Red Devil Ready:DCHS WeeKly Message

Week 14: Even Better the Second Time Around

Decatur County Community High School

605 E Commercial St, Oberlin, KS 67749

November 17, 2024 (Schedule at the bottom, Skip What You Want)

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Decatur Community,

There are two things that stood out this past week.

For starters, I am so happy with the turnout we had for our Senior Thanksgiving. Coming from a town where I had been a teacher, coach, AD, and principal for over 20 years, I approached a move to a small town in Western Kansas with a whirlwind of emotions that ranged from excitement to questioning my sanity, but it has been such a great experience to come out and become part of this community that has openly accepted myself and my family.

Here's something that I think genuiely speaks volumes about seniors in this community and their support for our school. I brought this tradition with me from Louisburg. Louisburg high school is a grade 9-12, 4A school with over 600 students in the building. For our Thanksgiving each year, we got around 200 seniors that would be in attendance. That's about 1 senior for every 3 students.

Oberlin? In a small school with 150 total students grades 7-12, we had 130 seniors sign up and another 22 show up that hadn't, proving that this year's event was even better the second time around. That is 1 senior for every student in our building. It is a statistic that should be appreciated and speaks to just how close knit the community genuinely is, a community that it is an honor to be a part of.

The second thing that stood out to me was the musical. What I loved the most about the performance was the genuine appearance of fun that seemed to be taking place on stage. Musicals have always been a favorite of mine from the day I became an educator. For so many of our students, you see a completely different side of them, always something exciting to see.

Musicals are also a culmination of a lot of hard work and effort from a large group in the school community, and it is always amazing to see a final project where students have memorized lines, choreographed dance routines, got into makeup and costumes, and designed a set. There are so many things to be proud of in that final product of a musical.

It was a great week that, and I know that I won't take it for granted.

Things You Should Know

SHOUTOUTS

Thanksgiving Shoutouts

Below, I will talk about our Senior Citizen Thanksgiving. I am just going to use shoutout format.

Shoutout to the 130 senior citizens that signed up and the addtional 22 that showed up to our Second Annual Senior Citizen Thanksgiving. After approximately 120 last year, I expected a big number, and the community did not disappoint. The positive feedback was both robust and appreciated.

Shoutout to Mr. Persinger and the DCHS Band for performing at the lunch. Several band members stuck around after perfroming and began serving members.

Shoutout to Mrs. Johnson, Ms. Tally, and the DCHS Singers. I love the consistency that the DCHS Singers have with their performances. With more tables this year, it was a tight performing area, but, they did not disappoint. Their three song performance was a perfect way to kick off our event. On top of it all, the a the teachers and several of the students had been busy getting ready for the musical.

Shoutout to a well organized kitchen staff that pulled off an amazing dinner with rave reviews. When I first approached our head chef Vicki Versailles last year, it was with a lot of unknowns. I didn't know how many people to expect, but I would have been happy with any number. Vicki was a little nervous, but she was onboard from the beginning. Vicki, Renee Harman, Tabetha Carfield, and Megan Loehoefner (pictured) were all flexible and helpful throughout the whole process. We have a solid kitchen staff that takes a lot of pride in what they do. This year, they were excited, ready, and had planned ahead. They came up with several new ideas to make things run smoothly and were even adding to the list themselves up to the last second. We are lucky to have them.

Shoutout to Mr. Anthony Marshall and his art students. There were so many things at play during this event. At OES, the students created Thanksgiving placemats. There were enough to put down for every senior that showed up for the lunch. At DCHS, the students made clever table settings for decorations. From all throughout the district, there was contribution.

Shoutout to Mr. Bob Castle. Mr. Castle provided golf carts for the festivities. The golf carts enabled multiple things to occur. First, it made for an easy ride to the door, as the parking lot soon became very full. Second, it kept the flow of the event moving. Third, it even allowed for a few deliveries to homebound seniors nearby. Mr. Castle provided them last year and was ready to go again this year, and it was great to see Deanna back for the meal.

Shoutout to Ms. Teresa Saul. You will rarely find as helpful a person as our Computer and Speech teacher. As we tried to think of every possible detail for our event, tablecloths came up, and sure enough, Ms. Saul had all the table cloths we would need for the over 30 tables that were needed for our event. On top of that, she also printed up small nameplates for each of our guests that pre-registered.

Shoutout to the student servers. All in all, we had a ton of students that helped, several who jumped right in after already having performed in the band or as a singer. The students staffing consisted of:

1 Doorman

2 Golf Cart Drivers

4 Greeters (1 greeting book and 3 coat-check ticket and, nametag providers)

28 Servers

Each of them dove right in to their job and helped to provide a fantastic memory for our senior guests.

Shoutout to the student body for giving up their parking lot. The day before the event, I knew we were going to have parking issues, so we adjusted. I simply sent out an email to the students asking them to park in the staff lot. It was kind of an odd site to look out in the back parking lot and see it almost entirely empty an hour after school had began.

Shoutout to Jess Allen. Our head of maintenance had another busy week. Jess was essential in the setup and clean up for our event. After coaching practice the night before, he arranged the tables and got the cafeteria as ready to go as possible. Then he met me before 6:00 on the day of, and we made sure everything was ready to go. He works hard all the time.

Shoutout to Melissa Dreher. There were 130 names that were taken down by Mrs. Dreher over the past month. I loved the enthusiasm and excitement that we would share whenever she would add another name. I appreciate her keeping everything organized up front so that we were able to easily communicate numbers to all parties involved.

Shoutout Mrs. Jillian Springer. Mrs. Springer took pictures for the school and shared a few on the district website. I have added several below:

Addams Family Shoutouts

Shoutout to Mr Anthony Marshall for all of his hard work directing the musical. I can only imagine that there is a massive sigh of relief for Mr. Marshall. As I am writing this, there is still one more musical performance, There are countless hours that go into a musical, and there are so many factors that truly have to fall into place for things to work out just right. Mr. Marshall, a DCHS graduate, came back to teach art for us last year, but this year he added cross country and the directoral spot of the musical. Throw in that the musical fell on the week that we had our Senior Thanksgiving, and Mr. Marshall has been a very, very busy guy this fall. It was a great show.

Shoutout to all of the staff, cast, and crew that were part of Addams Family. Students and staff show up to school before 8:00 every day. Many of these students work or play sports after school. Now, on top of that, they have musical practice. It's a lot of commitment for each one of them, and they each depend on one another to make their final product. It takes a special mindset to commit to something like that, and it's a blessing to all of the rest of us that get to enjoy their final performance.

Shoutout to all of the volunteers that made the soups and desserts this past Saturday for the Junior Class Soup Supper prior to the musical. There was chili, taco soup, chicken noodle, vegetable beef, and potato soup. There was cheesecake, gourmet cupcakes, pumpkin cake , brownies, and more. There was a good turnout.

There will be plenty of photos on Facebook!

Red Devil Ready

That's going to do it for this week. Thanksgiving may still be well over a week away, but I can't help but feel that in Oberlin, it has already begun.

Until next week,

Jeremy Holloway

Go Big Red!