Former assistant principal will lead Sylva school

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Former assistant principal will lead Sylva school

The newly hired principal of the newly formed Catamount School in Sylva won’t be new to the environment at Smoky Mountain High School, where the Catamount School is to be located.

Bob Dinsdale’s last day as assistant principal at Asheville High School was March 1, but he spent the previous two school years as assistant principal at Smoky Mountain High School. When he heard about the job opening at the Catamount School, he lost no time in applying.

“It’s really one of those once-in-a-career chances to be there from the beginning to start things up,” said Dinsdale.

Dinsdale, 43, lives in Brevard with his wife and two kids, ages 8 and 11. He originally moved from Smoky Mountain to Asheville in order to lessen his commute, but said the job at Catamount School is so unique that they’re considering a move to Jackson County. He starts the new job March 2.

“I think that was a very good move on Western’s part, putting him in there,” said Mike Murray, superintendent of Jackson County Schools.

Before his hire as assistant principal at Smoky Mountain High in 2014, Dinsdale taught at Pisgah Forest and Brevard elementary schools in Transylvania County for 11 years. From 1997 through 2003, he taught at Northwest Elementary School in Davidson County. Dinsdale’s experience includes teaching academically and intellectually gifted classes, and coaching Science Olympiad, Battle of the Books and middle school basketball. He is a 1996 graduate of Bowling Green State University and earned a master’s degree in school administration from WCU in 2008.

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The Catamount School is one of eight lab schools that the state legislature required the University of North Carolina system to start up in counties where at least 25 percent of the schools are designated as low performing. WCU is in the first wave of four schools required to open this August, with the second wave to open next August. The legislation gives a good deal of latitude as to how, exactly, the schools are set up but charges the university’s board of trustees with overseeing them and states that funding will come from the per-pupil payments the state gives to public schools.

WCU has pinned down some of the more important details of how the school will operate. It will be located in an unused wing of Smoky Mountain High School and serve students in grades six through eight, with a maximum of 25 students per grade. At maximum enrollment, three teachers and one principal will be hired, with WCU bringing the resources of its faculty and students to bear in order to enrich the classroom experience. Individualized teaching methods will be emphasized.

That last part is a big chunk of what attracted Dinsdale to the job.

“This is a chance to bring together the best that Jackson County Schools has in terms of resources and the best that Western Carolina has,” he said. “Not too many schools are going to be able to have an endless supply of people involved in education and training in education to find a way to get in touch with these kids, whatever they may be struggling with.”

Dale Carpenter, dean of WCU’s College of Education and Allied Professions, has been excited about that as well.

“We’re having a ball just thinking about all the possibilities of the things we can do,” he told university trustees during a committee meeting Feb. 23.

That doesn’t mean that there’s no uncertainty in the undertaking. There’s no blueprint to follow for this sort of thing, and there’s not a lot of time to figure it out.

“There are two concerns we really have,” Carpenter told trustees. “One, we would have liked to have had another year to plan for this. The second is we don’t know the timing of the funding and the amount of the funding.”

However, he said, with some of the big decisions made they’re now down to hashing out the “nitty gritty details.”

“We feel pretty good about it so far,” he said.

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