Principal Samuel Wynkoop sat down with the Griffin staff to discuss his expectations and goals for the 2019-2020 school year.
What is your general outlook for the school year?
Greatness. Looking fantastic. One of the things that we are trying to pay special attention to this year as a staff is to really make sure that we’re making attempts to connect to all our kids; to make sure that our kids feel comfortable with the adults in the building. We have some stakeholder data, good data, that says that 70 percent of our kids feel like they have an adult that they can go to. But to me that means that 30 percent do not. And I think that it’s important for us to try and find avenues to get as close to 100 percent as we can and just try to develop ways where we can try and create those methods to do that.
Do you have any specific programs that you’re trying to put in place?
One of the initiatives that we’re doing is “I love Dulaney”. Its inception is to kind of have an avenue for teachers, whether in effort or whether in progress, or whether in random acts of kindness, if a teacher may witness something they can hand these stickers to a student, but really the purpose is to maybe have the teacher then open that avenue of contact; start building with the child. What we want to do is instill a uniform pride. I know that there’s pride in performing arts. I know that there’s pride in kids at It’s Academic. I know there’s pride in Maryland Science Olympiad. I know there’s pride in student sports. I think that it’s important that we take all of that and really make it about one pride. Everybody is in this thing and we are in this whole thing together, whether its math, science, English, social studies, PE, or anything. You may have this program start with “I love Dulaney” shirts for all the and stickers to give out to students.