Three long-time educators to retire after school year

Medford-Abbotsford-Rib Lake hockey co-op approved

Abbotsford school board members were notified at their January meeting that three long-time educators would be retiring at the end of the 2022-23 school year. Among the retirees is Abbotsford Elementary School principal, Gary Gunderson who has spent 33 years with the Abbotsford School District and 17 years as a principal at the district. Gunderson spent the first 16 years of his tenure as an educator as a teacher in a fourth or fifth grade classroom.

The other retirees are middle/high school science teacher Eric Elmhorst and second-grade teacher Julie Decker. Elmhorst has been a teacher at Abbotsford for 31 years. He has taught middle school science, civics and health and has been active in coaching football, wrestling and track throughout his tenure.

Decker has been with the district since 1994 and has been active in volunteering outside of the classroom.

Hockey co-op

The board officially approved a hockey co-op with Medford and Rib Lake. The other two schools involved had yet to approve the proposal at the time of the Abbotsford board meeting. Three Abbotsford students are involved in the Medford youth hockey program but Bargender said those numbers shouldn’t affect other sports’ abilities to field teams.

Rib Lake contributes one student to the co-op currently. Medford had 14 students involved in the hockey program this year. Bargender said hockey is a unique proposal for the landscape of the Abbotsford athletic department.

“Normally, I would really pump the brakes when adding a sport because, you saw [middle school] girls’ basketball, there’s only eight kids out. It’s hard to spread them even thinner,” Bargender said. “I think hockey is unique in the fact that any kid in the high school couldn’t just go out for hockey right now without ever having played before. It takes playing it from early on and parents investing quite a bit into it. It’s not a cheap sport.”

“So I don’t anticipate that if we were to do this, we would have a bunch of kids switch over to hockey and hurt other programs,” Bargender said.

The school would be passing the cost of transportation to Medford onto the parents whose kids are involved in the program. The school would cover the cost of the student’s participation in the program such as busing, equipment, officials and other costs. That cost will be divided amongst the three schools by how many students each school has participating. According to a study conducted of other schools in a similar co-op, the cost per student ranges from about $1,000 to $2,000 per year.

n The Abbotsford School Forest is officially registered with LEAF - Wisconsin’s K-12 Forestry Education Program. The registration means the school can now get resources from both the DNR and the forestry education program to help build out the forest and start educating students.

n The district is showing a vast improvement in its elementary dual-language speaking numbers. A chart given to school board members showed 43 percent of the bilingual students have shown they are at a proficient reading level in both English and Spanish languages. The chart showed that testing has improved from quarter one to quarter two.

n The board was given an update on the FEMA building. At the time of the meeting, Market & Johnson had been working on continuing install of steel studs, install of cmu in the community room area, install of sheetrock, pouring mezzanine stairs and hollow metal window frames. Current Technologies continued interior electrical rough ins. KBK continued interior plumbing and HVAC rough ins, as needed. Blair Fire Protection continued sprinkler rough ins. Overhead Door installed the remaining door tracks. ICS installed the high roof ships ladder. Langford’s Caulking continued interior CMU caulking. Wells Precast continued patching and caulking the interior precast walls. Interstate Roofing installed the metal roof edge.