| Superintendent's
welcome to the new school year letter
Cottonwood School District’s enrollment for 2015-2016 is up from a year ago. We ended week one with 404 students K-12. Our enrollment at the start of 2014-2015 school year was 387 students. Prairie Elementary is down 4 students from this time last year and Prairie Jr/Sr High is up 20. We have an increase in open enrolled students. Last year we had 44 students from surrounding schools, at the start of this year we have 51. We added a security system at both schools with doors locked and secured from 8:20 - 3:03 daily. Doors are open during events such as ballgames, open house and parent-teacher conferences. Barriers have been added to the football field parking area and work is being done on the football field parameter to landscape and prepare the area for mowing. A new heating system has been installed in the Agriculture Science building (shop) and Avista has upgraded the power at the Jr/Sr High to three-phase. Our high school volleyball and football teams are off to a great start and our junior high football and girl’s basketball teams start their season next week. Cross county track is new to Prairie High with volunteer coaches and parental support behind the program. Volleyball starts the year with 28 students, football 30 and cross country 8. Student organizations FFA and BPA along with Knowledge Bowl are gearing up to have meetings and start their year. Knowledge Bowl has scheduled junior high and high school meets. Prairie is offering 9 dual credit courses this year. Dual credit courses are those that students take for high school credit as well as having the option to take for college credit. The courses include US History, US Government, Economics, Psychology, Pre-Calculus, Math 137, Speech, Natural Science and Chemistry. You can get more information from our counselor on our district website. Go to www.sd242.org, Prairie Jr/Sr High School, Parents/Students, A Note from the School Counselor. Our staff will continue to work on curriculum alignment K-12 and work toward end of course assessments. The first couple of weeks students are STAR and MAP testing and working on our own local assessments. We take this opportunity to welcome a new band teacher, Mrs. Brandy Fiorenza (maiden name Long). She graduated from Prairie High School in 1994. She taught one year in Idaho City and fourteen in the Boise School District. Brandy moved to Winchester in 2014 with husband Matt. They have two children Dylan and Spencer grades 3 and 7. Brandy will have fifth-sixth, junior high, and high school band classes. Ashle’ Long joins our elementary staff as the Kindergarten teacher. She graduated in 2003 from Prairie High School and the University of Idaho in 2008. She has spent the last five years in Culdesac teaching students in grades 2-9 in various capacities. Denise Mager is working in our elementary school as our janitor, replacing Laurie Lorentz who moved to the Jr/Sr High. Denise is a familiar face at ballgames and she has worked in the concession stand at the high school and football field. Denise has owned her own cleaning business and has worked for various families in our community. She also cleans for the BLM. Denise and John Mager have five children; John, Sam, Nick, Daniel and Nehemiah (Miah). Cheri Holthaus has hit the road running (so to speak). She is the new Administrative Assistant and will be in our high school front office greeting guests and working to keep the day to day work completed. She will also be in charge of the ISEE uploads mid year. She is our HOSA advisor for 2015-2016. Cheri is married to Pat and they have a daughter Katie and two grandchildren. Cheri comes to us after 18 years working at St. Mary’s Hospital. We welcome Matt Elven to our Jr/Sr High School staff. Matt as well is a familiar face at Prairie. Matt taught in the Mountain View District for the past 10 years and has coached Prairie football for the past 2 years. He is married to Cassi and they have 4 children; Bennie, Sage, Tragan (Nels) and Rowan. We look forward to a great year! If any community member is interested in being on an email list from the schools, please contact Lynn Rehder at rehderl@sd242.org or Carrie Nygaard at nygaardc@sd242.org. |
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