by Matt Hughes
J-E News Editor
Some people had questions when the Webster County school district hired a middle school principal more than a year before the middle school would be opened, but since arriving on campus, Geoff Bailey has been hard at work paving the way for the 2014-2015 school year.
Bailey’s office in the middle school administration suite is nothing more than four bare concrete walls without a ceiling. For the time being he has been assigned to a conference room three doors down from the high school office. His new school now sits six feet away from his “office” behind a temporary wall, still four to five months away from looking anything like a school.
But just because the building is still under construction and their are no students does not mean that there is nothing to do.
“At this point, in my planning process, I am ready to start working on personnel,” said Principal Geoff Bailey. “Up until this point I have been working on schedules, policies and procedures. Now I am ready to have people. I need the expertise of others to answer some of the questions I’ve got, and teachers in the classrooms are the experts.”
Bailey said that the tough part with meeting with his future staff is that most of them are busy already. The idea is that when the middle school students switch schools in the fall, so will the middle school teachers.
“They are in their own classrooms in their own buildings,” Bailey said. “They are not like me, they don’t have the time to think. They have to meet the demands of their own current administrators and students.”
District wide most middle school teachers will be given the choice to move to the middle school or to remain where they are. But this doesn’t mean remaining where they are will guarantee them a position. Positions at their old schools will be subject to board teacher allocations and to the teacher’s own certifications.
Once he has identified which teachers will be joining the middle school staff at the central campus, then he will begin the process of interviewing outside teachers.
The process is really quite different from what most schools go through. Usually the Site Based Decision Making council (SBDM) is responsible for hiring and firing the principal and the teachers, but without students or teachers, there is no SBDM.
Once he knows who his teachers will be, he plans to start having parent meetings. Eventually those meetings will lead up to SBDM elections.
“I don’t want to get into the summer and still be asking questions,” Bailey said. “I want to spend the summer fine tuning things. It’s going to be busy enough over the summer getting things moved and set up.
“Our big things is going to be creating our own culture,” he said. “We’re pulling a lot of good people from four good schools in the county. I want to spend time this summer finding out who we are as a team and creating our own identity.”
WCMS will maintain the Webster County Trojan tradition, using the same color schemes and mascot that Webster County residents are already familiar with. Bailey hopes that this familiarity will help the students as they transition from elementary to middle school and then on to the high school.
“We are going to incorporate a lot of what the high school is doing, just make it age appropriate for middle school students,” he said. “Some people would say ‘do your own thing’, but we want to help our students be successful when they reach the high school.”
But, Bailey concedes that not everything can be focus on the future. The middle school students will be leaving the only school most of them have ever known and going into a new school that doesn’t even exist yet. That’s quite a change.
“Anytime you’re working with change, there will be some uneasiness,” Bailey said. “But I think the students will handle it best of all. They are still going to have their friends that they went to class with or played ball with. I think transitioning to a mid-sized middle school will make it easier than jumping to the large high school.”
One way Bailey plans to ease the transition is with urging students to get involved in extra curricular activities.
“I want everybody to be involved in something,” he said. “Anytime you’re involved in something at school, you feel better about going.”
The middle school will also incorporate career and tech classes so that the middle school students can experience a variety of new subject matters.
“Part of middle school is figuring out who you are,” Bailey said. “We want to them to experience thing so that they know what they want to do when they get to the high school. Hopefully that will help them be better prepared for their college or career options after high school.”
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