Hello all, welcome to WFHR's Rapids Report, probably brought to you by Crockett Sceptic for this June 27th, 2025.
Have your host James with you, and right now we are joined, being joined from the Wisconsin Rapids Public School System.
We have Principal of River City's High with us right now, Steve Hepp.
Steve, good to have you with us.
Hey, nice to be here. Thank you.
Good to talk with you, sir. Thanks a lot for being here.
Right away, I want to thank you for putting in the time and doing so much with the greatest investment.
And if we have our kids and the work that you and our school system does, we appreciate you.
What are you doing here during the summer?
No, I'm joking.
You should be having off.
You should be off at another stage.
Enjoy yourself.
No, I'm kidding.
We appreciate you being here, especially one of the things that I enjoy talking about schools during the summer
is being able to cover things that we don't always get a chance to in the heat of the moment or with so much going on
and so many different topics during the school year two cover.
And especially having you, Steve, River City's is a bit different than some other public school systems
and are above their schools.
And I think having an opportunity to really dive into that is a great chance for not only us, but the listeners
and more and more people understanding what you guys are doing every River City's.
Absolutely.
So yeah, River City's is a little different than other schools.
And we're pretty fortunate to have a building such as River City's because a lot of school districts don't have that.
We often have other districts that come in and they want to take tours.
They want to talk to us about how we run things because they've heard such positive things about it.
So River City's is designed for students that for several reasons fall behind in credits
or have some other issues going on and they might not be on track to graduate from Lincoln High School.
And so it's kind of a recovery, a credit recovery option for them where they can come in and still graduate on time with their class.
So that's kind of the design for it.
So the majority of students that come in are normally juniors or seniors.
We want them to be at Lincoln because of all the offerings they have, the electives they have,
those things that we want them to be exposed to prior to coming over to River City's to kind of give them a good background.
However, some students just for whatever reason it doesn't work out.
So they come over to us and try to get them back on track.
And it's a smaller setting. Some students just need a different setting, a different start so that they can kind of go forward.
And then we work really hard on, besides getting them on track to graduate, we really work on what's going to look like after high school.
So we want to look at exploring different careers, giving them opportunities to explore and go out to jobs and we bring a lot of speakers in.
We have good relationship and partnership with mid-state technical college where some of our students will go there and take a class or two while they're still enrolled with us.
So a lot of our students will either join the workforce right away or sometimes they'll go to mid-state or another technical school to continue their education.
So we've been pretty fortunate that way.
Great breakdown. I appreciate that, Steve.
And from no worthy, I think not just to me, but just as an example to the community.
My sister really benefited from the first incarnation of this.
My sister really benefited from and attended and flourished with and everything.
Really more than we had really seen her do well.
Jillian was very smart. Just wasn't a school kid.
Got into the River City's program for what it was called originally originally, but the first real incarnation of this.
And we finally saw that brain that we always thought was there and everything.
And she really just hit the ground running as an adult, she moved the Madison and she's still there now and doing a lot of great things.
But I also used me as an example because I would have been going to that, but it wasn't around when I was in school.
And I moved around a ton. I had 10 different schools before I was 10.
I moved around a lot of different places.
One of the benefits of that for me was learning really early on.
The same thing that every teacher will tell you.
Well, every kid learns differently.
And I took that as a personal kind of thing of like, okay, I've got to ask questions.
I've got to reach out and put my hand up.
It doesn't matter if I look dumb or not. I don't care. I want to learn.
And that was a good thing for me personally, but a lot of kids aren't like that.
A lot of kids, you know, they'll keep the hand down. They won't ask questions or have follow-ups.
Having a River City is there and having that smaller class size, those teachers that are walking into the class understanding that, knowing that.
We're really making true investments in our youth with the school like this.
To where we truly are not leaving anybody behind education-wise.
We truly are giving people an opportunity because as we've heard from no matter how young or old you are out there,
you have had a teacher tell you everybody learns differently.
Why wouldn't we have schools that are built around that and everything?
It makes sense. And we're seeing the benefits of it.
Absolutely.
One of the things that we're also wanted to touch on with you, Steve, was some of the pupil services that we are available through this.
Yeah, so I'm also the director of pupil services for the school district.
And you know, it brought up like earlier kind of joking about summer and things.
What do we do in the summertime?
And we get that a lot. It's like, well, it's a quiet during the summer.
And you know what, for us, we're pretty busy in the summer.
We're wrapping up the last school year.
But then we're right now preparing for next year.
We're all of our budget things for next year.
And with our wrap up this year and then looking for next year is going on right now.
We're in the middle of hiring staff for next year.
Planning processes for professional development.
And then we're just kind of looking at how we want to start the school year.
So there's a lot of planning going on in the central office in general.
But with the pupil services, I can speak obviously a little bit more on.
So we're doing a lot of that right now.
And we have a lot of really good things that happened this last couple of years that we are going to continue to, you know, to focus on.
And a couple of those things are partnerships with a lot of our community members and our community agencies.
The last couple of years we've had, we've run this called the FAS program.
FAS stands for families and schools together.
And we've run that a few of our elementary buildings.
And what that does is we have a cohort of staff members, community members and families that come in.
And we have a pretty set schedule where they have some tasks.
They have some different things that they do during that time to kind of build that relationship to kind of try to have the families feel more welcome.
And for our staff to understand where our families are coming from.
So they share a meal and they have breakout sessions.
They have things to do with the kids that they bring their kids with them.
And then the community members that are with us, you know, they get to hear what's going on too.
And we can really find out, you know, what we can do better.
Because that's how we're always looking at what can we do better?
You know, what can we improve on? How can we be more welcoming to meet the needs of our families?
So that's something that's been very successful.
And we're excited that to keep that going.
And then this last couple years, we've also in the people service side more in that special ed side of people services.
We've been doing what's called donuts and discussions where we bring and we invite our families that have students with IEPs.
So our students that have special needs to come in.
And then we have an open session where they can like ask us questions, bring up their concerns, ask us what kind of supports, you know, that are out there.
And then last couple years, we've been inviting local agencies around the area that help support families that maybe families are not aware of.
And that they, we have, have them set up booths.
And then they are able to like take time and meet with each family and say, you know, these are our services.
This is what we're able to offer.
And, you know, and make those connections and families that have come have been really appreciative of that.
And all those agencies that we're very thankful that they come in.
They've been very, you know, appreciative of those opportunities too.
Because there's, you know, there's so many services out here that our community offers that a lot of people just don't know about.
You know, and we just want to make those connections.
With all the moving around my family and I did, we got into a knack of when we moved to a community.
We really get to know it, you know, drive around the back road.
Some of these things find businesses.
We were here for a good 10 years before we found the little pink restaurant and loved it.
And it's awesome.
It's a giant pink restaurant, isn't it giant?
But it's a big, you know, it's bright pink and everything.
And we didn't even know it was in town until we moved this side of town and everything.
It happens.
It's something that happens in small and big communities where there are things going on that you just don't always know about.
And then there's services.
And those can even be harder to find or hear about.
And there's nobody necessarily, there's no blame here or anything like that.
It's more so just the us as a community sharing this information.
We all know word of mouth goes farther than most anything really can.
So when you hear about these things, spreading the word about them, letting other people know about them, sharing them on social media,
that's some of the way that we can help get the word out and make sure that these services are being used by the people that need them.
And there's a lot of great ones out there that I think a lot of people to your point, Steve,
could really benefit from, but don't even know they're there.
So having these programs, something like this really beneficial to our community goes a long way.
And is there anything else you want to kind of dive into with this, sir?
Because I know that there's more to it as well.
With people services.
Yeah.
So another thing that we, and I think it's something that we want, again, we want to make sure that our community, our families, our students understand all the services that we're offering that are out there that kind of go above and beyond what schools offer.
I mean, so we do a lot, obviously, for when students are in the building, but we do offer a lot of opportunities and supports for when students are out of the building during the summer at home.
Another thing that we've partnered with for the last couple years is called Care Solus.
And Care Solus is kind of our mental health navigator.
So what they do is help students and their families connect with just mental health counselors and other substance and treatments, support programs.
And we try to offer that kind of a warm handoff.
Like, okay, if some families feel like they just need more support, we have, we connect them with Care Solus and Care Solus.
And it throws a pretty wide net out there to say, okay, we're some providers that we can help connect with these families to give them those supports that they need.
And that's the hard part with that is it's, you know, when we've had, we've done this before and the hard part at a lot of times is, you know, the follow through and all the paperwork and all the stuff that, you know, you have to do in order to get set up and get schedules and all that.
And what Care Solus does is helps families walk through all those things to kind of take some of those barriers away.
So our staff can sometimes will offer that up to families and families then will reach out.
You know, it's an optional thing, obviously.
Families can reach out if they feel it's a good fit.
But we also have it on our website.
We have it, Care Solus button and click on that if that's something that a family would be interested in learning more about or if they just say, you know what, maybe somebody in my family just needs to get the extra support with with some counseling or whatever they're kind of going through and they can reach out and see if it's a fit, you know, if it's a fit, that's great.
If they can't find somebody that works best for them, you know, that's something they can kind of work through too.
Again, really good stuff, Steve. I appreciate you breaking that down for us and keep in mind everybody that while we're getting into a lot today, there is always there's other things there and other services that could be helpful to you.
Or maybe if you think there are services that aren't available that we would like to see or could be helpful reaching out to the gang over there and finding out more and reaching out and letting them know about that is a really helpful thing as well.
Steve, did you have some other stuff you wanted to touch on before we let you go today? I don't want to keep it too long here.
Well, the only other thing I was going to touch on is going to kind of hit him back to River City's High School.
Right. I just want to touch on we just we just celebrated our 25th anniversary.
So that was a pretty big deal this year. We were able to bring back some staff members that were instrumental in helping create the program.
And we invited staff members that have been instrumental throughout the it's our history that they've been you know helping with if they've worked there if they've supported our kids there in different ways.
So they they came back for the ceremony this year. And that was pretty pretty cool to see some old faces and they were able to see you know again celebrate what the program has become from when it started.
You know, I think 25 years ago, I believe it started over and on the west side and pumps tires building or close to that.
And now we are at the old children's choice. I think since 2007 maybe.
Well, it's been a while. Yeah. So it's been and it's been great. So it was great to see for those people that were instrumental in helping create it.
See another group of kids graduate this year, which was fantastic. We really enjoyed it.
That's a good story of the day, man. That's just really good to hear. And I knew it had been a while. I didn't know it had been 25 years. That's really impressive. That's pretty cool.
It also gives me something to tease my sister about that. She's been out of school that long.
It's great talk with you, Steve. We really do appreciate the time and everything you and your team put into the community. Thank you for the time.
If people have follow up questions, they'd like to know more about some what we talked about today. What's the best way to reach it?
Absolutely. So you can obviously reach me through email. If you go to the district website and just look up pupil services and they can email me or reach out in my phone numbers there as well.
WRPS.org is the website and go there find out all this information in a great way to reach Steve and other staff members of the Wisconsin Rapids public school system that is WRPS.org.
Thanks again for the time, Steve. Absolutely. Thank you.
And thank you, everybody, for joining us for another edition of WFHR's Rapids Report, probably brought to you by Crocodceptic here at WFHR.
