in his career, a student who started out working under an Individual Education Program to help with his special needs, but eventually was able to study in a regular classroom.
“I realized that he probably could go on without his IEP — it would be hard, but I felt like he could do it,” Chester said. “We had a kid who went from having an IEP to being pretty much independent … to graduating with what would be the lowest level of honors that I have listed here. So, it’s an opportunity for us to celebrate the successes of many more students who work just as hard as those top two — it looks different, but the same amount of effort, sometimes even more, is put into that by students who struggle academically.”
Chester said he was also concerned about the competitiveness of the traditional focus on valedictorian status.
“I watched two of our students last year battle it out pretty much to the end — friendships were lost, and I felt like the importance of education wasn’t taken into consideration because we were chasing the GPA rather than a valuable education,” Chester said.
Chester noted that some students lose out on becoming valedictorian because they choose to focus on AP classes.
“AP classes tend to be harder than college classes but they don’t carry the same weight,” he said. “So we have kids … taking college classes for a 5.0 instead of taking an AP course which could potentially provide more value, a better understanding of what they were being taught at a deeper level because it did not carry the same GPA weight.”
Chester said that students at the top of their class would still be named valedictorian and salutatorian and would be notified so that they can put those designations on college applications.
Board Chair Brandon Pitman asked if other high schools have tried decentralizing the top two students in each class.
“Most schools are moving to this for a lot of the same reasons,” Chester said. “I mean, we have kids that love art but don’t take it because it won’t help their GPA. I think that high school is a great time to explore different avenues before you go off and start paying for it in college, but we have kids that aren’t doing that because they’re focused on their GPA, more so than getting the full educational experience.”
Chester noted that current sophomores, juniors and seniors will not be affected by this new policy — it will go into effect for the freshman class, to avoid impacting students who have already chosen to focus their high school career on a competitive GPA.
“Our current freshmen, they have no skin in the game,” Chester said.