Wisconsin Rapids Public Schools Update

Welcome everybody to Midday magazine for this Friday September 27th, 2024.

Have your host James J. Mailoff here and welcoming into the studio.

Some good friends of ours first up, Ronald A. Rasmussen,

Superintendent of the Wisconsin Rappix Public Schools.

Ron, always good to see you.

Hi James, how are you?

Doing good, thanks for being here and thanks for appreciate time.

And you brought in a good friend of ours, Tina Walner, principal of Grove Elementary,

Tina, it's good to see you.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Always appreciate our principles coming in here.

I don't at all immediately get guilty feelings and start feeling like I'm thinking

of all the things I did wrong at all about school.

That doesn't happen at all.

I don't know.

Tina, we appreciate you being here.

I'm more with you in just a moment.

If you don't mind, I want to start with Ron.

And Ron, how is the start of the school year going so far?

It's school year started out actually phenomenal.

It's the students are engaged.

Other than, you know, some of our buildings don't have air conditioning.

So it's been this unusually warm September.

Yeah.

So just trying to get students more focused on their education versus the heat.

Sometimes in some of our buildings, but the school year started out really well.

Students are actively engaged in their classrooms.

Our core and extracurriculars that are middle school and high school are in full swing.

And the other cool thing that's happening is just that our elementary is the amount of family

engagements that's happening.

Yesterday at grant, they had their fun run at the end of the afternoon.

So all those students got out and we're out in the school for us in the area around grant.

So just those important things of not just the academic school obviously is academically focused.

But really to engage students and families are those other things that we do outside and part of the school day.

So those are all occurring across the district and excited for people to come into our buildings and see that.

It's an exciting time of year.

It's one of my favorite times of year.

And something that we also, I think, is noteworthy in a word you mentioned there in focus.

And while the kids are getting back to routines and how whether they realize it or not,

how comforting and how good that is for their brains to get back into a routine after summer and some of that,

with that takes a lot of focus.

And these kids are really locked into school, they're locked into their after school activities,

which means that we as adults need to be adults and look out for them and keep an eye out on the roads.

We've had bad incidents already this school year, not in this area necessarily,

but in the surrounding areas.

And I just like to remind everybody to slow down, keep an eye out for kids.

At the beginning of the day, at the end of the school day,

and look out for our bus drivers and all that as well.

It's important this time of year.

That's why we get paid the big bucks everybody.

That's why we get to be adults and pick our own bedtime.

Is that doing these things?

Yeah, just really important.

Just anytime, just to be cognizant of your surroundings.

And especially as students are out and about more right now,

especially as you said in the morning and the late afternoons.

We'll wrap up with you Ron and just a moment.

Thank you so much for being here.

And thank you for bringing Tina by.

I always love that our superintendents bring some of our principals by.

And we get a chance to find out a little bit more of what's going on in these schools.

The transparency is really appreciated.

But also, if I can just be honest, it's really fun.

I love hearing from our grade schools and what's going on there.

Especially, you know, my kids are in their mid 20s.

You know, I've been in grade school in a long time.

It's fun to kind of catch up on these things and understand what's going on with kids

and teachers in our grade schools.

And we get to focus on Grove Elementary today and Tina being with us.

Tina, again, thank you very much for being here.

Yeah, no problem.

How's the start of school you're going over at Grove?

Yeah, it's been great.

We have lots of great things that I wanted to give a shout out to Ron here for being present in the buildings.

And he's already been busy reading just some classes from what I understand.

And he's been at Grove several times already this year.

And it's just really great for the kids to know who he is.

And staff to know that he's part of our family, too.

So at Grove, you know, we have Grove School family.

And we focus a lot at the beginning of the year on safety.

And school bus safety and walking to and from school safety.

So I'm glad that you mentioned that.

Another thing that we are really focusing on this year is trying to continue to do all the traditional things that we've done for families

and getting families involved in school.

So we've done some really fun things already.

We've only been in school three weeks, but we've done three family events already.

Wow.

Which has been really fun.

So of course we had our open house and we have our Learn the Routine Night.

And then we had our Outdoor Movie Night last Friday, which was fantastic.

That one seems pretty explanatory, but that's also that's a lot of fun.

What are the previous one you mentioned there?

What was what did you guys do on that night?

So Learn the Routine Night.

We had parents come in and they got to spend 20 minutes being a third grader, 20 minutes, whichever grade they're.

So they would go to their students, their child's classroom, and do a little learning of their own.

What's it like to be a third grader?

What kind of activities are we doing for math, for language arts?

What kinds of expectations?

Like what's my role as a parent?

Helping get sleep.

So I think that was mentioned already today too.

How much sleep do kids need?

We got breakfast at lunch at school, and at Grove we're a title one building.

So that means our students get free lunch and free breakfast.

So yeah, that was really fun.

And of course we fed them.

Nice.

Families went home sometimes with a full pizza.

I was there, you could smell the pizza and then buy the kindergarten or classrooms for down the hall for quite a while.

That was good.

That's a great way.

That's a very fun school day.

What a great idea.

I just mentioned that I'm a little out of touch with the elementary school system.

My kids in their mid-20s.

For many of us parents out there, it's been decades since we've gone to school and gone into grade school.

And a lot has changed.

It's great to be, adapt yourself to and be, be, be, be familiarize yourself with these things.

And the older we get, the more we forget what it's like to be young.

And what it is like to be a young person.

And any chance we have as adults to be reminded of that, to have some empathy for kids and a little more understanding,

can only make us better adults.

Can only make us better at our particular jobs or just as parents.

The more we understand of our kids, the better we can talk to our kids, which is what this is all about communication.

That's a wonderful idea to you.

Thank you very much for sharing that with us.

What do you got coming up at over at Grove?

Well, we had, I had a meeting earlier this week with parents who are helping to organize our traditional Halloween dance.

So that will be coming up on the 24th.

I also have some meetings set up.

Pizza is always a great way to bring people in.

Absolutely.

Pizza, people love pizza.

Yeah.

Pizza and pastry.

So every year I have two events in the fall and I repeat them in the spring.

Where parents are invited to come share ideas with me.

What are some things they want to see?

We have pizza with a principal and pastry with a principal.

Nice.

So that's coming up.

I'm excited about that.

We'll also have a family event in December that usually revolves around a reading.

And sometimes in the winter we do a math event.

So we have lots of things in the works that aren't quite planned yet, but they're always fun.

Yeah.

And working out the logistics and details up, but really fun exciting things to look forward to for all of our grow elementary members out there.

That's a very exciting share.

You mentioned talking with parents and having different opportunities to be able to do that.

As we go forward here, it seems more and more that parents are whether they're being involved or wanting to be heard or what all the above.

We're having more and more of that.

How has that gone for you over the last couple of years trying to build that bridge and make that bridge stronger between our education system and our parents out there and working on that?

It sounds like you've got a really good system here that's working pretty well.

Yeah.

Well, we try to get as many parents as we can engaged in the conversation.

Some are very eager and attend lots of events and share their ideas and conversation.

Others, I think, are still a little bit timid or a little unsure about how their voice can be heard.

I mean, I welcome parents to call, share ideas.

Regardless of which school they attend, we want to be your partner.

It is a relationship.

And parents, our parents and family members, grandparents, you are your child's first teacher.

And we want to collaborate with you and every building has different strategies that they use, different ways to get families engaged.

But I think the number one relationship between teachers and parents or caregivers, that's the most important one.

As a leader of the building, I can be a support in all those things, but it's really important for that communication to happen.

We have parents square now, we have this year, so we encourage all our parents to get the app on their phone and be engaged with that.

Because those relationships are really what's going to help push kids forward in their academic learning too.

It seems like even for our generations and when we were younger, they were having this conversation.

But we hear it maybe just as much now or maybe a more whatever, the case maybe stats wise or whatever.

But more and more of this concern of the younger generation and this or that or whatever.

And every decade, every generation has its concerns.

It's always going to be that way too.

And some of this isn't necessarily a bad thing as long as we're focusing on what the important parts of it and everything.

But when it comes to that communication part, that hasn't changed.

Kids have not really changed that much.

Opportunities, different things that distract them or whatever.

Sure, some of that has changed, but kids are kids.

And the same that they have always been.

And this still comes down to the major thing of communication and really talking.

And parents talking to teachers, teachers talking to parents, parents talking to kids, et cetera, et cetera.

The more we have these conversations, we can only get stronger from them.

It is worth noting to parents out there that you are the adult in the situation to act like it.

I think that's always worth noting.

And for me, I'm just talking, it's just me saying this here, not anybody else.

But I do think that the more I talk to parents, especially this time of year, I'm always encouraged by the passion and encouraged by them caring.

But also wanting to remind people as well that we need to be reminded that we need to treat each other like adults.

And that's important, too, because this isn't...

It shouldn't be about you, it should be about your kid.

And as long as that's the case, then, you know, we're all here to listen and we all want to get...

We all have the same goal here, to have a better future, to have these kids have a great future.

And when it comes to the future, it sounds like you guys got some great things lined up there at Meet Grove.

When it comes to the Grove, one of the things that I love talking about two principles from different elementaries around here is the uniqueness of every one of our elementaries.

When we're talking about Grove, what do you stance out as unique above the Grove Elementary School?

That's a tough question, but I got to ask the tough ones. I got every once in a while.

Yeah. Well, I think we have a pretty strong focus on arts and music.

We have a choir at Grove, a Grove School Choir, and I don't think any other building has that.

So some of our work with the fine arts, you know, we have art galleries.

So I think that makes us unique.

I also think that because we're a neighborhood school, most of our kids live within two miles of the school and there's not many of those around.

And so it's easy for families to get there.

We have a nice playground, hopefully a new one coming next summer, which will be very exciting.

But we have things happening around our neighborhood and that allow us families to gather.

It's not unusual for me to come in to work on a weekend and see volleyball and that set up in the back field and neighborhood kids or families there enjoying the park and playing.

So that's, you know, that's really unique.

Our kids really know it's Grove School Family. We wish each other well every day in announcements.

You know, we say I wish you well. That's a really important part of our culture.

And we have some really neat rituals that we do around our school family.

You know, every one of our elementary schools has this uniqueness to it, this wonderful bit of things going on.

And they really tend to have to do with a bit of the neighborhood and some of those things that they have.

And I just love being able to highlight those.

Thank you very much for joining me on that, Tina.

That's great.

Appreciate the time as always from both of you.

Your time is valuable and I greatly appreciate it.

So thank you both very much, Tina.

Thank you so much for answering my questions, putting up with that, but everything appreciated.

Thanks.

Ron, I did say I had a couple of questions for you.

And as we were talking about in a bit of our pre-game, you guys made a...

You at the Wisconsin Olympics Public Schools, that is, have made a bit of an increased effort to have a presence on social media.

Can we dive into that a little bit?

Yeah, one of our strategic planning initiatives is really our communication plan.

And we're working with our community.

Tina's talked a lot about engaging parents and families at the elementary level.

And we also fully realize we're a large school district.

And some of that is we're unable to as a large organization to do some of that fully engagement.

We know that parents and some of our students are obviously are really engaged on that social media aspect.

And we know the negatives of social media, but we do want to share the positives of social media as well for us to communicate out.

Much like we do with your program here that we do monthly, we try to do stuff within our local other parts of our media.

But also very important for us to get our stories out via social media.

We have our Facebook page, which some of our school buildings have more Facebook followers than the WRPS page.

So we would encourage everyone to go follow the WRPS page.

But we also recently created an Instagram page.

And we'll be posting more and more on that Instagram page just because we know that generally parents are much more on Facebook.

And our students are much more on Instagram.

And so we're going to be promoting and sharing all the great things occurring within our school buildings.

One of the things that has happened over time and it's just the growth of social media is all our individual school buildings have created their own, their own images on social media.

But we're also trying to bring some of that into the district perspective and those stories that flow from elementary school to a middle school to a high school.

So we're really excited about that moving forward.

And so we encourage people to like us on Instagram and follow us on Facebook for those stories.

Tina just shared, I think yesterday on the Grove page was another Grove page, the WRPS page.

WRPS, the WRPS page, you are my sunshine.

And some of that process that occurs at Grove and they talk about the choir at Grove.

And just those are the things that we like to highlight what our students are doing phenomenal.

So much of what you guys do is very similar to what we do here where it comes down to communication.

And having more opportunities for people to be able to connect and talk to you guys and anybody in your staff or anybody in the umbrella of the WRPS,

along with celebrating the great things going on in our community and giving people that may not have an opportunity to see some of this stuff, especially if you don't have kids in school,

they kind of just let you know about these things.

I know that I talked to many listeners, especially this time of years or high school football teams are playing each other and some of this, we tend to find out,

oh, you went to that grade school or, oh, you went to this high school and some of that, we take a lot of pride, even decades later in the schools we go to.

So even if you don't have kids in school, it can be fun to hear and see these things and find out what's going on.

I know I still pay attention to Washington school and all of that and I know I'm not alone in that a lot of us still do it.

I still follow on Facebook and my alma mater.

So you just get a feel for what's going on within your school, your former school's community.

And speaking of that, you mentioned homecoming.

And so next week is homecoming for Lincoln.

So we have the normal activities.

We have school assemblies on Monday and Friday.

The Friday assembly is open for all families if they want to attend the assembly on Friday.

Obviously the football game on Friday night and then Saturday will be their dance.

So you know, that's always a tradition, a highlight of a student's career in education is homecoming along with prom or the two big ones.

And so we're really excited and to welcome alumni back as well to our community and that alumni connection is really important this summer.

I gave three tours of Lincoln and then I know Mr. Ed Alice in our building and ground director gave tours as well this summer.

So we really encourage, you know, those classes that are doing reunions.

If you want to come back and see the school facilities now, that connection is really important.

And what I love more than anything else is hearing the stories of when they were students.

Yes.

And this teacher or at Lincoln, you know, Lincoln is behind glass now.

And when Lincoln used to be over at Old Lincoln, which is East, you know, what happened to Lincoln or where Lincoln's head was headed.

And all those stories of people that I've heard about over the years and just see that school school connection that they add with teachers back then.

And we hope our students today have that same connection with their teachers.

So in 20 years they're talking about Mr. Ex or Miss Ol.

Great stuff and really good references there, man.

You took me down a nostalgia road with some of those references.

I encourage people to do this, especially when you have the opportunity.

Certainly, you know, you don't just show up.

You want to plan on these things.

But when you have an opportunity to check in on your own school, not only can it be a great take of nostalgia and all that.

But really cool to find and see the growth at these schools and how much they have grown and adapted and changed.

And you get this hit a pride from it as well.

It's not just an nostalgia that you're hit by.

I think that's a great note and appreciate that run and appreciate the time from both of you so much.

I also want to remind everybody when it comes to homecoming in some of these events, especially sporting events.

It might be a little more traffic in the school areas than usual.

So kind of coming back to where we started.

You know, be safe out there.

Everybody keep an eye out for these kids.

Keep an eye out for our bus drivers, our fellow parents.

People that are just trying to make sure that our communities are as happy and it's fun and have some good things going on as we can in them.

And attend these events.

Encourage you to be a part of these events.

Again, you don't have to have a kid in school to go to a football game.

You don't have to help out a bake sale or to anything going on.

The more we put into our schools, the more our schools have to put into our communities.

Help our schools do the work that they're doing.

Let's help our teachers, our superintendents, our people out there.

Show them some support and let them know that we have their back when it comes to these.

And you can do that as simply as just telling them when you see them.

But especially when you're able to attend events like this and get some of these, be a part of some of these great events.

I appreciate the time from both of you.

So very much and greatly appreciate what you do in our communities.

Tina, if people had some follow-up questions about growth or just in general for you, how can they reach you?

Yeah, you can reach me through the district email, Tina.Walner at WRPS.net.

It's probably the easiest way to reach me.

And again, encourage you to find grow elementary on social medias, follow along on what they're doing over there

and all the fun things that are happening.

And Ron, same question, how can people reach you if they have follow-up questions?

Yep, the easiest is my email as well, which is Ron Older.Rasmussen at WRPS.net or contact at Central Office and you'll get directed to me.

And just one more time before we wrap up, there is this new program available for parents out there.

Just reminding any parents that might not know about it, Ron.

Yeah, so just a reminder for all our parents in our school district, we've simplified it to go to one communication platform

for all our schools, sports, co-curriculars, et cetera, called ParentSquare.

So we encourage parents to download that app and that's really received their direct communication from their individual schools and our club's reactivities.

And of course, WRPS.org, WRPS.org is a wonderful website.

You should go there to check out other information and have that bookmarked.

Follow all of these schools and of course WRPS on social media and keep up-to-date and all the great things going on in your community.

Both of you, thank you again for the time.

Thank you.

We want to send a big shout out to our friend and the heart of the station Pam Hilke and the amazing scheduling she does.

Week in a week out, we appreciate you, Pam.

Have a great weekend, everybody.

We will talk to you sooner than later right here at 975 FM 1320 AM WFHR, locally grown radio.