With August just around the corner, we want to introduce our families to our new staff members and share our gratitude for some of last year’s staff that will be moving on to new adventures in their own careers.
First we want to thank Will Allen, Danny Hanlon, Hadar Zeigerson (below), and Kari Nevins for all the hard work, good humor, and expertise they shared with Compass staff and students throughout the last school year. They each added so much to our community, and they will all be missed as regular members of our staff! Each of them is off on new professional and personal adventures and we wish them the best. We trust that they will each come back to pay us visits (and hopefully find new roles with us) and we look forward to learning about their new pursuits.
Our new staff will bring their own flavor of expertise and experience and they promise to enrich our school further. In this and our next few newsletters we will be introducing you to some of these wonderful additions to our community.
New math teachers, Karen Karppinen and Elana Sobol, will join Dawn Dupriest in creating an engaging, effective, and creative math department. Elana will focus on middle school math instruction while Dawn and Karen will focus on more advanced coursework. Elana has been teaching middle school math in St. Vrain School District, and Karen has experience teaching in public schools, home school programs, and most recently, at Ridgeview Classical School and University of Northern Colorado. All three bright, creative, hard-working, and experienced math teachers will collaborate to make Compass’ math curriculum robust and responsive to both the students and the demands of college and career. Welcome Elana and Karen!
Debbie Bush will be joining the Compass team to take over the office management role. Will spent a great deal of time making sure that he is handing systems over to Debbie that are in good working order, and then he and Debbie spent several days training together so she will hit the ground running and will be ready to welcome you at the front door while keeping our school humming along “behind the scenes”. Debbie is originally from Columbia and brings her excellent analytical skills and bilingual talents to Compass after most recently having been working at Harris Bilingual School. This summer she successfully completed the Ride the Rockies 445 mile bike ride!
Interestingly enough, Camilo Jimenez is also originally from Colombia, and he will be joining the Compass team to teach Spanish. We are thrilled to have a native speaker and experienced world language teacher joining our team. Camilo has experience teaching everything from Spanish 1 through Advanced Placement Spanish. He has a master’s degree in Languages, Literatures and Cultures with Specialization in Spanish from CSU and is looking forward to making Spanish a creative and relevant language learning experience for our students.
Stay tuned for more introductions in our next newsletter! We will introduce you to our new Future’s Counselor, Wendy Rose, our British native social studies teacher, Shamayim Watson, our music teacher, Claire Lute, and our art specialist, Erica Quihuiz. Our staff is growing in cultural background, experience, expertise, and skill sets and we are grateful for all that they will share with our students and community.