Personnel changes approved at Big Foot; First day of school set for September 6 | Local News

Board members approved the resignation of math teacher Bret Sendelbach, who will travel to the Evansville Community School District in Rock County to teach math at Evansville High School.

“Bret was with us for a year, straight out of college,” said district administrator Dr. Doug Parker. “He was a co-counsellor on our math team and an assistant basketball coach. He worked a lot of games and was a great support for our students. He will be missed, but he has returned to his hometown of Evansville.

The school board has approved the hiring of Tyler Heck, a seventh- and eighth-grade math teacher at Walworth Elementary School, to replace Sendelbach at Big Foot High School, where Heck was already head wrestling coach and assistant football coach. .

Originally from Burlington in southwestern Racine County, Heck grew up in a family of teachers, graduated from Burlington High School in 2009 and graduated in December 2013 from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, where Heck majored in elementary education and minored in math. Heck served as a long-term math substitute and seventh-grade teacher at Karcher Middle School in Burlington before being hired in August 2014 to serve as sixth-grade math teacher at Walworth Elementary.

“Tyler is a great recruit because he’s already been such an integral part of Big Foot High School,” Parker said. “He knows our students and has been teaching at the BFASA (Big Foot Area Schools Association) for eight years. We were lucky he applied and wanted to go to high school.

Based at Walworth Elementary School, the Big Foot Area Schools Association is a cooperative educational organization that provides shared resources to the Big Foot Union School District’s five independent school districts, including shared services, resources, cross-district leadership and personnel among member districts, with a primary focus on providing an articulated JK-12 program.

Big Foot Union High School serves the Town of Delavan, the Village of Fontana, the Town of Linn, the Town and Village of Sharon, and the Town and Village of Walworth. Four independent K-8 school districts feed Big Foot Union High School: Fontana Elementary School, Reek Elementary School, Sharon Community School, and Walworth Elementary School.

The Big Foot Board of Education has also approved the hiring of Jenny Valdez, from Venezuela, as an English language learning teacher.

“She will be teaching on a J-1 visa for three years,” Parker said. “Many districts across the country are going overseas, overseas so to speak, to get high quality teachers. The teacher shortage in America is very real.

The U.S. Department of State’s nonimmigrant (J) visa category is for individuals eligible to participate in work- and study-based visitor exchange programs.

“We were lucky to have applied through WECAN (Wisconsin Education Career Access Network) and gone through the teacher exchange process,” Parker said. “She is highly educated and brings authentic cultural experiences that she can share with our students, staff and community… Jenny is certified in biology, with an extensive scientific background as well, so she will definitely be an asset to all of our students for science.”

Today, serving more than 500 schools a year, WECAN was launched in 2001 to help educators find teaching jobs in Wisconsin and streamline the candidate review, screening, and hiring processes.

A non-profit enterprise supported by Wisconsin school district membership fees, WECAN was developed through a collaboration of Wisconsin school districts, teacher training colleges and teachers with the Wisconsin Association of School Personnel Administrators (WASPA) and is managed and maintained by Graduate and Extended Learning at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse in conjunction with WASPA.

In his primary role at Big Foot as an English learning teacher, Parker said Valdez “will help students who don’t speak English as their first language learn language skills and succeed in our school.” .

Upcoming dates of interest at Big Foot include the first day of school, after the national Labor Day holiday, Tuesday, September 6.

The next regular meeting of the Big Foot Board of Education will be Monday, September 19 at 7 p.m. in the conference room at Big Foot Union High School, 401 Devils Lane in Walworth.