Speers, interim superintendent, excited to serve Jessieville district
Melissa Speers, director of special programs for Jessieville School District, was recently named by the school board as interim superintendent.
The appointment comes after Superintendent Ralph Carter resigned in order to take the same position with Lipan Independent School District in Lipan, Texas.
Speers has been with the school district for 20 years in various capacities, and has called the Jessieville community her home since 1986. As special programs director she said she primarily handled federal programs and other duties that didn’t fall on other people.
“I started here in the spring of ’98; I started out as sports arena manager,” she said. “The sports
arena wasn’t even completed yet. So I started out in there and did that until the spring of ’06. I went back to school and got my teaching degree and I graduated in December of 2005.”
From January to May of 2006, Speers taught high school math for half a day and continued working as sports arena manager the rest of the day. The following school year she became a full-time high school math teacher. Speers has also served as middle school principal, she said.
In the interim, Speers said she plans to see the district continue its progress from recent years.
“We have started a lot of good things,” she said. “We are making good progress so I want to just keep us on track for where we’re headed. We’re doing some good things academically with our curriculum. We want to continue that.”
The district has been working over the past school year to break down its curriculum and standards in working to “make sure everything is vertically aligned,” she said, noting the coming school year will also be the third for Jessieville in the professional learning communities process.
“We’ve been doing a lot of collaborative work with the teachers, so we want to continue doing that,” she said. “That has been very beneficial to our staff and so we’re going to continue that program as well.”
One program which has had overwhelming success that Speers hopes to see expand is the HUB program — a non-traditional route to education for students who may benefit from more flexible online coursework for various reasons.
“Maybe it’s a family situation, maybe it’s just a personal situation, and they need to not necessarily be in the traditional classroom, they can do some online work,” she said. “It’s kind of a blended atmosphere. Part of it may be inside the classroom, part of it is in an online platform and they can eventually work up to where they can be doing most of their work at home. That way if they needed to hold down a job part of the day and then take their classes, we started that.”
Speers said students who enroll in the HUB program have flexible options for learning via a combination of online and face-to-face courses. Students in this program also receive job skills training.
The district contracts its alternative learning environment and HUB program through Arch Ford Education Service Cooperative, she said.
“That was very successful last year,” she said. “We saw some students who maybe graduation would have been much more of a struggle for them traditionally, they were able to be successful and graduate. So that’s been a wonderful program and we’re going to continue that this year, and hopefully expand that.”
Speers said the district is already planning to expand the new agriculture program as well as its career and technical education offerings.
The interim administrator said she is excited to serve the community and district for the time being, and no one can expect “huge, 180-degree changes.”
“I’ve lived in the community since 1986 so my children graduated here, my husband graduated here, my mother graduated here,” she said. “So I think just being a member of the community for so many years. I love the school district. I’ve got a history here and so I care very much for the Jessieville District and want to see it do very well. So I think maybe just the knowledge can help me bring all of those pieces together.”