Student involvement grows at CC high school

By Kate Hayden, khayden@charlescitypress.com

When Superintendent Dr. Dan Cox was in high school, he played the alto saxophone in band. Jason Walker, vice president of the Charles City Board of Education, played baseball.

In 1979 Larry Wolfe, now the associate principal at the Charles City High School and Middle School, wanted to be involved in high school activities too. So he told his dad.

“‘Pick one, because you’ve got to milk every night,'” Wolfe recalled his dad saying at Monday night’s Board of Education meeting. “‘Enjoy it, because it doesn’t pay the bills.'”

Wolfe picked baseball.

Student activities may not pay the bills, but they are now an extension of the classroom, he told the board — and the rate of Charles City High School students participating in sports, clubs and performances has risen since last year.

Out of 471 students in the high school, 79.96 percent of students are involved in one activity or more — higher than this time last year, Wolfe told the board. That means 375 students have been involved in one of the 37 activities available to students this year. The school’s current goal is to end the year with the same or higher rate of students involved at the end of the 2015-16 school year.

The average GPA of students involved in activities has risen from 3.13 last year to 3.226 this year.

“Successes are small, but that’s a great success,” Wolfe said.

Wolfe shared ways the school is celebrating student successes, ranging from posting photos and announcements in public displays to recognizing homerooms with the highest first semester accumulative GPAs.

The highest GPAs in each class go to the homeroom students of Todd Forsyth (freshmen, 3.41 GPA), Tyler Downing (sophomores, 3.15 GPA), Donna Forsyth (juniors, 3.41 GPA) and Steve McGrew (seniors, 3.375 GPA). The entire student body was a 3.03 GPA.

“The student body is doing really well right now,” Wolfe said.

As part of the school district’s state reporting, the district runs grade reports every nine weeks, and collects data on the amount of students involved twice a year at semester changes, Wolfe told the Press. The high school also uses that data to see how involved students are overall. The goal is to encourage the 17 percent of students not involved to find a student activity they enjoy this year, he said.

“The data shows that the more kids are involved, the more kids appreciate those around them, their attendance is better, all of those things improve the more skin they get in the game. That’s a common documentation through many resources,” Wolfe said. “School will have more depth and more meaning for them.”