THE ECHO

By Ella Staton // Co-Editor-in-Chief

Avon High School has appointed Andrea Abel as the new Dean of Students. With over two decades in academic leadership, Abel is trained to deal with student behaviors at the high school level. She is taking on this role with the goal of helping students understand rules and the reasons as to why they were put into place. She aims to address student conflicts from a kind angle to ensure that the students at Avon feel the same respect she feels here in her new position.

This is not Abel’s first time dealing with student behavior. At her previous school, she was labeled as the coordinator. This job title insisted of her being both an assistant principal and a dean.

“In addition to balancing a lot of the behavior expectations, I also helped with teacher appraisal,” Abel said. “The neat thing about this role as dean is that I get support expectations all day long.”

With over two decades of experience, Abel has experienced a vast spectrum of behaviors in schools. Avon has shown her both the positive and unique aspects of working at such a large, diverse school.

“When I look at the population that our school serves, we are extremely diverse in every metric that you can measure, whether we’re talking about free and reduced lunch populations, special education populations, even the number of multi-language learners that we have,” Abel said. “Everyone’s capable of meeting a high level of expectations academically and behaviorally.”

A large change for the students at Avon High School is the new lanyard rule. To ensure safety for each student, they are required to wear an Avon issued lanyard around their necks at all times.

“A lot of our students are receptive. I’d say 99% of our students are doing a great job. Even the students that forget it usually grab it quickly and explain that they left it in a pocket. Once you provide that redirection in a positive way, students understand,” said Abel.

Abel aims to get the entirety of the school to adhere to rules and understand the reasons for them. She goes at this with a use of high empathy and understanding. She believes that kindness will get her much farther than anger.

“I will say that when I give a student a redirection or a reminder in the hallway, very rarely am I met with disrespect,” Abel said. “I think most of the Avon students, and I’d say a large majority of the Avon students, are kind, polite, wonderful humans and I see that every day.”