WELLFLEET — A few things have changed at Wellfleet Elementary School since Principal Mary Beth Rodman retired last year and Adam O’Shea took the helm. For one, the signs look different: a drawing of three women in a clamshell that had served as the school’s logo for some 20 years has been replaced by one featuring waves.
Art teacher Sharon Hughes helped teachers develop the Wellfleet waves logo.Like the tide, we rise together, we fall together,” O’Shea said on a tour of the school with a reporter for the Independent. The new mascot is intended as a model of inclusiveness, something especially important in a school of only 91 students, O’Shea said.
“We have to make sure the kids are learning a lot from each other,” he said. “Preparing them to be successful in the future relies on building a social network.”
For O’Shea, this means amplifying the students’ voices. Every morning, students help O’Shea write the morning announcements. “If it’s Black History Month, or Women’s History Month, we want to make sure that is part of the messaging we have on the daily and expand on it through activities in the classroom — what does it look like as a lived idea?” he said.
Another example: To mark the 100th day of school, which happened to fall on Valentine’s Day, students read aloud from their own writing, O’Shea said. In kindergarten, the question was “What is love?” The responses? “Love is hugging Mama when she comes home,” and “Love is playing with my sister Jocelyn,” O’Shea wrote in his weekly newsletter to parents on Feb. 15.
O’Shea’s first 100 days at Wellfleet Elementary followed a steep learning curve, he said. Previously the principal of Monomoy Middle School, “I went from being with 13- and 14-year-olds trying to revolt against everything to having five- and six-year-olds looking up at me adoringly,” said O’Shea.
The staff he oversees here is much smaller than it was at Monomoy, where O’Shea said he managed 87 people. Here, he works with a staff of 20, with one teacher per grade.
“I love the tight-knit community here,” O’Shea said. “Based on the design, the students are so close with one another. They all stay with each other as they get older. They learn to make it work — like siblings would.”
O’Shea grew up in Homer, N.Y. in a family of educators. His mother was a fourth-grade teacher, his sister is a high school chemistry teacher, his brother is a college professor, and eight of his nine cousins also work in schools.
Before becoming an administrator at Monomoy, O’Shea had been an educator for 18 years, 11 of them on Cape Cod. He has also worked in upstate New York and Fairfax, Va. as a kindergarten, third-, and fourth-grade teacher.
O’Shea, who lives in Eastham, sees a lot of similarities between Wellfleet and his hometown of Homer, a farming community. “They are quite similar in the type of person it takes to tend the crop, which here is shellfish. It reminds me of my childhood,” O’Shea said, “though you won’t find me out on the flats.”
Being in a small school has helped O’Shea become more hands-on academically. “I am able to have more in-depth discussions about curriculum and instruction and assisting teachers to help them feel more supported,” he said.
O’Shea said he is working to expand after-school enrichment programming. Using rural education grant money, he has been able to add choices for students and make child care available for all families with students at the school. O’Shea said that close to half of the students stay after school.
“It’s important that we are thinking about the families,” O’Shea said. Which means “making a reasonable effort so families can work to afford to live out here.”
For the first time, students are meeting twice a week after school to put on a play, with help from the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater. After April break, 23 students will perform in Jungle Book Jr. at WHAT, with full costuming and sets spearheaded by the school’s art teacher and an assist on set design and lighting from WHAT. “It’s the real deal,” O’Shea said. The team, he said, is “the best of the best.”
This year, fifth-graders will participate in the National Environmental Education Development (NEED) Academy, also known as the Seashore Program, O’Shea said. Based at the former Coast Guard Station in Truro, the program is run by the Dennis-Yarmouth, Monomoy, and Falmouth school districts in partnership with the National Seashore. O’Shea learned about the program when he was at Monomoy. This will be the Wellfleet Public School’s first time taking students on the five-day overnight, which takes Earth science and history lessons outdoors and immerses students in both nature and culture, according to the NEED website.
O’Shea hopes participation in the NEED Academy will become a rite of passage for fifth-graders before they transition to Nauset Regional Middle School, which is over five times the size of the Wellfleet school.
At the end of the tour, O’Shea brought a reporter to the after-school podcasting club, which O’Shea runs with music teacher and technology specialist Andrew Staker. “It’s kind of misnamed,” O’Shea said. “We don’t make podcasts; we do newscasts.”
The January and February newscasts included an update on the school’s boiler situation: “Wellfleet Elementary School has a problem,” one newscaster said to the camera.
“The problem is that we have two boilers in our school, and they are getting old,” her counterpart added.
After showing off their news update, students got an opportunity to turn the tables on a reporter and grill him on hard-hitting questions, like whether journalists can get rich from writing.
“No comment,” came the reply.
