Show: On The Town Station: KNCO File: 10:19.mp3 Air date: 2026-10-19 Source: OpenAI whisper-1 · shrunk from 26.7 MB to 5.3 MB --- transcript --- And KNCO Newstime, 1136 70 degrees. Welcome On The Town, Tom Fitzsimmons here at the KNCO studios. 70 degrees, still kind of a warm day out there, a little breezy out there. So again, a reminder to be careful if you're doing some work outside. Conditions are still very dry out there, so make sure if you're doing some yard work in particular, something might throw a spark. Just be extra cautious, please. And today, finally back on the air with me is Superintendent of the Grass Valley Union School District Schools, Andrew Withers. Andrew, how are you doing today? I'm doing great, Tom. How are you, sir? Well, I'm doing fine. I know it took a while for us to catch up with each other and stuff, and fall break was last week as well. You know, that's become such a big tradition for the parents and the kids to have that break. Is it something that the superintendent and the staff looks forward to as well? Yeah, no, I mean, this is year seven for me, and so I had never heard of or experienced a fall break until I had the privilege of coming here to Nevada County. And I'll tell you, I'm very much used to it now, and I very much enjoy it and appreciate it. It is a nice break after the big launch of the school year, probably a good time for kids, families, teachers, staff, and yeah, I enjoy it as well. Yeah, well, very good. And I realize that more and more that it is kind of unique to the school district up here. I was doing a football game this past Friday night, and a school came up from the Lincoln area, and they heard that the kids had the whole week off from school, and one of the parents said, wow, that would be great to have something like that. So I can tell you, it is unique. Yeah, you know, it's an off season. It's an off season when most people want an off, and so if folks want to travel while the weather is nice before the full winter gets here or do something of that nature, you know, it's pretty awesome. We have not affiliated with the school district, but we have an annual tradition where some volunteers take a trip to Washington, D.C. with students from Long Island Gilmore every year, and I know there's community and philanthropic giving opportunities as well, and it's just a great time to travel when a lot of people aren't traveling. Well, that is, that sounds outstanding to have something like that happen. Well, you know, one of the news stories we had just recently, I know they were going through teachers that did extraordinarily well for the county, and I noticed it seemed like there were some Grass Valley School District teachers that were mentioned in the Teacher of the Year competition. Yeah, yeah, we have amazing teachers who make a difference, and here just recently, which you might have seen, there was a Teacher of the Year awards event, and so Ms. Kim Floyd Martinez is our Teacher of the Year. She grew up here in Grass Valley, went to all of our schools from kindergarten all the way through, knew she wanted to be an educator, and we're so fortunate that we were able to hire her. She's been both a classroom teacher, a special education teacher, a substitute teacher, and she's currently in a unique position called an instructional guide. It's a teacher of teachers over at Grass Valley Charter School, and she does a great job of wearing many hats and filling in anywhere the school might need her, everything from supporting brand new teachers or supporting teachers as they learn new instructional moves to, you know, feel confident and comfortable providing great education in their classrooms. So Kim Floyd Martinez is fantastic and was a unanimous decision by our administrative team about a year ago. It takes a year to get the process going, and we generally only consider staff who've already been awarded the Teacher Who Makes a Difference award, and that Teacher Makes a Difference is usually 100% staff generated, and so these are already great, amazing people that have been vetted by our staff, and to be our Teacher of the Year is pretty phenomenal. We're so proud to have Kim Floyd Martinez in our district. I love that term, teacher of teachers, because, yeah, I imagine, especially with the curriculum that's out there, you could have a teacher, maybe that's a specialist in creative writing, and all of a sudden they're assigned history that it would not be necessarily an easy transition. Totally, and, you know, we've also had, gosh, during my career, I've experienced teachers who are phenomenal, and then they, like you said, either get a different content or a different group of students or just a different school site or they are teaching partners, you know, retires, and they just need support, and so it's great to be able to support those who are giving everyone else support, and so Kim does that well over at Grass Valley Charter. All right, and this might sound like a funny question, but the people that are running for the Grass Valley School Board, you know, that's on the ballot for everybody out there if you're in the Grass Valley area. Yeah, and how does that work, you know, for you, because after all, the school board, you report to them and stuff. Is there any thing that you get involved with, you just hands off and let the process do its thing? Yeah, so there's five individuals running for three board seats here in Grass Valley, and one of them is an incumbent, so I know that individual well, and then the other four, I reached out to them and had individual meetings with each of them, went over kind of the history of the school district, kind of our general operations, and then asked them, you know, just some general questions as to why they want to be a trustee, and that way I have an understanding if the community elects them, and so it's an important part of the democratic process where folks are elected locally by their local community to be a trustee. It's a big commitment and a big honor to be a trustee, and so I generally, like many folks, don't get to pick my bosses, and so it's not, I'm not able to, by both integrity as well as district practices, to like advocate or encourage anyone to vote for one individual. It's completely neutral from the school district perspective, but there certainly are signs up in all the public places around the community. There's five great individuals working for those three spots, and I'm confident that the community will do a good job in the election process as they traditionally do. Yeah, it's important that people get out there and vote. That's what it's all about. 100 percent. And these school board members are important people, for sure. 100 percent. Yeah, they have a huge impact on, you know, setting the rules and regulations of the school district, overseeing the work I do as superintendent, making sure that, you know, we're aligned. We have some training opportunities coming up as, again, we'll have at least two new trustees post-election, and wanting to make sure that the five trustees and myself and Catherine Baker, my administrative assistant, we're all working as a strong governance team to do great work for the kids of Grass Valley. Well, two months into the school year or so when the fall break comes, I imagine attendance and stuff has settled down and people are where they have to be. Are you happy where attendance is right now? Yeah, so attendance and enrollment are two different things. So I would say that attendance is the best we've had lately, as in the attendance rate. How often the kids who are registered come to school, I definitely would say there's a noticeable uptick from last year to this year in kids coming to school more. I know that our data from last year was not great, and so really making sure that we're reaching out to families who are chronically missing school or not coming to school, that's a huge indicator of their child success or the family's possible need. And then enrollment, unfortunately, enrollment is down. We were anticipating being down about 20 students, and we're down a bit more than that. And so luckily we have, in some sections of the district, smaller class sizes. In other sections, again, kids don't come in all the proper bunches. They come just like families. Every family's different. And so we're set in for the school year with our staffing and our supports. And certainly as we get ready for next school year in our kindergarten and TK roundup, we'll want to make sure that families know of all the great programs we have here in Grass Valley. All right. And kind of a sad note, and it did happen during our fall break, but they had that unfortunate school shooting up in Bend, Oregon, which is a neighboring state, and especially when little ones' lives are taken. How does that affect, well, first you as a superintendent, but also even staff? Because I called my daughter who's, I think I'm going to share with you, she's an eighth grade teacher up in Oregon. And you know, I ended up calling her just to see how she was doing emotionally. Yeah. I would say initially reading it, you know, you're fighting back tears and you know how amazing people are that choose to work in public education and the trauma of the incident, the loss of life of both students and adults, the brave individuals who intervened and many others whose name haven't come forward. It is catastrophic. I don't know how else to describe it. And it definitely digs into the importance of us working as both a staff and larger community and larger county. We do, from my perspective, a great job of communicating and supporting one another with doing drills, doing preparations, being as proactive as we possibly can. But no, that event is tragic. It brings up all the questions and it's just hard to understand why an innocent place like a school would be targeted. And I certainly read a bit about the individual and I still don't understand it. Yeah. Yeah. It's all very tough. But like you said, it's something that your schools drill on and, you know, prepare the best you can. Heaven forbid there's a circumstance like that. Yeah. You know, on a lighter but similar note, a student pulled a fire alarm over a bell hill in the middle of lunch just before fall break. And like the amazing principal Sarah Colvin is, she thought, well, this is a great learning opportunity. I haven't done one of these before. And, you know, some of the kids are eating, some of the kids are playing, some of the kids are in class, some of the kids just got back to class and here we are, boom, let's do a real live fire drill. And guess what? It was a lot harder and took a lot longer than the ones we planned for before. And so it's important that an emergency doesn't wait for the right time. An emergency can happen at any time. And, you know, you made a reference earlier to the dry weather. I'm looking forward to some wet weather here, hopefully this week. But we've got to be ready for anything at any time. And a lot of that is that practice. We've done a great job of emulating from what the high school district did by having a district safety week where we go through all of our practices and procedures together. It includes videos that have been created by our students with scripts to make sure our students hear from our own students and staff as to what the bell tones are going to sound like, what the procedures are going to be, and that we also repractice those every January to make sure as we come back for the new year that everyone knows how to do all the things. Usually in the event of emergency it is listen to the adult in front of you and, you know, remain calm and we'll take it from there. There also are, again, depending on the age of the students, more run, hide, fight practices that can be instructed. Something you wouldn't instruct a TKK kid, kiddo, but something you would definitely instruct an older elementary middle school child. I will say this. I love the idea of having students being on the videos that talk to other students about that. That's pretty progressive. I love you guys kind of thinking out of the box in the Grouse Valley School District. Yeah, well, I appreciate that. Again, I would give credit to the great work that's happened at Nevada Joint High School. We've definitely emulated some of the videos they have for their specific school district, and we worked with our school resource officer, and I always appreciate the partnership with Grouse Valley PD. And, you know, yeah, the videos have only been in circulation for I think about four years, and, you know, at some point if best practices change, then we'll update our video. But that way we can guarantee that in every classroom, whether there's a substitute or a regular teacher, everyone knows the same procedures on the most important thing, which is safety. Very good. Well, we're going to take our one break. We're going to do that right now. We're talking with Andrew Weathers, superintendent of the Grouse Valley School District. So quick break. We'll be right back. Tune in to the Ramsey Show today at noon, brought to you by Zion Capital, your trusted Ramsey SmartVestor pros right here in Nevada County. I'm in the way! Help! Help! Son, what are you going to do? Just accept your fate? Think. Think. Prime Cinema presents movies on the big screen as they were meant to be seen at Del Oro and Sutton Cinemas. Showing through October 22nd at your Prime Cinemas at the Del Oro Street Fighter rated PG-13, Whale Fall, also PG-13, and Other Mommy, rated R. Now let's check on the Sutton. Sense and Sensibility, rated PG, The Social Reckoning, rated R, and Verity, also rated R. Playing through October 22nd at your local theaters. Now you know what's showing. Be sure to enjoy a movie on the big screen at Nevada County's two Prime Cinema theaters, the Sutton and the Del Oro. Here's the deal. We gotta set ourselves up. See, retirement is the long game. We gotta make moves and make them early. Set up goals. Don't worry about a setback. Just save up and stack up to reach them. Let's put ourselves in the right position. Pre-game to greater things. Start building your retirement plan at ThisIsPretirement.org, brought to you by AARP and the Ad Council. And KNC Newstime, 11 51, 70 degrees. Welcome back down to town. Tom Fitzsimmons here at the KNCO Studios. Joining us by phone, Andrew Weathers, Superintendent of the Grass Valley School District Schools. Arguably the best schools around, because my kids went to Grass Valley Schools. And yeah, they had a great start. They went to Bell Hill Academy, a matter of fact, Andrew, and that's always been one of my favorite schools. And it is quite a campus that you've built over there at Bell Hill. It seems to always be improving over there. Yeah, yeah. I appreciate that. Bell Hill has a lot of history, whether it's the the bell that symbolizes the school there right at the front, or the brick entry, or the quaint neighborhood that it's in. But Bell Hill had quite a bit of summer renovations that took place. All of our portable classrooms were completely renovated with new flooring, new walls, new ceilings. We also installed an updated ADA pathway to get to a couple other classrooms that didn't previously have an ADA ramp pathway. And we're currently in the midst of adding some stairs that will also be adjacent to the pathway to make a shorter walk like we used to have. So those that are able to amble upstairs can use the stairs, and those that need the ramp can do the ramp. But great work happening over at Bell Hill. We resolved the field over the summer as well. I would say it isn't looking as amazing as I want it to, but the solar in the middle of the campus and the pathway and the new classrooms just enhanced the already amazing campus. And it had some changes with its class. Do they still do TK there, or is that over at the Scotton School? Yeah, so TK no longer happens at Bell Hill. We actually created a learning center for another room to support students who are in special education or need additional interventions. And so we have a dedicated space for that now, which will really help support the work of that campus. All right, and so let's talk about Scotton School, because that's where TK is now, right? Yeah, so Scotton School is going well. They definitely are supporting our TK to fourth grade. Again, Bell Hill is kindergarten to fourth grade. What's going on at Scotton is, I mean, we often refer to it, but probably the best elementary school playground in the county. It also has a smaller playground on the south side of the campus for the younger kids. They're doing a lot of lead learning work in our preschool to third grade coherence and collaboration. That's working with staff members all the way from preschool to third grade and above. Their focus right now is mathematics, and our district focus has also been mathematics, and they're doing a lot of heavy lifting with us for that. Great, great work led by many of the staff, teachers, and principal at Margaret Scotton, which supports the district. All right, and of course, right near there, the flagship Lyman Gilmore Middle School. You use the same language as me. Yes, I'm learning out more than I think. Yeah, so no, the flagship middle school of the district, Lyman Gilmore. Again, great programming there. Lyman Gilmore's test scores in all areas have continued to go up over the last few years. They have an amazing new vice principal, Casey Wachs-Warden. We borrowed slash stole slash hired her away from commuting to the Placer Union High School District in Auburn, which brings us a wealth of knowledge of a community member that already lived in Nevada County and is used to working with older kids, and so some of the things that happened at Lyman Gilmore to her, well, it's no big deal. I've dealt with this high school level, and she's fitting in well, and again, a very talented team at Lyman Gilmore. All right, and then Grass Valley Charter School. Yeah, Grass Valley Charter School, excited to remind listeners we have a new principal there. Aaron Drew was previously the vice principal at Lyman Gilmore, and Aaron started the school year off with a bang and is doing a great job of connecting and bringing the community together. Grass Valley Charter also had some summer improvements. There's an HVAC project that happened there, and for the first time in many, many moons, the multipurpose room there actually has air conditioning. That might not sound like much, but it is the multipurpose room. It's where kids eat lunch. It's where kids learn, and it's where many theater productions happen, and you can imagine how hot and sticky that can get, and the kids will be able to, and the community will be able to enjoy the improvements there. Grass Valley Charter is also going to be doing a major window project this upcoming summer, so that'll be exciting. Some of those old, old windows just need to be replaced. Wow, that's very exciting. I was going to say about multipurpose room. My kids went to Bear River High School, and their multipurpose room didn't have air conditioning, and before they built the theater, you described it perfectly. Everything went on in that thing. It was terrible. I mean, it was sticky. You were there because you loved your kids. That's right. You left a little sweatier than before, but no, I would just add, Tom, we continue to have great extra supports in the Grass Valley School District. Any listeners, we have a more expanded learning opportunities program and more community schools resources than I would say most anyone in the region. While there are, I'm sure, amazing, great schools that you might be able to choose from, I'd always encourage you to check out the Grass Valley Schools. Both the work we do directly with students in the classroom, the work we do with our extracurricular offerings, and the work we do after school and with families is a cut above all, and we really care. So if anyone ever has questions about the Grass Valley School District, don't be afraid to reach out to my office or to a school site. We'd be happy to give you a tour or tell you more. And nutrition is a very important part of your curriculum, too, just to make sure these kids are fed. Absolutely, and we definitely benefit from the work spearheaded by the county office, but really led by everyone across the county to be a partner with Community Roots. And Community Roots is phenomenal and does a great job of feeding, I believe, most all schools, public or private, here in the region, and doing so at the same rate that we traditionally funded the other food we used to serve. And so now you begin to see more and more scratch and fresh cooking opportunities. It's absolutely driven up student participation and interest in breakfast and lunch and supper, and it's a win-win all around. It's a win for families that can trust that wholesome foods and ingredients are being served to their child every day. They don't have to go through the struggles of packing lunch from home unless that's really what they want to do, because something great is going to be offered at school every day. Yeah, that is awesome. I mean, the kids, being well-fed is such an important part just to sit still and learn, especially for little ones, right? Well, I mean, it'd be you or I, right? If we skipped a meal or ate something less nourishing, it absolutely is going to affect our brains and our bodies. And so little kids aren't maybe as adept at communicating that through their words, but they certainly will communicate that through their actions. And so, yeah, giving kids nourishing, quality foods is a staple, is a basic. All right, Andrew, and I got less than a minute left. Do you get dressed up for Halloween? That's not that far away. Do you do Halloween in your office? I'm usually pretty boring. I'll wear my 49ers jersey or throw in some fake teeth and a cape, but I love watching everyone else dress up and celebrating the kids with high fives and smiles. Yeah, I love that idea of fake teeth and a 49ers jersey. That kind of works. Hey, Andrew, all the best to you and the staff over there at the Grass Valley School District. Appreciate your time. Hey, take care, Tom. Talk to you soon. Take care. Again, Grass Valley School District Superintendent Andrew Withers joining us talking about Bell Hill, Lyman Gilmore, Scotton School, Grass Valley Choral Schools, all great schools here in Nevada County. All right, we've got ABC News coming up at the top of the hour. It's followed by the Ramsey Show here on KNCO News Talk at 830. --- end of transcript ---