New faces, new efforts greet kids in Stowe

But teachers and staff members try to make the transition as smooth as possible.

Stowe Elementary

At the elementary school, students will be greeted by a new smiling face each morning. Longtime principal Richard Smiles retired in June.

Marty Lacasse, a music teacher for 16 years, will now be conducting the entire school, rather than just her classes.

“I am prepared for this exciting adventure,” Lacasse said. “And I’m also aware that I’m not doing this by myself by any means. I’ll be working with a collaborative group.”

That group will welcome four new educators this year. Dana LaClair is the new music and chorus teacher, succeeding Lacasse. Peter Terwilliger will teach second grade, Chelsea Stetson will teach third grade, and Gretchen Casey is the new literacy teacher leader.

“We are very excited to welcome them,” Lacasse said.

These new teachers, along with the rest of the Stowe Elementary team, are restructuring their curriculum to fit with the new statewide proficiency-based graduation system. They’ll still offer the same courses, but there will be a greater focus on personalized learning in the classroom.

Most teachers attended a weeklong curriculum camp this summer, working with teachers across the supervisory union — from Morrisville and Elmore — to garner new ideas to implement in the classroom.

Middle school

Stowe Middle School will also welcome a few new faces to the faculty. Jennifer Anthony will teach family and consumer science; Ian Shea will instruct eighth grade science and language arts; Marianna Donnally joins the team from Lamoille County Mental Health and will be the home-school coordinator for middle and high school; and Heather Neff is returning to the middle school — she worked there in 2011-12 — as a para-educator.

Longtime teacher Kaaren Meyer will transition from classroom math education to helping all math teachers keep current with changes in instruction and curriculum as the grades 6-12 math teacher leader.

Meyer will help also with the transition to Eureka Math, a new math program and curriculum. Eureka Math “connects math to the real world” in a coherent approach from pre-K to grade 12 that will help teachers know what incoming students have already learned. It’s meant to reduce gaps in student learning and ensure that students are prepared for what comes next.

A few other elements at the middle-school level are “not new, but improved,” Principal Dan Morrison said.

• The school garden is supported by the Stowe Education Fund and helps students learn about the components of food service. Last week, a group of students harvested about 20 pounds each of potatoes and garlic. As school starts on Monday, the vegetables will be at their peak, with the prized produce being pumpkins and watermelons.

“The kids saw how big they were getting and wanted to pick them the other day, but I had to tell them that they weren’t ready yet,” Morrison said.

The garden project is shepherded by teachers David Smith, sixth grade, and Jeff Grogan, seventh grade, and all of the food goes into school lunches.

They even tried something new this year and grew tomatillos for salsa.

• Next to the gardens, new wooden planks will be put up as soon as they are coated for weather protection. The planks were painted with murals during the school’s beautification day last June, and will replace the murals that are now on the building.

• This year marked the second annual student orientation, where seventh- and eighth-graders were trained to help welcome incoming sixth-graders.

The new students were introduced to digital citizenship and how to use their new Chromebooks, completed a scavenger hunt tour of the school, and took an art workshop, all aimed at reducing anxiety at the start of the new year in a new school.

“Student orientation was a huge success this year,” Morrison said, with about 85 percent attendance last week.

• Students this year will also be working on personalized learning plans, in accordance with the state’s proficiency-based graduation requirements.

Stowe High School

Along with welcoming Meyer and Donnally to the team, the high school added Rob Dornfried to the history department, and Seth Marineau will teach French. Mike Walogorsky is going to act as interim science teacher until Tim Ziegler is well enough to return.

Ziegler was diagnosed with a degenerative heart condition a year and a half ago, and just returned home on Tuesday after a heart transplant last month (see story here).

Next year will also bring a new administrative change — Principal Jeff Maher has announced that he’ll be retiring at the end of this school year.

Maher’s last year at the high school promises to be much the same as the previous year, as not much has changed for the incoming students.

“The big things this year are not new, but we will have an unrelenting focus on personalized learning plans — anagnorisis,” Maher said. “As part of that, we will also be focusing more on student life on campus.”

Stowe High has also transformed a couple of upstairs classrooms into a global education center. This center will be the hub for international language classes — French, Chinese and Spanish — and will provide a base to welcome new exchange students to the campus.

This year, Stowe High has three exchange students — one from Spain, one from Nigeria and one from China — who will be joining classes on Monday.

A few other minor adjustments were made at Stowe High, including a new fire-alarm system installed this summer. The project cost $63,000, which was within the school’s budget.

All three Stowe schools, as well as the Lamoille South Supervisory Union, have new websites. Each site has been designed with the same template — calendar at the left, slideshow in the middle and announcements on the right — to make information easier to find, but some tweaking still needs to be done to streamline the transition. The old sites are meant to redirect visitors to the new sites, but it may take a bit for them to catch up.

John Meyer, Lamoille South’s director of educational technology, is working on the sites.

Once everything’s running smoothly, the new websites will offer electronic course registration, which means saying goodbye to stacks of papers with class descriptions and titles.