“It simply can’t happen”……….

9/26/2018

Every year we host an amazing College Fair for our Juniors and Seniors. This year it was a marvelous event with great planning by our Counseling Department and PTO. Our Juniors usually spend the most time visiting representatives as the future college experience becomes a little more concrete. Juniors can be thrilled with thoughts of independence, leaving home and beginning a new life. This also can cause the first true anxiousness and discomfort about these same thoughts. Our Seniors seem to peruse and gleefully meander between the schools they have on their personal list. Some you see, are set with their choices as the application process is on-going and time-consuming. The College Fair is also a time that our teachers and counselors see a surge in requests for recommendation letters. This may be a good time to have a quick check-in about college plans with your Junior or Senior as you may gain insight into your child’s plans since they can change sporadically.

Last week, we were fortunate to open the grand walkway between the library spaces. This has been a desire for me personally as I arrived in February of 2002. This was significantly the most poorly designed area for traffic flow at WHS. This doorway was actually closed at one time to any student traffic until we opened it up in the spring of 2012. After the opening of the door, I had been reportedly told that “an opening simply cannot be done.” Even though a larger passage looked physically feasible with the current design, the answer was always no. The list of reasons was exhausting and even illogical at times. Perseverance is a mighty trait to have when the goal is to make our students’ lives a little better. With the help of our Campus Leadership Team and forward thinking by Maintenance & Operations (M&O), including Jeremy Trimble and Brian Bolek, we were able to get this completed after many years! The look on our students' and staff faces as they were passing through the first few times was priceless. These little things in our daily lives are our response to meeting student needs especially when they can minimize frustration and allow more time between classes.