Ms. Bechtold, Mrs. McKay, Mrs. Huber, plus librarians from Washington, set up a reading activity for Read Across America week last Wednesday. Our high school students read to kids in grades K-3. Ms. Bechtold is trying to make it so high school students will read to the elementary students once, quarterly. They are getting ready to send out a Google form to question the high school students about their thoughts on reading to the kids. Ms. Bechtold said that feedback will determine if we have more days like that.

“The activity turned out very well and there wasn’t any trouble.” Ms. Bechtold said, “I was ecstatic about how well it went. I was floating on a high all day. Mrs. Dickerson has received an email and was very very pleased with the outcome of the activity. The kids had a lot of fun and they enjoyed seeing all of the high schoolers.”

Many students gave feedback about their experience. Junior Nate Gifford said “I enjoyed it a lot, it  gave us a good opportunity to be leaders”. Junior Brennen Smith said “It was a good experience for both the little kids and the high schoolers to interact with each other”. Ms. Bechtold tried to trouble-shoot the whole day and tried to find out if anyone was going to try to do anything bad and embarrass our school. There was one incident that wasn’t a big deal. Ms. Bechtold said “We did have one high school student who fell asleep while the child was reading”. The student is being punished accordingly.

There were 9 school busses transporting the kids to the high school led by bus garage Director, Dave Eckles. The unusually high number of busses cause some concern. Citizens wondered if there was an emergency and a concerned citizen called the police and asked what was going on. Ms. Bechtold said that she was proud of the students for acting mature and not making fools of themselves. Even some of the school board members and teachers participated. Ms Bechtold said  “I was really happy to have one school board member show up and read to the students”.

Make sure to look out for a survey about service learning day in your emails so we can make the next one even better!