Vince Beasley

Less than a week before the start of the 2014-15 academic year, there were still teachers, support personnel and also an assistant principal to be hired for the Wawasee Community School Corp. Wednesday, Aug. 6, for the second week in a row, a special Wawasee school board meeting was held in Syracuse.

Several positions were authorized to be filled by the school board, including the hiring of Vince Beasley as assistant principal at Wawasee High School. Beasley is returning to a very familiar campus as he is a 1995 graduate of the school.

He has six years of experience as an assistant principal at East Noble High School in Kendallville, though for the last two years he was in business sales and worked with school districts on the west side of Indiana providing services such as renovating existing buildings. Beasley also served as a guidance counselor for two years at East Noble.

“Timing is everything,” he said, noting he and his family have lived in Syracuse for a while and now he is only about five minutes away from his new role at WHS. Vince is married to Lindsay and they have two children: Addison, a second-grader at Syracuse Elementary; and Reese, a kindergartner at Syracuse Elementary.

Beasley replaces Geoff Walmer, who left to become assistant principal at Warsaw Community High School, the high school he graduated from. This will be the third school year in a row Wawasee has had a new assistant principal at the high school.

Other personnel changes include Sue Ganshorn becoming an aquatics paraprofessional at Wawasee Middle School, Chad Hoffert will teach math at WMS and Jason Scott will replace Kimberly Bestul, who resigned, as a science teacher at WMS.

Amanda Knipper will teach third grade full-time at Syracuse Elementary. And Cayle Woodard, who retired at the end of the 2013-14 school year, will come back to Milford School to teach industrial technology again, though this time only half-time. Kim McCreary will also teach industrial technology half-time at Milford.

The school board also approved changes in construction work orders amounting to $8,905 involving work at the high school to include modifying exhaust duct work at the marine trades building, repairing hinge pockets on the door frames for the north doors of the main gym and adding a couple of basketball goals to the annex gym.

“This has been a year unlike any other,” said Dr. Tom Edington, Wawasee superintendent, about the number of late resignations of teachers and others.