Admin Corner: March Insights from the Office
Photo from Hamilton School District.
Kennedy Ellis
For this edition of Admin Corner we are interviewing Mrs. Goike, a first year administrator for Hamilton who previously worked at SSI. She received her undergraduate degree at Carroll University and her graduate degree at Arizona State University. Goike wanted to be able to make a larger impact on students, which is why she decided to go from a teaching position at SSI to working at Hamilton.
She states, “I wanted to have an impact with more kids. I loved, in my own classroom, seeing the growth and successes of my kids, and I wanted to see that on a broader scale.”
Goike is very excited for her new role and has been looking forward to many new changes when coming into the administrator position. What she was most excited about was bringing meaningful change to the school. For example, she has set a large focus on CTE (Career and Technical Education), where she continues to expand the program and create a better experience for people at Hamilton looking to go into technical fields. One of the major things she is working on in this area is introducing new pathways to brighten technical college pursuers in their passions, like creating an aviation focused club and arranging the funding for flight simulators to help them get the best education they can. She is hoping to help students in high school receive technical degrees while graduating high school. Along with helping different groups in the program, Goike is also promoting awareness for the program by creating newsletters on what is happening each month. Creating programs like this is exactly what she started this position for.
Another administrative goal that Goike has helped support and encourage for Hamilton students is ACT prep sessions. These sessions are currently taking place during advisements and are offered in each of the subject categories of the ACT: Reading, English, Science, Math, and Writing. Hamilton high school teachers in those subject areas are running the sessions. Goike states, “Creating those opportunities for kids to get that practice and support for such a big exam can help them, [and] I'm really excited about.”
Goike continues, saying, “We had the juniors take a practice ACT and from there we were able to get so much data about what they would score specifically on each strand, each subject. So then we can put students into groups and then have them go to different teachers to get support in those areas that they need it. And then what's really great about it is that in each subject area we get a breakdown of the topics and then how did kids overall score. [We used that data to create] enriching groups or look at what specific strands kids are scoring relatively low or high with. And then we just look at different testing strategies that kids will need based on our scores that we can help them [increase their scores].”
Overall, Goike is very excited to have the chance to create a new positive environment for Hamilton. “As someone who's been in other districts, we are so lucky here. We just try to keep combing through things because if we can find gaps that are there that we can close to support more kiddos, we're going to do that.”
Goike finished with a reminder that the entire administrative team remains open and willing to have conversations with staff and students to continually improve. “If there are things that we miss, we rely on our teachers and other staff [and] we want to hear from [students] too.
