May 19, 2023 Community Update

Summary

Superintendent, Dr. AJ Murry, announces the teachers of the year and different school buildings that have been named after notable people. It also mentions that Justin Strain has been elected as a school board member.

Recording

Happy Friday, Pirates. We hope you had an outstanding week at school. We have lots of exciting announcements to make and we wanted to share a few things with you. First of all, we want to congratulate our teachers of the year. Teachers of the year are selected at their campus by their peers as being outstanding teachers in the classroom. So we want to take a minute to recognize them and say, congratulations Gloria Pelcher from Deitz Elementary, Marcie Johnson from Noble Reed Elementary.

Melissa Gardner was recognized for Walker Elementary teacher of the year. Joanne Walters at Wilson Elementary, Terry Eason was recognized for Crandall Middle School, Shana Thompson from the Freshman Center and Shane Glenn from D.A.E.P. But we also had two teachers of the year at the district level. So they win the teacher of the year at their campus and then are selected by their peers to become the district representative for teacher of the year.

Congratulations to Lindsay Moses who is the secondary teacher of the year and she's from Crandall High School. And Julia Tyndall is the elementary teacher of the year from Martin Elementary. This group of selected individuals are just absolute rock stars in our classrooms. And if you know them, you know, the impact that they have, they've done amazing things this year. They were selected by their peers to have been outstanding individuals.

And so we just wanted to say congratulations to them. Also, this week, we had some other announcements that were really exciting that we want to share with you. First of all, elementary six finally has a name. Elementary number six is now Opal Smith Elementary. We are so pleased to be able to honor her legacy. She was a teacher in Crandall ISD for a number of years and served her community in a variety of capacities and so very excited to get to honor her by naming our elementary six, the

Opal Smith Elementary School. In addition, we named the student services building, the Wayland Clearman Student Services building. Mr. Clearman was a mayor in the city of Crandall and did great things to help bring new people into our city. And so it was very fitting to name our student services building that receives all of our new students after him.

So the Wayland Clearman student Services building. Also, we are in the process of working on a transportation facility. We named that transportation facility, the James M. Jones transportation facility. Mr Jones was a long time member of our community as well. And one of the interesting facts about him, he used to drive buses and bring kids to school.

And so it was very fitting to be able to name that facility after him. And then lastly, we had the honor of naming our AG buildings, our little ag complex agricultural facility down by the high school. We named that the Billy Johnson agricultural facility. Mr. Johnson has worked in Crandall ISD for a number of years. He is retiring this year, but he has developed a wonderful program here but also been influential statewide.

The last thing that we wanted to talk about was Justin Strain was elected as our school board member, and we we're able to swear him in to taking his oath of office for the Crandall ISD School Board of Trustees Place Two. And so that happened last night. Congratulations to him. Also, last night, we were able to say it's finally over.

We have named a superintendent and so that search is over and I'm just again, want to say thank you for the opportunity to get to serve our community and serve our schools in this capacity. We hope you have a great weekend, and we look forward to finishing our school year strong.