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Welcome to Charles City: Student-guided tours help newcomers feel at home

Eighth-graders Anders Haglund and Jada Litterer pause for a photo while leading a student-guided tour Monday at Charles City Middle School. (Press photo James Grob.)
Eighth-graders Anders Haglund and Jada Litterer pause for a photo while leading a student-guided tour Monday at Charles City Middle School. (Press photo James Grob.)
By James Grob, jgrob@charlescitypress.com

After eight or nine tours, Charles City eighth-grader Anders Haglund agrees that he’s getting to be an old pro at it.

“We spend six or more hours every day here, so we do know a lot about the school,” he said.

Indeed, Haglund and his classmate Jada Litterer seemed to know more about Charles City Middle School than the teachers or administration did as they led a student-guided tour Monday morning.

“We just want to make new kids feel welcome here,” said Litterer. “We want them to feel like they’ll fit in right away, and things will go smoothly.”

Litterer has only led a couple of tours, but she said she’s been able to catch on quickly.

“I really enjoy it,” she said. “Lots of times kids are going to feel nervous going to a new school, so we just want to make them feel at home.”

Currently 17 students in grades 5-12 conduct the tours, usually for families of students who are moving or considering a move into the Charles City School District. Spearheaded by Charles City Talented and Gifted teachers Ann Prichard and Michelle Grob, the program utilizes a diverse group of students, because the district expects to see a lot of diversity in the interested families.

“The true purpose of the program is to be invitational to students new to our district,” Prichard said. “Having a student of roughly the same age show someone around allows a new student to hopefully be more at ease about the transition.”

CCSD enrollment increased by nearly 40 students this year, which entitles the district to an additional $270,000 in state funding. There are a wide array of reasons for the increase, but new families moving into town — as well as students open-enrolling into the district — play a part.

“Our goal with the tours is to live our core value of ‘invitational’ to all people that we work with,” Charles City Superintendent Mike Fisher said. “We have a tremendous amount of prospective families, business people, educators, and community members that want to have a chance to tour our schools and learn more about the Charles City Community Schools family.”

Making a good impression — and making new students feel at ease — is of the utmost importance.

“I find there is nothing better to demonstrate this than tours lead by student leaders,” Fisher said. “Especially for new families moving to town, this allows them an authentic experience with people who are in our schools everyday and have a unique perspective — kids.”

Fresh-baked cookies while on the tour can also certainly help make a school feel like a home. Students on the tour also receive a gift bag, with information about the district and the community inside, and a handful of other goodies.

“If you get down to it, we’re just trying to welcome them to the family,” Haglund said.

Litterer and Haglund said that they were able to learn in advance of one prospective student’s love of Sprite soda, and so the student was thrilled and amazed to find some Sprite in his gift bag.

“We hope that the more practice the tour guides get, the better they become at both making the student feel welcome and sharing information about the school,” said Prichard.

“We had a student who was really interested in tuba, and so we were able to take them down to the high school band room and introduce him to Mr. Gassman,” Haglund said, referring to the high school band director.

Such meetings are common along the tour.

While on the tour Monday, the group just somehow happened to bump into a member of the custodial staff, the middle school PE teacher, the high school band and choir directors, a few friends, and superintendent Fisher himself. All of those “coincidental” meetings resulted with the new student receiving an inviting smile and a hearty “welcome” to the Charles City School district.

The student-guides said that the tour group usually consists of parents and students together, and that typically the parents are more interested in the academics, while the students tend to be more concerned about whether or not they’ll be able to get along.

“They ask how easy it is to transition,” Haglund said. “The parents ask more specific questions. The students ask me more questions about friendship and social interaction.”

The guides have gotten some training in advance of their tours, and more training is on the way. They will attend a training session later this month, which will revolve around leadership activities and working to understand positive and negative leadership styles.

The tour program also serves the purpose of providing more state-required leadership opportunities for TAG students.

“Iowa Code is very specific about funding for gifted education, and part of that section talks about what schools need to address,” Prichard said. “There are five aspects laid out — general intellectual ability, creative thinking, leadership ability, visual and performing arts ability, and specific ability aptitude.”

Prichard said that she and Grob felt pretty confident in the way the district handles the academic aspects at Charles City, and that the art, music and drama programs provide excellent opportunities in visual and performing arts.

“The piece that we felt we could build upon was the leadership portion, at least in the elementary and middle school age groups,” Prichard said.

Fisher said the tours allow students to have leadership opportunities, be ambassadors, and work on the needed soft skills that employers need, like public speaking, shaking hands, and being friendly.

Litterer said that, as a student, she felt she knew much of what she needed to be a guide. The training is helping her to be a leader.

“I went on a practice tour before I started giving regular tours, and that taught me a lot about how to do it,” added Litterer. “And since I go to school here, I just already know what lots of things are.”

Prichard said the tour guide program is just starting out. A couple vans full of middle and high school students visited Hoover Middle School in Waterloo earlier this fall to see how the student-led tours work at that school. They then went to the University of Northern Iowa to go on tours of the campus led by members of the UNI Ambassadors group.

“We went to a tour at UNI where we sort of saw the professionals and how they did it,” Haglund said. “That was a lot of fun, and I learned a lot about how to give a tour.”

The discussion after the tour at UNI was also helpful to the high school and middle school students, according to Prichard.

“Charles City students had a roundtable discussion with the college students and the head of the program to discuss giving tours and making people feel at ease,” she said.

Prichard said that at the elementary level, new students and their families will get tours with an adult, whether that be a school counselor or a principal. Lincoln students (third and fourth-graders) will also go along with an adult staff person giving the tour.

“Doug Bengston (retired Charles City elementary principal) was a guest last week and entertained a group of students with stories of the building, all the way back to when it was built in 1914,” Prichard said. “I hope that the more students know about Charles City School and its history, the more they identify with it.”

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