School board recognizes Mrs. Boyd after choking incident at Taft Elementary

By KYLIE PORTZ

The Humboldt Community School District met for their regular meeting on Sept. 16 to hear administrator reports from the middle school and to recognize Lucinda Boyd for her life-saving action during a choking incident at Taft Elementary School. Board President Tate Satern read the nomination letter for Boyd to receive the Champion for Children Award.

He said, “tonight is our pleasure to recognize Lucinda Boyd. On Sept. 6, there was a student experiencing a choking episode in the Taft lunchroom. Lucinda handled this situation as well as she possibly could by asking two other students to run to the office for help. She then applied the Heimlich maneuver to dislodge the blockage, Lucinda stayed calm in a very stressful situation, and the result was as positive as it could have been in the situation.”

The board next heard from Middle School Principal Cassie Smith, Assistant Principal Creighton Jenness, Middle School Instructional coach Jennifer Savery and 8th grade Language Arts Teacher Natalie Schulz.

Smith shared the building goals for the 2024-2025 school year.

She said, “one of our big goals this year, our motto is to ‘Team Up Every Day for Every Kid”.

Smith went on to explain that the first goal the middle school is focusing on is to grow by 5% more than the baseline on the School Culture Survey. According to Smith the focus will be on building those healthy student-teacher relationships to ensure each student’s needs are being met in regard to their social and emotional well-being.

Smith said the school has begun to implement the Character Strong program which focuses on teaching empathy, emotional understanding and regulation skills, goal settings and habits and cultivating leadership and teamwork.

Read the full story in this week's issue of the Humboldt Independent.