The dean shuffle

The+dean+shuffle

Many students are wondering why they have a new dean this year. Even though Westside High school has undergone lots of changes, the dean switches have largely impacted the students. The number of deans went from 14 to 11 due to budget cuts and they had to strategically prepare for the upcoming year. Westside’s administration understands that there has been a lot of confusion due to the changing of houses and deans but they’re working to solidify and ensure that students are comfortable with the new changes.

East one is business and culinary with Dean Robbins and Dean Willams; East two is health science and humanities with Dean Gonzalez and Dean Matlock. North one is engineering and computing sciences with Dean Anthony and Dean Pliskin; North two is health science with Dean Byrd-Williams, Dean Davis, and Dean Mayfield. South two is engineering and digital media design with Dean Barry and Dean Williams. If they kept all of the deans in their house from last year, then some houses would have three deans and others would have one, which of course wouldn’t work. By moving around the deans from one house to another, they also realigned the pathways in different houses so that they were more equal to one another in terms of pathway requests.

With the new arrangement of deans, if you haven’t noticed, Disch is no longer the dean of North 1. He got promoted to Dean of Instruction, replacing Ms. Lena Atherton, who will not be returning to Westside in the Fall. Now, Pliskin who was originally in East 1 and in charge of the business pathway, is now in North 1 working with WEGA. Being is excited about working with WEGA, he says, “I think change occasional change is a good thing.  I’m not at all happy that I had to leave my 10th and 11th graders when I was switched. However, I had been in the same office since the seniors were in 5th grade, so mixing it up was good for me personally.” The change didn’t impact him as much as others because he came from the only two dean house, so instead of having 260 students, he now has 290. Although Westside strives to keep each student with the same dean for all four years, they had to make changes to some students’ dean assignments in the wake of the staffing modifications.

Also new at Westside is Dean John Robbins. Originally he started in the oil and gas business. However, his wife, who is a teacher, convinced him to pursue a job in education. After teaching for a couple of years, he decided to take a job at Spring Forest as a testing coordinator to gain experience as an administrator. Today Mr. Robbins has 260 students and is the East 1 dean of business. “I love my job here at Westside! The faculty is so nice and I love my students.”