Both Michigan City High School and Michigan City Area Schools will experience changes in administration involving new and old members of the MCHS staff this year due to the departure of former Assistant Superintendent Xavier Botana.
MCAS selected the now former MCHS principal, Wendel McCollum, to fill Botana’s position, and he accepted wholeheartedly. In fact, being in a leadership position like this one is something that he always saw himself doing one day. McCollum has been active in the field of education for 16 years, and a lot of that time has been spent in Michigan City. Aside from being the principal for three years and a varsity football coach at a high school that he once walked the halls as a student in, McCollum has also been the assistant principal at both Krueger and Elston middle schools.
When he isn’t strategizing about how he can benefit the students of MCAS, McCollum can be found spending time with his three daughters, who are going into first, third, and fourth grade, and his son, who is a sophomore at Lake Michigan College.
McCollum says he won’t forget his roots while in his new position. He plans on spending ample time at the high school to continue his initiatives such as the honors college program, the early college program, and the AP/Dual Credit program. McCollum actually wants to extend the AP program through the middle and elementary schools by starting a pre-AP program. “It’s all about moving our high ability kids forward. We want to align our secondary level curriculum with our high school curriculum,” said McCollum.
One of the other projects that McCollum will focus on this year is the City Promise Scholarship, which has caused quite a bit of buzz among community members.
“With the help of the city councilors, this program will provide students with a $5,000 scholarship that they can use towards any Indiana school, and we’re working on making it available for students planning to go out of state as well. Hopefully it will be ready in time to benefit the class of 2017. Education is just another thing our city supports,” McCollum said.
Being around the students that he hopes to benefit with this scholarship every day is one of the many aspects of being a principal that McCollum is going to miss. As a principal, McCollum always made sure to be as approachable as possible because “people like a principal who communicates well and is approachable.” In fact, when asked if he had any advice for his successor, Bonnie Manuel, he said exactly that.
Manuel is currently in the process of moving her things from the office that she held as an associate principal to an office that has never been used by a female principal. She is the very first woman to be the principal of any high school in Michigan City Area Schools, but she feels as though that won’t be the most important aspect of her time as principal. “A principal is a principal, gender isn’t a concern,” she said.
The new principal’s family inspires her to be the best she can be. She is married with three sons: Matthew, 36, Eric, 33, and David, who would have been 33 this year, but passed due to lymphoblastic leukemia.
“After David passed away, Eric Camel, who was a close friend of his, became our ‘son by love,’” said Manuel.
Manuel considers Camel’s children to be her “grandchildren by love.” Through this experience of loss and gain, the biggest lesson that Manuel learned was that “the saying ‘Blood is thicker’ is not true. Love and opening your heart are the most powerful things out there.”
Her compassion and kindness greatly affects her students as well as her family. As an assistant principal, Manuel’s philosophy was: “All kids are good kids, and they all have bad moments. But those moments don’t identify who they are.”
Working with the students of MCHS is her absolute favorite part of her job. Even some of her personal hobbies relate back to her devotion to helping students; she is an avid gardener, and her favorite kind of plants are perennials.
“I love to watch them grow and change as the year goes on, kind of like with students,” she laughed.
Manuel plans on helping her beloved students achieve their dreams by building on many of the programs that Mr. McCollum has started at MCHS, but she may add “You’d better get ready!” to his ever-repeated catchphrase, “Are you ready?”
Amidst the process of getting herself ready for the upcoming year, Manuel is also helping her successor Candy Van Buskirk get ready to take her new position. Van Buskirk is the former associate principal of New Prairie High School, and she is very happy to be a part of the MCHS team.
“Over the past six years, I’ve looked from the outside in at changes that have moved MCAS in such a positive direction, and that’s what made the environment so enticing,” said Van Buskirk.
Other than the location, Van Buskirk doesn’t think that anything will be noticeably different about being an administrator at MCHS rather than at NPHS. “I’ll be the same person at MCHS that I was at New Prairie. I love students, so I’m very excited to meet and interact with the students here. Daily interactions with students is very important, not only because it lets me get out of the office, but because we need to know what students are and aren’t into in order to make the school a better place,” Van Buskirk said.
Aside from being an administrator at NPHS, Van Buskirk has also coached women’s basketball at both the high school and collegiate levels, and she has a teaching background in biology and chemistry.
All three of these administrators are eager to impact the school system on a larger level, and this year holds great promise for all of them.