Vigil Oct. 25 for Drama Teacher

Walla Walla High School drama teacher killed in tragic accident; vigil planned today

WALLA WALLA: Sunday, Oct. 25, 2015 - Walla Walla Public Schools administrators, staff, students and school board members are deeply saddened to report Walla Walla High School Drama teacher Brian Senter was struck and killed by a car last night. Details of this tragedy are being investigated by the Walla Walla County Sheriff’s Office.

Walla Walla High School Principal Pete Peterson is planning a staff meeting today (Sunday, Oct. 25) at 3 p.m. at the school’s commons. A student vigil is being planned immediately following the staff meeting at 4 p.m. at the Walla Walla High School Performing Arts Auditorium. The district’s GriefBusters program has been activated to help staff and students cope during this extremely difficult time.

The district extends its thoughts and prayers to the Senter family and all those who deeply cared for Mr. Senter. There are no details regarding funeral services available at this time.

For more information, contact Communications Director Mark Higgins at (509) 526-6716 (office) or (509) 520-6242 (cell) or by email: mhiggins@wwps.org.

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DENNIS RAY COMMENTS: 10/9/15

 comments/suggestions:

$1·I like the schedule for the focus groups on October 28.  Please let me know if this changes and/or we need to add groups on the 29th.

$1·Some of the activities identified for November 2-4 may need to be pushed back.  We won’t have the complete vacancy notice available until about the middle of November.  I know I showed it being posted to the WASA (and other) web sites on November 2, but that will be a preliminary posting only.  I would suggest that for your web site you might want to wait until the vacancy notice is complete.  Perhaps that is not a problem, but just wanted to be clear.

$1·Regarding the interview observation team, that group will only (officially) be active for the preliminary interviews.  We will encourage them to also attend the open forums with the finalist candidates, but as a group they will only be involved in the preliminaries.  I would shoot for 24 members in this group — 12 staff and 12 community.  If it ends up expanding to a few more, that’s okay. 

$1·For the preliminary interviews on February 17 and 18, we will only need the room (Board room, I assume) from about 3:30 p.m. on.  

DENNIS RAY COMMENTS: 10/10/15

Sam sent me a reminder that he was going to be on vacation February 5th through the 13th, so we’ll need to adjust that part of the schedule.  I think the easiest adjustment would be to move the screening report to February 4th, and leave the interview dates as they are.  If we move the screening report back to the 4th, I would like to move the application closing date back to January 28th, which shouldn’t present any problem.  This would leave the schedule thus:

• January 28 — Application deadline
• February 4 — Screening report
• February 17-18 — Preliminary interviews
• March1, 2 and 3 — Final interviews

Do you see any problems with this adjustment?  Do you want to communicate with the Board on this, or should I?

Questions for Dennis during the 10/13/15 meeting with Sam, Cindy, Susie and Mark:

1. Is the Feb. 4 screening of applicants a work session or executive session?
2. When is the web posting of the job description ready for the WWPS website and news channels. (we had Nov. 2, but Dennis says this is too soon. What is the best time to post this site?)
3. Note: Notify table captains to invite their table participants from Strategic Summit to the Community Focus Group – Wednesday, Oct. 28 – 6:30 p.m. in the board room

Email from Dennis post 10/13/15 conference call:

• Here are some documents from other searches as per your request.  Regarding the “finalist’ schedule,”  I would suggest that the candidates meet with Bill during the lunch period, either in his office or with Bill taking them to lunch at another location.  And, the Board may or may not want to have dinner with each of the candidates; if so, that will require some adjustments, obviously (the Cascade schedule shows one way to do this.)