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School District of Spencer

Inspire, Educate, and Celebrate

Welcome Back!

Posted Date: 08/31/26 (04:53 PM)
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I want to take a moment to welcome everyone back for the first official day of school tomorrow, September 1st!


This year, we have several new staff members and staff members who have changed positions.  When new teachers are brought into the district, we have them participate in a mentoring program.  Our mentoring program is collaborative in nature and designed to get new teachers off to a good start in their career and/or new school.     Please join me in welcoming the following new staff members to the District!

  • Emma Winter- Kindergarten

  • Riley Matson- HS Math

  • Marah Bodendorfer- 4th Grade

  • Brett Bangart- MS ELA

  • Sydney Schultz- MS Math

  • Linda Hall- Food Service (started last year)

  • Jenny Leonhardt- Food Service (started last year)

  • Lori Kurszewski- Early Childhood

  • Staci Hinker-Elementary Paraprofessional

  • Becca Kuehmichel- 5th Grade

We also had a number of people transfer or move into different positions.  Those are listed below.

  • Nick Viegut- MS/HS Principal

  • Andy Hogden- Dean of Students/AD

  • Jeff Fischer- Student Success Coordinator

  • Nicole Fischer- Math Interventionist

  • Janet Wolf- 4K

  • Patti Jennings-3rd Grade

  • Brianne Anderson- Full-time Childcare

 In late August, we had our staff in for a four-day in-service.  We do this annually to prepare for the upcoming school year.  This year we will have a focus on helping students who are in need of assistance, whether it be for academic, social, or emotional needs.  This could take place via formal interventions or less formal methods to provide support.  We also had Peaceful Warriors come in to do a Tier 1 school safety training with the staff.  Hats off to the district leadership team for their efforts in planning these very impactful days.  It was great to see everyone back in action!


 We had a lot of facility work taking place over the summer. We renovated the roof over the high school.  Our roof is divided up into about 32 sections.  We take on 2-3 sections per summer.  This allows us to keep up with things and avoid a major roof renovation down the road. We also finished our hallway painting and hallway flooring project throughout the school.  The middle school and high school hallways have a fresh coat of Rocket colors!  The old wrestling gym and cafeteria were also painted.  The hallways near the middle school counseling office and the old locker rooms were also resurfaced.  Our big project this summer was window replacements.  We replaced nearly all exterior windows, including new shades, screens, and exterior panels.  The windows in the new parts of the building were not part of this project.  In the front of the building, we had some of the concrete replaced on our sidewalks, and the circle drive by the LTCA was also resurfaced.  Shout-out to Derek Evenson, our Facility Manager, for coordinating these projects. 


 Again this year, we had two summer school days, with August 26th and 27th serving as our first days of school.  We get additional aid from the state on this.  While we cannot hold students accountable for truancy regarding attendance on these days, we sure do want to see the students in the building.  We are able to get pictures taken and get through a lot of logistics to get the year off to a good start. This year we will be done with school before June.  I plan to obtain more feedback from the community on this topic. The official first day of school is September 1st.


 In recent months, there has been a significant amount of legislation passed that is often referred to as the anti-grooming laws.  Act 57, Act 88, Act 89, Act 186, and Act 185 are the major acts related to this.  We have updated our policies to be in line with state law.  Those policies can be found on our website.  As part of this process, we are requiring our staff to utilize ParentSquare to communicate with students.  This is something we started almost a year ago.  Speaking of our website, we completed renovating it this summer.  Please check it out at www.spencer.k12.wi.us.  You can also find legal notices related to the above Acts and other legal topics on our legal notices page at https://www.spencer.k12.wi.us/legalnotices.  In addition to those two pages, I would also like to highlight our Board of Education page at https://www.spencer.k12.wi.us/boe

where meeting agendas, board policies, and meeting minutes can be found.  


 We are in the process of preparing the annual budget.  The annual meeting will be held on September 16th at 6:30 PM in the Distance Learning Center.  We invite the community to come in for this meeting.  We will be presenting the preliminary budget.  The previously passed recurring referendum will add $150,000 to the budget.  This year we saw a decline in state aid, which unfortunately leads to increased local taxes. We will also be presenting an update on our strategic planning process.  We will discuss our goals around College, Career, & Life Readiness, Health & Wellness, Facility Management & Financial Sustainability, Staff Retention, Recruitment & Development, and Community Engagement & Family Relationships. We would love to see more people come out to the Annual Meeting!