BY: Chloe Ritchey

The students, faculty and staff bid farewell to their Principal.  Janell Henderson has been the Tussey Mountain Senior High School principal for 4 years, but on the 20th of March she will be leaving Tussey and moving to Colorado. The position of principal will be passed down to Matthew McCahan, who currently serves as the middle school principal. In Colorado, Henderson will not be working in education; instead, she will be working for CCMC a property management company. The community Henderson will be managing is called Heritage Todd Creek. “It’s a fifty-five and over resort style living community,” explains Henderson.  In a way she will be like the principal of the community. There are 3,000 homes there and much like school, Henderson will have to report to a board. One of her responsibilities will be to “make sure everything is safe just like I do here [at Tussey Mountain],” said Henderson. 

While working at Tussey, Henderson helped update the schools safety procedures. She changed the master schedule adding a tenth period “for students to get tutored, retake tests, and utilize that instead of study halls during the day, so that we can have maximum academic exposure during the school day periods one through nine,” explained Henderson.  Henderson also added a double math period in pre-algebra and algebra, “so that they [the students] could use one period for instruction with their teachers and the second to gain practice skills on those new lessons and hopefully not have as much homework,” she said. 

Henderson says, “I have so many great memories [from] working at Tussey Mountain.” Her favorite memory and biggest accomplishment would be helping to create the PRIDE team, seeing what the PRIDE team does, “and how they really changed the culture of our school.” When she first started working at Tussey Mountain, Henderson said, “I didn’t feel the culture was as positive as it is now.” 

Henderson found her position as principal challenging, but she enjoyed it. She has learned that you need good communication skills and good problem-solving skills to be the high school principal. Henderson feels that her past jobs working in alternative education, being a juvenile probation officer, and then being a guidance counselor really helped her prepare to be a high school principal. While this is the only principal position that she has had, Tussey Mountain just felt like the right fit for her at that time. Now she is off to new adventures!  Her Titan family wishes her all the best!