Petal School District officials have said it time and again: the reason for the district’s continued success lies directly with the district’s people, particularly the teachers.
During a recent meeting of the Petal School District Board of Trustees, the district got to welcome several more, with the addition of 44 new teachers – with a total of 212 years of experience in education – to the district’s five schools.
“The strength of any organization is its people, and that holds true here,” board chairman Bruce Magee told the new teachers. “We’re always looking for great, quality people with great talent, and you guys exemplify that.
“I want to say thank you, because you guys were searching for us as we were searching for you – you could have gone to work somewhere else, but you chose to come here. Petal School District is a high-performing district because of people like you.”
Petal High School sees new 18 teachers this school year, with 28 years of combined experience. That number includes, but is not limited to, new teachers in the fields of special education, English, culinary arts, science, math and history.
“We’re really proud of this group,” high school principal Rob Knight said. “We want to thank those that are here (tonight) – it’s a fantastic group – and thank you to the families that are here as well.”
Petal Middle School welcomes four new teachers, including an eighth-grade English Language Arts teacher, a seventh-grade science teacher and a student volunteer from the University of Southern Mississippi who is working with the school’s special education language department in the seventh and eighth grades.
“We do have the smallest group here tonight, but they are the best,” principal Michael Hogan said.
Eight new faces were welcomed to Petal Upper Elementary this year, including those in sixth-grade math, fifth-grade science, fifth-grade English Language Arts. The school also brought in two resident volunteers from USM, who are working in English Language Arts.
Seven new teachers have joined Petal Elementary School, along with four USM resident volunteers. That includes teachers in third-grade English Language Arts, fourth-grade English Language Arts and fourth-grade math.
“One of the challenges we were given was to hire big, and cannot say enough about the new members of our team,” elementary school principal Wyn Mims said. “They have jumped in and hit the ground running.”
Petal Primary School brought aboard 12 new teachers, including those in special education, positive behavior specialization, speech pathology and counseling.
This year marks the first time the district has played host to the USM volunteers, eight of who will spend the next six months or so working to gain experience in the education field.
“They’re getting a whole year-long experience,” said Matt Dillon, superintendent of the Petal School District. “What we feel like this is going to do is better prepare them not just with the bookwork, but also in seeing how that really works in a school setting.
“So I think it’s going to be great, and we’ve got some nice incentives in place if they end up signing on with us, so we’re very excited for those that we have at three different schools.”
To welcome the new teachers and help them get acclimated to the district, Dillon recently held a meeting to encourage the teachers to relay their experiences so far this school year.
“We asked them to be very candid about their experience, and we learned some things – a lot of great things, and some things that we can do better,” Dillon said. “In addition to that, we met with the USM residency volunteers, and that was a great time as well, to let them share their experience and be around their classmates.
“I just thought they all communicated with each other, but that’s not necessarily the case because they’re all spread out across our campuses. So that allowed them to come together, and we’ve been very pleased with our eight volunteers across our three schools.”
