Although lots of changes have been made, students have adjusted and made the best of what they have. Combined lunches, 7 days of the schedule taken off and given to teachers, and new arrivals make this year stand out. This 2024-25 school year has been going through some changes. CFHS has had teachers getting moved around, lots of new teachers coming, high schoolers now all have the same lunch period, and lots more.
Lots of teachers have had a rough start to this year because of the amount of changes that have been made. Sue Franke Clark, Destinee Olson, Ashley Shaw, Joel Justin, Joe Webster, Amber Borgen, Danielle Hudy, Ellery Bonde, Elizabeth Evenson, and Rachael Langer left Cannon Falls. That’s 10 teachers that had to leave Cannon Falls. The new teachers are Josh Banks, Anna Broring, Madison Olsen, and Jade Fransen. That’s not quite 10 teachers, so they still lost more teachers than they gained.
The number of students, however, are staying about the same. The class of 2025 has 80 students, and the incoming 6th graders only have 67. Overall the numbers are staying relatively similar.
High school students have had a couple words to say about their new lunch schedule. The entire high school (grades 9-12) have a joint lunch period. This ends up helping lots of problems that the school has been dealing with the past couple years. First, the overlap between the 6th grade lunch and the 7th and 8th grade lunch is eliminated. Second, it provides the cooks more time to transition between lunches. This may not seem like that big of a deal, but the school has had 4 fewer people working in the MS/HS kitchen over the last couple years. Having 1 fewer lunch to prepare for makes it a lot easier.
The most predominant change this year deals with Staff Development. Almost ⅔ of the district’s teachers are going through a significant amount of training for the “Read Act”. The Read Act means that there are going to be changes made to the regular professional development plans, our PLC process, and the number of days students have in class this school year. In a normal school year, students have 174 days of instruction, but this year, to meet the demands of training for the Read Act, they ended up changing 7 instructional days into Staff Development days.
Middle school/high school teachers will have special training for the Read Act at some point as well, but the district has yet to hear what that will look like, since the Minnesota Department of Education has yet to determine what training secondary teachers need.
With all the curveballs being thrown this year, the students and staff have done a spectacular job adjusting. Not all changes have been pleasant or easy to work with, but teachers and students have handled it very well. None of these changes were expected, but have so been running smoothly.
