With the first semester over, Memorial principal Laurie Kinne looked back with optimism at everything accomplished by students and staff in such a short period of time.
“I thought it was great, combining three campuses,” Kinne said. “Opening a brand new school, you’re going to hit a few bumps in the road, but I thought, really, it was great. We had a lot of success in athletics, in our fine arts and with our band and our choir and everything’s been great.”
Kinne attributes the first semester’s success to the input of the community, from teachers, parents and students.
“I definitely think we did a great job, like with the Stampede, our community came and really put something cool together to build traditions for our school,” Kinne said. “There’s always things we can do better like, next year we’ll kind of tweak the parade and make it better and different things like that. We want to try to build more school spirit in our pep rallies and get more kids involved and those kinds of things. But I think overall, we’ve done a pretty good job of getting it off the ground.”
One of Kinne’s biggest goals was ensuring that everyone coming into the school was comfortable.
“I think that might have been the hardest part is just trying to combine those cultures and make everybody feel at home and get to know each other and just kind of come together,” she said. “It was hard, but I think it’s gone pretty smoothly.”
Even though she was pleased with the first semester, Kinne is always looking for ways to improve in the future.
“I look at the passing periods, the lunches, our grading systems, how can I support teachers more, how can I support kids more?” Kinne said. “How can I hold down the rules and still make it fun. I’m always just looking for ways to make things better. “
Over the past five months the staff has been learning how to work together as a team, which was challenging at first.
“I’m very proud of the staff that we’ve put together here,” Kinne said. “We’ve got a great group of teachers and support staff and I’m just excited to come to work every day. We all not just do a good job in the classroom or in our role, but we really enjoy working together.”
All the work that comes with the first year of a new school left Kinne without much time to interact directly with the classroom. She’s hoping things slow down a bit in the spring so she can have more time visiting with kids and checking in on teachers.
“I’ve made jokes that I feel like a party planner because we had to plan so many events this year that you don’t have to plan usually because they’re already kind of pre-planned,” Kinne said. “So next year, I’m excited that I won’t have to think about what homecoming is going to look like, or what are the problems we’re going to have, because they’re already going to be set.”
There is still much to look forward to for the second half of the school year, including new spring sports.
“I’m excited for all of our spring activities and spring sports, and I’m excited for our seniors to get to do a lot of their activities at graduation,” Kinne said. “I’m hoping that our teachers feel supported and that they’re happy and that they want to stay, because I think in order to be a successful school, you have to have consistency. And so you want to keep your teachers and you want your kids to look back and say overall, we had a great year and it’s only going to get better.”
