Penn High School Principal Dr. Sean Galiher, along with assistant principals, director of athletics and students showed off and explained how Penn is “Building Bright Futures.”

At the Penn-Harris-Board of School Trustees meeting held Monday, Feb. 10 at Penn, the high school demonstrated how they are putting this year’s theme into action in everything they do.

From highlights from the Homecoming parade in the fall to reports on Penn’s amazing 98% graduation rate and everything in between. Other reports included:

• Building & Trades program (now in its 56th year!)
• Engineering Design & Development program (competed against and beat college students in the TECH 120 class at Purdue) 
• Class of 2025 students on track for an Honors Diploma
• AP Enrollment & Success
• SAT Performance
• Attendance
• Athletic & Academic Teams update
• Teacher Professional Development update
• … and so much more!

Click here to view Principal Dr. Galiher’s full presentation.

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This year’s “Short Hair Because We Care” will hold a hair donation event for the Children With Hair Loss organization will be held Saturday, November 16 at Penn High School’s Studio Theater.

Anyone in the community can donate their hair, but the minimum is 8 inches of hair. Hair that is colored and permed is accepted. Local professional hair stylists will be donating their time to cut volunteers hair for free. Because this is for hair donation, the service provided is just a simple cut, no style.

This event was started in 2019-2020 school year by a group of 7th grade Grissom Middle School students. 

“It started as something that students could give, that wouldn’t be money or something they wouldn’t have control over being young students, but everyone can donate their hair, so that’s why we started it: to give everyone an opportunity to serve even if they don’t have other resources,” Ella Smoker Class of 2024. Click to see the WNDU-TV’s story.

Last year, 33 people donated a total of 334 inches (click to see photos)! Donate this year and help beat last year’s totals!

If you’re interested in donating, click here to sign up using the Google form.

Email shbwcphs@gmail.com with questions, and follow the group on Instagram at @shbwc_phs. 

If you can’t make it to the event or don’t have enough hair to donate, you can still help out by donating directly to Children With Hair Loss.

Children With Hair Loss is a nonprofit organization that provides hair replacements at no cost to children or young adults facing hair loss at no cost. Whatever the cause, hair loss can have effects that go deeper than cosmetics. Providing this hair is how this organization gives back to the community. You can help us give back to your community and the children facing hair loss by donating your hair or simply spreading the word about the event to everyone! 

Penn High School’s exceptional learning opportunities and programs will be on display for prospective and current students at the 2024 Penn High School Showcase, 6-8 p.m., Monday, Dec. 2nd (Snow Date Tuesday, Dec. 3rd).

Penn is a recipient of the Indiana Department of Education in College Readiness Award and is ranked No. 1 in Indiana for students earning College Credentials.

Incoming Freshman click here for additional details.

Sophomore Scheduling information click here.

The Showcase allows incoming Freshmen (current Eighth Graders) and prospective move-ins, along with their families, to have the opportunity to tour Penn, meet with staff and students, and hear about the all the college and career readiness opportunities Penn offers through its eight Academies.

All prospective Penn students and current Penn 9-11 graders and their families are welcome to join us to learn about classes and clubs they can look forward as Penn students.

Penn High School is filled with so many opportunities that the choices can be overwhelming. This is a great time to speak to teachers and current students about course options. Some classes will be available to see live in action!

Besides the Live Classrooms, students and parents are encouraged to visit the Academy booths, which will be set up around the building, to gain information into the Academy structure at Penn High School. Teachers representing both Academy and elective classes will be available to answer questions and provide information. We will have representatives of the Early College Academy, Exceptional Education and the Elkhart Area Career Center. We will also have tables with club representatives set up in the Sunshine Hallway. Stop by to see the many club and extracurricular activities available to Penn students.

If you have any questions about courses, scheduling, or graduation requirements, Penn counselors will also be on hand to meet with students/families.

Your involvement in your child’s education is vital to making their high school experience a positive one. We value your participation in decisions related to planning your child’s class schedule. A collaborative effort between parents, students, teachers and counselors is essential and represents P-H-M’s “Triangle of Success!”

Incoming Freshman click here for additional details.

Sophomore Scheduling information click here.

After months of planning, on Sunday, May 19 and Monday, May 20, Penn High School teachers Mr. Steven Sanders (Earth and Space Science, Environmental Science) and Mrs. Amy Tiebout (Project Lead the Way Biomed and AP Biology) drove 27 students to Suttons Bay, Michigan for a once in a lifetime science experience. Click to see the photo gallery below.

Through partnership with the Inland Seas Education Association, students were able to participate in a four-hour long science sailboat voyage on Suttons Bay using professional limnology equipment along with analyzing data previously collected. While on the sailboat, groups of students worked with professionals to focus on specific research topics while gaining skills in science sampling procedures. After all of the sampling and data collection, students shared their newly acquired knowledge with other groups to help reinforce their new knowledge to make this a very educational experience. 

In addition to the “Schoolship” experience, students were able to visit Harbor Bay Beach at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore on Sunday evening to enjoy sunset in nature and explore the town of Suttons Bay on Monday morning. The work of Mr. Sanders and Mrs.Tiebout made this trip much more accessible and affordable for students and their families. Mr. Sanders spent a week of his summer during 2023 getting professional development from Inland Seas that reduced the cost to families of the program by $825 and the cost of accommodations by $840. He also wrote a PTO grant to help cover miscellaneous expenses on the trip by $500. Therefore, families were only responsible for $10 of this trip because of all Mr. Sanders did in preparation. 

Students left this experience with a greater appreciation for science as a force for good in the world by directly connecting the science concepts from the classroom and research on the boat with the importance of stewardship for our shared environmental resources. All of this helps students better understand what it means to “Take Care of this Place.”

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On Monday, June 3, 2024, Penn High School held our 65th Commencement. The ceremony was held at the University of Notre Dame. The Class of 2024 is made up of approximately 854 students. It was a wonderful time to celebrate the hard work and accomplishments of ALL of our graduates! Click here to see the photo gallery below with photos that can be downloaded for FREE!

The full ceremony was livestreamed and has been archived on the Penn Harris Madison YouTube channel. You can watch it below. This is the direct link: https://youtube.com/live/5gWg5mbUuqc

Click here to download a copy of the Commencement Program.

Click to see video and pictures of some of the Senior Parades that took place Thursday, May 30th and Friday, May 31st.

Highlights from the Class 0f 2024 include:

• nearly $16 million in scholarships
• 442 earned Academic Honors diplomas
• 325 earned High Honors diplomas
• 72 earned Technical Honors diplomas
• 119 Early College Academy students
  • 113 earned a credential through Ivy Tech Community College
  • 98 earned an Associate’s Degree from Ivy Tech 
• 21 Valedictorians
• 4 Salutatorians

Click here for more information about the Class of 2024.

The official photos of every graduate were taken by InterState Photography and are available for purchase. Please refer to the Senior Parent Communications for the link and password.

The photos in this photo gallery are unofficial candid photos were taken by Penn-Harris-Madison School Communications Department staff. We have uploaded these candid photos to the photo gallery below. To download  these high-resolution jpg files for FREE from the photo gallery below, just simply right click and select “Save image as” and save it to your desktop or device.

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Superintendent Dr. Jerry Thacker started handing out the third and final round of district Impact Awards on Wednesday, May 22. The awards were given to teachers who had the most significant individual student growth with DIBLES, ILEARN, and SAT assessments for Spring 2024.

Dr. Thacker, along with Assistant Superintendent Dr. Heather Short, Director of Professional Development and Student Learning, visited four schools to surprise five teachers letting them know that they were the latest winners, and Penn High School had two winners:

• Candice Beelaert had the highest student growth in English on the SAT.

• Rebecca Horvath had the highest student growth in Math on the SAT.

Congrats to Mrs. Beelaert and Mrs. Horvath and their students!

As this school year comes to a close we want to thank all our teachers and students for their commitment to academic excellence this school year. The hard work really paid off!

Thank you to the P-H-M Education Foundation for covering the cost of the awards for purchasing the beautiful crystal awards given to the teacher award recipients.

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It’s widely known that there’s a national teacher shortage. In Indiana, it’s been reported that there are around 2,000 teacher vacancies across the state.

Encouraging high school students with an interest in children and education to become teachers is one way we can help widen the teacher shortage gap.

Under Penn High School’s Family and Consumer Sciences program, students who are interested in pursuing a career in education can take several courses, such as Early Childhood Education and Cadet Teaching.

Click here to see Penn’s full Program of Studies.

On Wednesday, May 22, 2024, a special event was held for 13 Penn students who plan to become teachers. Patterned after College Signing Day what student-athletes do to declare their intentions on playing for a particular school, the Penn students donned their college of choice t-shirt and signed their intentions to major in Education with proud parents in the audience. We also asked the students to invite their favorite P-H-M teachers.

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1. Brooklin Kline: Indiana University South Bend, Elementary Education
   Favorite Teacher: Mrs. Kylee Wetzel, Penn High School
2. Sarah Gentry: Purdue University, Elementary Education
   Favorite Teachers: Mrs. Sherri Potts, Mrs. Cassie Scarsella, Mr. Jason Pikuza, Bittersweet Elementary; Mr. Steven Sanders, Penn High School
3. Gretchen Moore: Indiana University Bloomington, Secondary Special Education
   Favorite Teacher: Mrs. Bonnie Manningham, Penn High School
4. Kaitlyn Vargo: Indiana University South Bend, Elementary Education
   Favorite Teacher: Mrs. Rachael Meyers, Penn High School
5. Molly Knight: Ball State University, Elementary Education
   Favorite Teacher: Mr. John Hedrick, Discovery Middle School
6. Brianna Magnuson: Holy Cross College, Elementary Education
   Favorite Teacher Mrs. Rachael Meyers, Penn High School
7. Emma Szymanski: University of Kentucky, Elementary Education
   Favorite Teacher: Mrs. Anna King, Mary Frank Elementary
8. Payton Johnson: Indiana University South Bend, Elementary Education
   Favorite Teacher: Mrs. Rachael Meyers, Penn High School
9. Samantha Fecteau: Ball State University, Elementary Education
   Favorite Teacher: Miss Anne Napoli, Penn High School
10. Caitlynn Fischer, IUSB, Elementary Education
    Favorite Teacher: Mrs. Stephanie Betzer, Moran Elementary
11. Ellie Stabnick, University of Tampa, Elementary Education
    Favorite Teacher: Mrs. Ally Starkweather, Penn High School
12. Xavier Browning, Purdue University, Secondary Education
    Favorite Teacher: Mr. Kyle Marsh, Penn High School
13. Brandon Mueller, Indiana State, Secondary Education
    Favorite Teacher: Mr. Jeremy Starkweather, Penn High School

Good luck to these students and we hope to see these faces again when they come back to Penn-Harris-Madison to teach!

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This week is National Teacher Appreciation Week and Penn-Harris-Madison Superintendent Dr. Jerry Thacker is making his rounds to surprise a couple of P-H-M’s best educators with some good news.

Today, Dr. Thacker with the help of Penn High School Principal Dr. Sean Galiher and Assistant Principal Jeanie Mitchell (a former PHM Teacher of the year herself), Jeremy Starkweather was taken off guard with the news that he had won P-H-M’s 2024 Secondary Teacher of the Year honor! Local TV stations were on hand to capture it all! Mr. Starkweather’s wife, Ally who is also a teacher at Penn, was told ahead of time so she could participate in the surprise. Along with the students, a big group of fellow Penn teachers and PHM District Administrators were in the classroom to congratulate him. Click to watch the video below.

Mr. and Mrs. Starkweather are both 2013 graduates of Penn High School. Mr. Starkweather attended P-H-M’s Moran Elementary School and Grissom Middle School.

Click here to see the full photo gallery below.

Jeremy Starkweather is wrapping up his 7th year of teaching at P-H-M; but including his time as a student, student-teacher, and now a teacher, he’s been at Penn for a total of 12 years! He’s even still on the Speech & Debate Team just like he was while in school, except now he’s the coach! Mr. Starkweather is everywhere; he serves as the Assistant Coach for the Boys Cross Country Team, Coaching Consultant for the Education Foundation’s Running is Elementary, and Vice President of the Penn Building Trades Board of Directors.

Mr. Starkweather’s interests have carried over from his student days into his teaching career. Along with teaching English, Mr. Starkweather also teaches Debate, and has been serving as Penn’s Speech and Debate Coach since his first year of teaching. Prior to Mr. Starkweather at the helm, the team struggled to attract student participants; now Mr. Starkweather has made it cool to be on the Speech and Debate Team! The 2023-2024 school year both teams did extremely well. The Speech Team has 20 students advancing to the national tournament this summer; and the Debate Team not only won the State Championship, but a couple of the students even broke a record previously held by Coach Starkweather when he was a student!

For the first time in Penn history, the Debate Team won a State Championship. Additionally, out of all five state championship debate categories, three Penn students came in 1st place in two categories (one team and one individual) adding two more State Titles to the list. One of those wins was a student duo in the Policy category. Policy received a traveling trophy that has been around almost a century (in existence since 1928); and the last time the trophy was in Penn High School’s possession was when Jeremy and a teammate won it back in 2013 (his senior year)! How’s that for full circle? 

Until recently, Mr. Starkweather was known for his big bushy, blonde afro. However, thanks to Jeremy’s topnotch debate coaching skills, his team captains convinced him last summer, when the team was at the national competition, that if they won the State Championship, he would allow the students to shave his head. Jeremey Starkweather is a man of his word! He didn’t just allow his students to cut his hair, he let ALL the Speech & Debate students, Speech teacher Mrs. Danielle Black, and Superintendent Dr. Jerry Thacker get in on the action. It took over an hour to cut off 9 inches of his golden locks! Now that’s showing commitment and dedication to your students! Click here to see that video and full photo gallery.

Speech and Debate has become so popular at Penn that Mr. Starkweather enlisted the help of his top students to see if they could create the same interest at the middle school level. Not only was there interest, there’s now Debate teams at all three middle schools with over 80 students. The past few summers Jeremy has also been offering Summer Debate Camp.

What is Mr. Starkweather’s secret to creating such an interest for Speech & Debate? It could be that he has the best and rowdiest student club floats in Penn’s Homecoming parade; but it’s also because he quite simply cares about his students and they know it. There’s no “debating” it!

During the week of May 6 along with surprising the Teacher of the Year winners, Dr. Thacker will also surprise the honoree of Classified Employee of the Year. Monday, May 6 Dr. Thacker surprised 3rd grade Northpoint teacher Nichol Mondy with the news that she was the district’s Elementary Teacher of the Year. All winners will be officially recognized at P-H-M’s Employee Recognition & Retiree Dinner on Wednesday, May 22nd. Along with a plaque, the two Teachers of the Year will also receive a grant from the P-H-M Education Foundation to use in their classroom. Both TOY winners will go on to compete for Indiana’s Teacher of the Year, which will be announced in early Fall 2024 by the IDOE.

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South Bend Regional Chamber announced Wednesday, April 10, 2024 their 2024 “Forty under 40” class and for the 12th time in 17 years, P-H-M teachers or staff members have made the list! This year’s honorees are Betsy Alwine, Dyslexia Specialist for all Penn-Harris-Madison schools, and Andrew Nemeth, Director of Choirs at Penn High School.

Michiana Forty under 40 is a distinguished initiative that highlights the achievements of 40 outstanding young adults who, despite being under the age of 40, have demonstrated exceptional leadership, excellence in their respective careers, and a commitment to community service. The program aims to recognize and celebrate the contributions of these individuals who not only excel in their professional endeavors but also make significant efforts to give back to and positively impact their communities.

Andrew Nemeth is the Director of Choirs for Penn High School, a position he’s held since 2015.

Penn Choirs have been consistently been award Gold ratings in Choral performance and music literacy. Penn’s Choirs were state finalists at ISSMA last year, for the first time in more than 20 years. This year Penn had 13 students, nine soloists and the Robertson Barbershop Ensemble with four students, competed in ISSMA; students won five Gold; four Gold with Distinction; and one Silver.

Mr. Nemeth works as Chorus Master regularly for the South Bend Youth Symphony Orchestra and sings as Tenor section leader with South Bend Chamber Singers, as well as serving on their Board. He’s also Penn’s Vocal Music Director of the school spring musical for past 12 years.

Mr. Nemeth sees value in various student performance experiences. He’s taken Penn choirs on several performance trips to places like Ireland, Hawaii, New York, Disney World, just to name a few. Mr. Nemeth in the importance of giving back to the community. He regularly takes his Pen choir groups to perform at nursing homes/assisted living facilities. Personally, he’s very involved with his church, Holy Family Catholic Church in South Bend volunteering and serving as Music Director.

Students feel welcome in Mr. Nemeth’s choir room, and he is continually striving for “the next level” of choir performance. Mr. Nemeth is a lifelong learner, and he is open to changing the paradigm for choral performance at Penn after he learns about what the top high school choirs in the state and nation are doing. One of his best attributes is his gift of collaboration that often translates into once in a lifetime opportunities for his choir students.

He has collaborated with the University of Notre Dame, world-renowned symphony conductors, and teaches his students the importance of knowing the composers of their pieces. He has created opportunities for his students to meet the composers of the music they are performing. He also enjoys collaborating with other P-H-M music programs. To raise awareness of the Fine Arts options at Penn High School, he the choirs on performance tours to P-H-M’s 11 elementary schools and three middle schools. These concerts get younger students interested in taking Fine Arts classes like choir when they get to Penn High school.

Betsy Alwine has shown incredible dedication and enthusiasm for Penn-Harris-Madison students and teachers since the moment she began teaching in P-H-M as a Reading Specialist at Walt Disney Elementary School during the 2021-2022 school year. Prior to that time, Betsy taught within in Elkhart County for more than a decade. Mrs. Alwine served as a reading specialist at P-H-M’s Walt Disney Elementary School for one year, before being for a leadership role as P-H-M’s Dyslexia Specialist for all 15 schools. 

In this role, Mrs. Alwine coordinates early screening and assessment for students who show academic risk, develops and oversees programming for students who are not yet proficient in reading, and assists in leading professional development for hundreds of P-H-M teachers in the area of research-based reading instruction. Betsy’s involvement as a LETRS (Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling) facilitator has recently taken heightened importance, as Betsy successfully co-wrote competitive grant, which resulted in the Indiana Department of Education awarding P-H-M more than $450,000 to train and certify teachers in the LETRS program! With these funds, all of P-H-M’s K – 3^rd grade teachers along with special education teachers, ENL teachers, and reading specialists will be trained in LETRS! With this important professional development platform in place, P-H-M is aggressively pursuing the Indiana Department of Education goal of 95% of all third grade students passing the IREAD-3 assessment.

Beyond her role in supporting excellent instruction in foundational reading skills across our eleven elementary schools, Mrs. Alwine plays a pivotal role in leading our Teacher Leadership Teams initiative.

This fall brought another opportunity, which highlighted Mrs. Alwine’s talents, as she served in the role of Acting Principal at Elm Road Elementary for 12 weeks. During this time, Betsy led teachers through comprehensive assessment cycles that resulted in gains in student achievement.  She also took the opportunity to enhance student voice, by creating a 5th grade “student coalition”. The student group met with Mrs. Alwine to share their input for improvements the school could make to enhance the students’ overall experience. Betsy has continually used every opportunity to improve others around her, and to impact our P-H-M students.

2024 marks the recognition of the program’s 18th class! The program is brought to you by the South Bend Regional Chamber, Young Professionals Network South Bend, in collaboration with program sponsors Community Foundation of Elkhart County, First State Bank and the Mendoza College of Business at Notre Dame, along with chambers of commerce in the Michiana region.